Monkey’s thumb

The Money gem is a great little utility for representing money in ruby.

However it’s formatting rules assume that the currency symbol will be a dollar ($) which is makes it far less useful for those of us who need to display other currencies, euros, pounds sterling (£) and yen (¥) to name a few.

Luckily Paolo Negri has come to the rescue with his More Money gem which has all the goodness of the original money gem (configurable currencies and exchange rates) with added support for international currencies.

Installing it is as easy as

gem install more_money

Shining through has written an invaluable guide to the ruby on rails select helper methods.

Now if only someone would turn these into a documentation patch for rails.

I am very pleased to see that there’s a bit of a buzz building around Stephen Bett’s most excellent project Comix Influx.

Stephen’s interview with Paul Gravett explains more about this collaborative comics translation site.

Disclosure: I am a friend of Stephen’s and a contributor to the Comix Influx code base.

Once installed the exception notifier plugin will send emails to your whenever your application raises an exception.

It’s a sinch to install making it no brainer for low/medium traffic rails apps.

1. Install exception notifier

   script/plugin install http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/exception_notification/

2. Configure by adding to the list of email address you want to receive notifications your production environment

   ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = %w(foo@bar.com)
   ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %w(exception.notifier@bar.com)

Deploy and that’s it, you’re done.

Update - 11 Feb 08

Edge rails changeset 8669 breaks the plugin but Lourens has posted a neat fix.

Tom Stuart, has been doing his bit to make Rails a household name with this piece on the release of 2.0 in the Guardian today.