Guy Roberts | Nottingham based | Ruby on Rails and Java contractor

Nottingham Energy Partnership

The Nottingham Energy Partnership provide advice about all aspects of using energy more efficiently.   They recently worked with the City Council to fit  Photovoltaic Panels on 600 council houses.

I worked with the NEP marketing officer to build and host a new content management system for their web site.

Because of the richness and sheer volume of content we used Expression Engine to organise it in three tiers.

In case this is of use to anybody looking for something similar

  # eg in October, ["Nov", "Dec", "Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct"]
  def previous_twelve_months
    month_names = []

    (0..11).each { | m |
      month_names << m.months.ago.strftime("%b")
    }

    month_names
  end

This will only be useful to people using the fabulous Netzke who have asked about how we got bespoke forms working in Netzke Grid Panels. Sergei, the author of Netzke might soon be adding this feature in to the basepack so unless you are in a hurry do it his way !

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As part of a project I am replacing an MS Access database with another app that can be used from a web browser. Lots of tables with loads of fields and heaps of forms are involved, so I needed a nifty way to do it.

I chose Ruby on Rails and a wonderful gem/plugin called Netzke written by Sergei Kozlov. Rails is a great way to plumb a web page into a database, although it is annoyingly prone to change (just try running any example from a two year old text book, my old Rails books have been converted into gerbil bedding by my daughter).

Netzke blend the advantages of Rails with the loveliness of EXT JS. Now Rails is written in a language called Ruby and executed on the server while EXT JS is Javascript on the browser, so inventing an easy to use combination is a clever trick. Sergie Lozlov’s Netzke is of the most beautiful bits of computer science I have seen in a long time.

Sergie makes Ruby and Javascript tango together. Further more, he’s written some easy to read tutorials that help other people to do the same thing.

I know that the Ruby language and associated tools are created for free by enthusiasts, but quite often there are little issues that spoil the experience. Like this one;

I needed to install Rails on Ubuntu 8.04.3. After installing ruby gems 1.3.5 I did this;


$ gem install rails
$ /usr/bin/gem:11: undefined method `manage_gems' for Gem:Module (NoMethodError)

The solution is here. You have to edit the /usr/bin/gem file that was just installed.

Now I can work around this kind of thing, but I wonder how many people coming to Rails for the first time are put off and go away with a bad impression. I guess I ought to contribute.

Note to self, instead of peering at wrongly formatted JSON like this;

SyntaxError: missing ) in parenthetical cannot parse JSON response: { "success" : true, "msg" : "This is the message !", "rows" : [ { "task_id" : "jbpm$2", "description" : "Can you look at this buddy ?", "status" : "Not Yet Started", "priority" : "2", "resources" : [ { "name" : "B0006336.psd", "url" : "/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/62cd9c9c-95a1-4363-a618-69f4c119860a/B0006336.psd" } ],... ...... date) } ] }

Use the JSON formatter and debugger to spot the mistake;

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Here is a groovy front seat view of a glider launching. I don’t often take a camera up but on this day Rob Taplow did the flying from the seat behind me. All I did on the launch was to press Record. And to find a Rolling Stones song to go with the video.

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