TheCWLZone Blog

I love the extensions that Rails has for the Ruby Time object (see ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Integer::Time) – you can do calculations like Time.now + 1.month, (4.months + 5.years).from_now, and other cool things.

In my last post, I mentioned working with an application that uses a subscription service. One of the things I want to do is send the subscriber an e-mail when the current subscription is about to expire. (I am not comfortable with the concept of auto-renewal; customers should have the right to “opt in” on the continuation of a subscription. Just personal preference.) So I set up a cron job that tests subscription expiration dates. Here’s the one that checks a month in advance:

next_month = Subscription.find(:all, :conditions => [ "subscription_expires_on = ?", (Time.now + 1.month).to_s.split()[0] ])

With a test case subscription expiring on Feb 28, e-mail went out correctly on Jan 28. And also on Jan 29, Jan 30 and Jan 31. Ooops! My reminder has turned into nagware. What I really want is:

next_month = Subscription.find(:all, :conditions => [ "subscription_expires_on = ?", (Time.now + 30.days).to_s.split()[0] ])

Live and learn.

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I think the format is a bit better. On to other things…

- Changed the image to something I own

- font-family: Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;

- Changed text color to black

- Changed… Continue reading

I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the way my blog looks – it still feels “hard to read”, and I’m not sure how to fix that, except to experiment with some other two-column, fixed-width WP… Continue reading | 1 Comment

The latest VMware Server version is 2.0.2, released on October 27 of this year, so I thought I would give it a spin. The downloads are available as RPMs, so that was the obvious… Continue reading

My mostly static web site was hacked together about 5 years ago with straight HTML tags using the XEmacs editor. To say the least, it was starting to look pretty frayed around the edges, not… Continue reading | 1 Comment

I updated all the gems for my current Rails development project that is using Ruby 1.9.1. This also included an upgrade to Phusion Passenger 2.2.5. Then I upgraded to Ruby 1.9.1-p243, which promptly crashed… Continue reading