After replacing the old carousel with the new one, I discovered that the new code didn’t provide a way to do circular carousels. It had a fixed beginning and an end. You could program it to loop but when you got to the end and told it to move to the right again it would actually scroll really fast to the left until the first item was back on the left edge. In a circular carousel, if you’re on the last item, you want the first item to show up to the right of the last item if you move past the end, looping forever.

So, with the code being released under the GPL opensource license, I did what any self-respecting developer would do. I patched the code to make it circular when you told it you wanted it to loop. This is a change from the old way it worked so people using this library and expecting the old functionality should be warned. I could have added a “loopmethod” config variable but I didn’t want to introduce any new configuration variables without approval from the true author. As it is, I only added one new method – a way to move a specific item to the left most item using an unnoticeable jump, instead of the default scroll. This is part of the magic that makes it able to simulate a circular loop. Compressed with the YUI Javascript Compressor, it only adds 600-ish bytes to the code. Even less, when you finally gzip it. Acceptable for the return in functionality, IMNSHO.

I haven’t tested it 100%, notably the code where you are using the custom API methods, but it SHOULD be good to go by just replacing your old version. YMMV. I will be submitting this to the author of jQuery Tools so he can evaluate it for the next revision of Scrollable. In the mean time, test it, use it, let me know what you think.

Download the Scrollable javascript

It’s only a model… shhhh.

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On the left, store bought. From our tree is on the right. Accept no
substitutes.

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from The Telegraph via Boing Boing

I encountered another problem now. When I ran my autotest but tried to shut it down by hitting Control-C twice in a row, the tests would just reset and run again. Double Control-C is supposed to interrupt the process and allow me to shut it down. This it did not do.

I am also running the autotest/menu plugin that is supposed to explicitly ask you whether you want to quit, restart or just keep going when you hit Control-C, even if it’s just hitting it once. This is the best possible option and is what I recommend, but it wasn’t happening. There were no prompts to quit, continue, or restart. Just restarting the entire test suite EVERY time I hit Control-C, whether it was two quick hits or 10 hits a row.

I originally looked at the code thinking that I should fix it there. Autotest provides hooks into it’s process. Run, interrupt, quit, etc. I figured it had to do with one of those so I first tried just commenting out the :interrupt hook code on lines 39-41 in ZenTest-4.0.0/lib/autotest/snarl.rb. This worked and I was happy. However it still didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to hack the code and ask them to fix it. It must be working for other people because I haven’t seen other people complaining about it.

Turns out the fix is a really easy one and requires no hacking on the gem code at all. It was just a problem with the order of my “require” lines in my .autotest file. My original .autotest file looked like this…

require 'redgreen/autotest'
require 'Win32/Console/ANSI'
require 'autotest/snarl'
require 'autotest/menu'
require 'autotest/timestamp'

The .autotest file that WORKS swaps the “snarl” and “menu” lines around, like so…

require 'redgreen/autotest'
require 'Win32/Console/ANSI'
require 'autotest/menu'
require 'autotest/snarl'
require 'autotest/timestamp'

NoMethodError: undefined method `admin' for #<Admin::RegistrationsController>

but what was the first line that came up in the backtrace?

app/controllers/admin/registrations_controller.rb:18:in `show'

This was giving me fits. There’s no call to ‘admin’ in the ’show’ method. I knew there had to be something else so I searched for how to see more of the backtrace.

The BacktraceCleaner introduced in Rails 2.3.2 cleans out backtrace lines coming from the Rails framework (Railties, etc). This is usually what you want. However, I was sure that my error was coming from somewhere in the framework. Turns out it’s really simple to turn off the backtrace cleaner. Add this line in a ’setup’ method in your test_helper.rb file.

Rails.backtrace_cleaner.remove_silencers!

Very simple, very easy. My name is Chef Tell.

I bet if gun range owners got a few of these for targets, I’d be able to hit ‘em.