jQuery Plugin: A 1kb Simple Slider for Images + Description

I recently set out to find a good slideshow for our homepage, but most of them are monsters, with 20kb code, no thanks…
The simples/best solution i found was the s3Slider somewhat simple and looks good.

But after it started behaving silly (sliding to fast/slow, hanging on mouseover) I decided to fix it and discovered a pile of spaghetti. So here is my s3_slider rewrite download that is smaller(now ~1kb) / simpler / maintainable and more easy to setup! Demo of the new version

Umlaut Aware Alphabetical Sorting

The simples solution i could come up with, convert all chars to their base (á -> a), using String.tr would be ideal for this task, but its not UTF8 aware…

If you dare to digg deeper, more information can be found on wiki and on coding horror 

list.sort_by{|name| convert_umlaut_to_base(name)}

  def convert_umlaut_to_base(input)
    text = input.dup
    %w[áäa ÁÄA óöo ÓÖO íi ÍI úüu ÚÜU ée ÉE ßs].each do |set|
      text.gsub!(/[#{set[0..-2]}]/,set[-1..-1])
    end
    text
  end

Cucumber vs ActiveRecord 2.3 — Attempt to call private method (NoMethodError)

All of the sudden some columns began to misbehave in cucumber tests, claiming that “Attempt to call private method (NoMethodError)” on normal column attributes!

A simple fix for this, essentially saying that a method is not private when its a column:

#features/support/ar_private_fix.rb required from env.rb
unless ActiveRecord::Base.methods.include?('private_method_defined_with_fix?')
  class ActiveRecord::Base
    class << self
      def private_method_defined_with_fix?(method)
        return false if columns_hash.keys.include?(method.to_s)
        private_method_defined_without_fix?(method)
      end
      alias_method_chain :private_method_defined?, :fix
    end
  end
end