A quick reminder in case I ever forget: If you need to generate a new public/private key on a Windows box your best bet is PuttyGen. The Problem is that PuttyGen will create a SSH2 key that you can't use in your authorized_keys file as OpenSSH is using a different key format.

Thankfully ssh-keygen supports converting keys from one format into another:

ssh-keygen -i -f my_putty_key > ssh2_compatible_key.pub

Then just upload the file to your server and append it to your authorized_keys:

cat key.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Defining assocations to be included in the rendered Json in Rails is pretty easy. You just use the options hash to define an include in to_json and by voodoo magic to_json will also traverse the ActiveRecord assocation and render the associated entity as a nested element in the Json. The code in question is quite simple:

@object.to_json({:include => :assocation_a})

By default Rails will only include attributes in to_json so if you want to also serialize the return value from a method (for example if you want to concatenate some attributes or compute something) you can do so through the options hash:

@object.to_json({:methods => :my_method})

You can also combine them easily if needed:

@object.to_json({:include => :assocation_a, :methods => :my_method})

But this calls the my_method on @object. How do you tell to_json to invoke my_method on @object.assocation_a?

Not trivial, but it works:

@object.to_json({:include => { :assocation_a => { :methods => :my_method }})

It gets spicy when you already had multiple includes in an array like this:

@object.to_json {:include => [ :assocation_a, :assocation_b ]} 

And now you only want to include my_method in assocation_a and not assocation b. simply replacing :assocation_a by a hash like before isn't going to work. It took me some time but this is what I came up with:

@object.to_json {:include => { :assocation_a => { :methods => :my_method }, :assocation_b => {} }} 

Did I mention that I am amazed by how flexible the syntax is here?

One very nice thing about the internationalization library in Rails is it's support for pluralization by default. Instead of having to figure out how to display a plural or a singular when selecting what message translation you display you can just call translate and it will figure out if the plural or the singular form should be used.

Defining the two forms is done inside your config/locale/.yml like this:

found:
  one: "Found one result"
  other: "Found %{count} results"

This works out of the box for things like validation errors or ActiveRecord models. But it refused to work on me for my own little custom array I was outputting.

Turns out I was just not calling it correctly. I18n.translate simply takes a hash of options - expecting one of these options to be count so it can perform the pluralization check (by default this is entry[count == 1 ? 0 : 1]).

So in order to use this with a custom array you need to write something like this:

I18n.translate :found, :count => myarray.length

Since this allows you to pass any value you want through the arguments hash you can easily construct translations like this:

found:
  one: We could not find anything matching your query %{query}
  other: We found %{count} items


I18n.translate :found, :count => myarray.length, :query => "your query"