In Meeho!™, you can instantly do a quick search. The shortcut to Quick search is set up under My profile (click your name at the top of Meeho!™). The key you need to use for Quick search is the 1 key on the keyboard, and this cannot be changed. However, you can change the keys needed to activate the Quick search alongside key 1. It looks like this:

Keyboard shortcuts in Meeho!™. (Please note that the screenshot is in Danish.)

Having defined which keys to use for keyboard shortcuts, you can press Ctrl-Alt-1 (or whichever keys you’ve chosen) which will make the Quick search window appear. Then you write a search string, press enter, and flick through the results using the arrow keys. Once you’ve chosen a search result, you press enter, making Meeho!™ show you the projects you’ve found, the client or whatever you have searched for. It is fast, easy and above all fun!

Quick search in Meeho!™, revealing itself by the press of the keyboard shortcut buttons. (Please note that the screenshot is in Danish.)

Please be aware of how you operating system controls the keys you choose. For instance, if you use Windows and Internet Explorer 8, and your shortcut key is set to being only Ctrl, then Internet Explorer will switch to tab no. 1 when you press Ctrl-1. In this case, you should enable more keyboard shortcut keys. If you’ve got Ctrl-Alt-Shift enabled, then it won’t interfere with Windows and Internet Explorer 8.

If you have ever wondered why all your images alt attributes suddenly aren’t shown anymore in Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8, this is caused by the browsers now finally following standards in this context.

The alt attribute (i.e. <img alt=”Picture of a computer” … />) is originally designed for browsers not capable of showing the element that the alt attribute belongs to, which could be an <img> or <input> tag. But for a number of years, Internet Explorer has shown the alt=”…” text as a tool tip confusing many web developers today because their tool tips for navigation buttons etc. arent’ shown anymore.

Luckily, the solution is simple: use the title attribute, and pop!, your tool tips are shown again! You could have

<img src=”hello.gif” alt=”Hello Good Sir!” title=”Hello Good Sir!” />

… working all fine and dandy in Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 8 etc. The below images are examples of me only using the alt attribute and both using the alt and title attribute. Try to hover the cursor above both images:

If you work with Rails version 2.1 or higher and you make use of the freshly added time zone support via Time.zone, you should be aware of a pretty grievous condition that I walk you through in the following:

Time.zone instances give you access to the same methods that are available in Ruby’s Time instances, i.e. Time.now.hour -> Time.zone.now.hour. For example, if you call Time.zone.now you get:

>> Time.zone.now
=> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:33:10 CEST +02:00

… which seems reasonable so far. Rails is telling you that it is Tuesday the 13th of October at 6:33 PM and that you’re 2 hours ahead of GMT (CEST = Central European Summer Time = UTC/GMT + 2). Now, Time.zone.now gives you the actual time in the time zone defined by your environment.rb, but you could easily be in need of fetching a bunch of objects from your database, for instance all objects that have time stamps that are within the boundaries of today, so to speak. Then what would you do?

Well, I guess you would do your query and make use of Time.zone.today to get the start of today plus Time.zone.today + 1 to get the start of tomorrow. Then you would probably include the start of today by using >= and excluding the start of tomorrow by using < in your query to the database. But it is in this exact case that you need to be aware of the following:

>> Time.zone.today
=> Tue, 13 Oct 2009

Oops!  Time.zone.now gives us the time right now with the current time zone attached to the time stamp, but Time.zone.today does not – and this difference could be crucial to just how many objects you fetch from your database with regards to their respective time stamps (re: an object that has a time stamp of 2009-10-12 22:00:00 +2 won’t be fetched in our time today context if you ask for all objects that have created >= Time.zone.today AND created < Time.zone.today + 1 because of the lack of the time zone data when calling Time.zone.today).

A possible solution to the problem could be the following:

>> Time.zone.today
=> Tue, 13 Oct 2009
>> Time.zone.parse(Time.zone.today.to_s)
=> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 CEST +02:00

I know: it doesn’t look all too pretty. But when you wonder why Rails does not behave the way you would expect, then it’s better to have a solution that works than not having any solution at all. The above condition is worth remembering when working with Time.zone.

When you use Meeho!™, you automatically do something good for the environment. Meeho!™ has just become a part of the ingenco2.dk programme which means that the CO2 emissions from both our Meeho!™ servers plus from the computers that the users of Meeho!™ are using themselves are neutralized by the purchasing of CO2 quotas. Little strokes fell great oaks…