Icons and Users and Roles, oh my

This week I started finishing up icon support.  I say started because it also lead to me working on authorization and authentication.  Authentication will be handled by devise, and authorization will be through cancan.

A Trip Down Console Lane: Mapping Troy Properties

Last Thursday, Professor Moorthy asked me if I could map the foreclosed property listings in Troy, NY.  This seemed like the perfect kind of data to be displayed on a map, so it works well for an application like Flagship Safety.  The problem is that I haven't deployed it yet, and don't really want to host it on my development server.  So I decided to make it a project in Community Mapping, which is also powered by Flagship Geo.

RCOS Presentation

On Friday I gave a presentation to RCOS about Flagship Safety.  I gave an overview of what we're trying to accomplish, and outlined some of the things I want to do over the next two months  You can find the presentation bellow.

RCOS Timeline

We're entering week four of the Summer session here at RPI, and I realize I should probably schedule out  the tings I want to do.  I've spent the first three weeks working on improving the display of emergency poles, and I can now display multiple layers on one main map.

Rails Console (or not)

Between testing my CSV import function and testing layer views,  I've imported the call boxes spreadsheet about a dozen times.  So I decided to use the rails console to clear my <code>call_box</code> and <code>import_tables</code models and re-import things.  Since the rails guides don't say much about the console, I had to look elsewhere.  After ten minutes of nor finding an answer, I decided that I could just rebuild my app without too much fuss.  So I deleted my app and checked-out my repo again.

RCOS

I've decided to continue work on Flagship Safety over the summer by turning it into an RCOS project.  RCOS is the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software.  They support the development of open source projects and contributions to open source projects.  It has been around since 2007 and in the summer it meets weekly from 12-1 in Lally 104.

returning data efficiently

Like any good web framework, you can use the JSON format to send data to your application. The JSON data I was building in my layers controller was returning a 500 error, which was because the :include parameter is expecting attributes from multiple models, and fails if it doesn't find them. Once I removed :include, the JSON flowed freely.