Month: April 2017

Flight Log Version 2.1: Import Flights from Digital Boarding Passes

~ Paul Bogard ~ Leave a comment

In general, my Flight Historian has been a big time saver for me as far as tracking my flights – instead of manually generating reports and maps from an Excel file, I can simply add flights to a database and let it do all the work. However, as I’ve started tracking more details about my flights over time, the task of entering the flights has become less simple.

Screenshot 2017-04-09 21.59.30
There are currently 24 fields to fill out in the flight log. Not every field is required, but it can still take several minutes to fill out a flight.

Since I’d been working on parsing boarding pass barcode data, it seemed like a logical next step to write some sort of scanner that would read a boarding pass barcode and import the data as a new flight. Then one of my Twitter followers had a suggestion:

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Creating Multiple Flash Messages in Ruby on Rails

~ Paul Bogard ~ 1 Comment

On my Flight Historian application, a number of my pages make use of the flash and flash.now session messages capability for errors, warnings, successes, and informational messages. However, some of those pages needed to have multiple messages of the same type (e.g., multiple warnings), which flash didn’t allow me to do. Additionally, I had some views that were generating status messages of their own (for example, if a collection was empty on a page that had multiple collections), and so I ended up with several ways to generate messages that didn’t output consistent HTML.

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