Interesting Things

• We’ve found another appable_plugins bug: it seems to prevent Rails View Helpers from being properly mixed-in to ActionMailer templates. We’ll send them our patch.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 10:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• Profilers: If you want a good Ruby profiler, check out the ruby-prof gem. It even creates HTML call graphs.
• Gotcha: Rake and Capistrano tasks are global, regardless of their namespace. In addition, if a Rake and Capistrano task have the same name, they will collide: which one wins, nobody knows! We’ve had success encapsulating Rake and Cap tasks in Ruby classes and delegating to them as soon as possible.
• Though we’ve a big fan of Fast-JSON, the new JSON library is faster and appears to fix several of the bugs that FJSON was created to fix.
• Hackety Hack is a little tool to help beginners learn to program in Ruby, especially kids. Why is it cool? Because of Why! Why? Yes, Why!

Ask for Help

• “We have some really slow tests that test external dependencies, such as Amazon’s S3 Service… should we create a ‘slow suite’?” We are planning on doing this, and many of us have create ‘slow suites’ that run only in continuous integration… with mixed success. Sometimes people just ignore the slow suite’s errors.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 19:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• ActiveRecord::Base.destroy_all can really slow down tests. Plus, some feel it’s a bit hacky to set up your test’s preconditions by nuking all of the existing data.
• We have a test that validates all fixture data. Perhaps we’ll post it here.

Ask for Help

• “Why is ActionMailer’s multipart mailer causing a segmentation fault?” Though we don’t know, we do get a deprecation warning stating that the multipart mailer should not be used. So, stay away!
• “Say you have class Car extending class Automobile using Single Table Inheritance, does Automobile.destroy_all also destroy all Cars? If not, should it?” The answer is no, it does not and should not: the relationship between Automobile and Cars/Trucks is an inheritance, not a tree-like structure — Automobiles do not “own” Cars.

Interesting Things

• One project has been importing large amounts of pre-formatted text out of a 3rd-party database and wanted to display it on a site with as little effort as possible. The best solution was to display it as pre-formatted with the <pre> tag, but also tell the browser to word-wrap it so it doesn’t all display as one big line:
  <pre><code>
  pre {
  white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;
  word-wrap: break-word;
  font: 12px verdana;
  }
  </code></pre>

• The tubes are clogged! We are doing a lot of remote pairing with <a href="http://www.skype.com/">Skype</a>, <a href="http://www.tightvnc.com/">TightVNC</a>, and <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/">Adobe Acrobat Connect</a>, all of which really sloooooooooooooow down your network.