Help

“Anybody have any experience using the oath gem without net/http? There are some things we want to do that it’s not good at”

Like posting large files? Shell out to curl. There are a couple things nobody seems to have done right, yet, and that you just have to use curl for.

“What is the right gem to use for AWS? The official one seems newer than this right_aws that hasn’t had a commit in a couple years”

You are probably looking at the wrong version. Another project was using right_aws and they swear it’s newer than that. It sounds like the gem forked and you probably want the RightScale one. Either way it definitely works better than Amazons ec2 gem, which will get the job done sometimes, but is less than optimal.

Interesting

Testing right_aws with webmock

A team was seeing webmock continuing to feed a bad result to all of their tests (within a timeout for the shared connection) when one failed, instead of trying again. They switched to using connection=dedicated instead of shared.

Help

“We’re using Rails 2.3.x built-in Digest Auth to hide the production/demo env of a site that doesn’t have a user model yet. It seems like every few requests we have to reauth – possible worse when multiple computers request concurrently”

Make sure there aren’t any failing requests (such as an ajax firing off an illegal route) that might be causing the browser to think it is no longer authed? Maybe just stick with using Basic Auth via an .htaccess? A number of other comments and guessed were thrown around, but nothing conclusive.

Interesting

Flot FTW

The team asking about charting yesterday said Flot was the answer. Highchart has licensing/pricing they didn’t like, Graphael might be getting stale, as it hadn’t been touched in a while, and they needed more data than the GET limit, which prevents the use of Google Charts.

Some Jasmine tests were failing on CI in Selenium, but not locally.

It turned out to be some tests that fail when the window size is to small. The team bringing this up added a helper for Jasmine to resize the window if it was too small. Another team mentioned new Selenium runs fullscreen by default. Another team gave the Jasmine test block a static style and large size in css.

Help

“Anybody have a favorite for charting on the client-side?”

Google charts works well for getting something simple going quickly, use Flot for anything beyond that. Some people mentioned the existence of Raphael.js, but nobody had much experience with it.

“We had to make sure we were using rvm as a function instead of a binary and-”

You installed it wrong – the install checks that rvm is a function.

“We are seeing a lot of errors (more than the hoptoad limits) going to hoptoad and newrelic for error types that are handled by rails built-in rescues, like 404s for ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound. The app is serving up the correct error page, but still sending an error to the services.”

These services hook in lower than that so they can get all error info. Make sure nothing happened to their config of which errors to ignore, because they have their own way of skipping them.

Also consider turning off the default route to cut back on crawlers. This would likely just trade 405s for 404s, though.

Help

“Yesterday we agreed to always check in the Gemfile.lock, but 1.8 and 1.9 versions differ slightly so…?”

It wouldn’t quite make sense to maintain a whole separate branch, but someone cleverly suggested making the file a symlink and having your .rvmrc manage which file the symlink points to.

Ask for Help

“Does everybody check their Gemfile.lock into source control?”

Yes! Yehuda said so and if you don’t the earth might fall into the sun.

“Anybody have any experience using chef client-server?”

A number of people said they had seen it go down in flames and get ripped out of projects in favor of chef solo.

*”Is there a way to get IE7 to render in quirks mode, but IE8 and everything else in standards?”

Not that anybody knows of. IE6 can be triggered by an xml prolog before the doctype, but they fixed that for IE7. So your choices are IE6 and earlier in quirks and IE7+ in standard, or all IEs in quirks.

Interesting Things

• A pivot had trouble with rspec being not be installed in development mode and getting rake spec to run right, but others had had no trouble with it in test env only.

• You can do layouts in pure css that used to be a lot of work, like 100% height with fixed px headers/footers, using the display:table|table-row|table-cell styles.

This will work in the standards based browsers and IE8+. This means you need to use an alternative for IE7, either js, expressions in an IE only stylesheet, or a quirks-mode based layout using fixed padding. I experimented with this over the week-end and blogged about it: The new css 100% width and height with header and sidebar