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Monthly Archives: November 2011

Davis W. Frank

Movember Update: Check Out the ‘Hawks While the Pivots Involve It

Davis W. Frank
Wednesday, November 30, 2011

We powered through Movember this year with a bigger network, Webstache, and over 80 participants. Pivotal Labs – all four US offices – plus our friends at Square, Sharethrough, and Halogen all grew whiskers and helped raise money to end “dude cancer”.

In 30 days, we met our goal of raising $20,000 for Livestrong and The Prostate Cancer Foundation and then some – the current tally is $23,318.

But that’s not enough. We had Pivots who couldn’t grow mustaches. And Pivots who had mustaches who didn’t want to shave them. What are these Pivots to do?

Someone said, “But a Mohawk is like a mustache…FOR YOUR HEAD.” Then there was much betting and cajoling and smack talk. In the end, Pivotal agreed to donate $500 to Movember for each Pivot that got a mohawk.

Which meant we needed to have Mohawk shaving parties in New York and San Francisco. Pivots in the Boulder and Denver offices, as well as a couple of remote Pivots did the same.

Total: 28 ‘hawks shaved (plus Gregg, the one with the green & purple one-day ‘do merited a half-donation) and another big donation coming to Movember from their friends at Pivotal Labs. We may break $40K before the donations close.

Big thanks to my fellow Pivots for growing, donating, raising, and yes, shaving. And HUGE thanks to Pivotal Labs for tolerating all of this and making the big donation this year.

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Pivotal Labs

[Standup][SG] 2011-12-01 – Events events events!

Pivotal Labs
Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Events

  • House of Genius Singapore is having their first session on Wednesday, December 7 at Amazon’s offices. Check out their About page for more details on the nature of the event.
  • Come see The Stand-up Economist at TAB tonight at 8pm.
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Matthew Kocher

[SF] 11/30/2011: 30 Days has Movember

Matthew Kocher
Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Ask for Help

“Is there a good JS/HTML code editor that will expand to fix the contents?”

A team is just getting started with putting in a code editor and is currently using ACE. It doesn’t seem like there’s a way to tell it to take up as much height as it needs. Many suggestions were thrown out, FCK and TinyMCE being two, but none was known to auto size itself. There is one that no one can remember the name of, but they had fond memories of from the past.

Interesting Things

  • Super Market Street Sweep is coming up this weekend. Ride your bike around SF for a good cause.

Movember Update

  • Webstash passed the $20k mark that Davis & Sean had been shooting for–congratulations everyone! (This does not include Rob’s generous Mohawk donation). SF has raised $323.36 per stash, NY $163.40 and Boulder $210.50. There’s still time to donate.
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Pivotal Labs

[Standup][SG] 2011-11-30 – Deprecations in jQuery 1.7

Pivotal Labs
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Helps

“We have some DOM that looks like this: <div><span /><a /></div>. We can style the a which follows a span with the CSS rule span + a, but it appears there’s no rule to style the span if it’s followed by an a.”

  • This is more of a sad face than a help.

Interestings

  • As part of jQuery’s slimming down effort, in the 1.7 release non-standard event properties are no longer copied from the native event object to the jQuery event object. Certain plugins may not be aware of this change yet.

  • Along the lines of jQuery 1.7, .live() is also being deprecated. Please use .on() and .off() in its place.

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Onsi Fakhouri

No really, you have to pick *one*

Onsi Fakhouri
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Ask for Help

“Postgres SELECT * GROUP BY insists that all selected fields must either appear in the GROUP BY or be aggregated.”

Many agreed that this is, in fact, how a database should behave and that MySQL’s leniency on this matter is faulty. If you select a field that you don’t group by, you must tell Postgres how to combine the sub-set of values that fall in a given group into a single result (should it take the max? the min? the mean? the most purple?).

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Parse: A Better Way to Develop Mobile Apps

Monday, November 28, 2011 | Run time: 29:39

Many mobile developers find themselves rewriting the same server code for every app. Co-founder Kevin Lacker talks about Parse, a service that helps you build mobile applications without writing any backend code.

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Sean Beckett

New Tech Talk: Travis

Sean Beckett
Monday, November 28, 2011

Erik Michaels-Ober, Fellow at Code for America, discusses Travis CI, a modern distributed open-source build system for continuous integration.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

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Matthew Kocher

[Standup][SF] – 11/28/2011 – Post Turkey Edition

Matthew Kocher
Monday, November 28, 2011

Ask for Help

Why does my md5 change when the timezone changes?

A pivot found that the tests of MD5 generation fail if the machine is in a different time zone. While one of the inputs to the hash is the time, he swears up and down that it’s integer seconds since the epoch, and is the same on both boxes.

Interesting Things

  • Tomorrow is Mo’hawk day at the Pivotal SF Office. It will be live streamed, with color commentary by our own Davis Frank. The live stream may be a PPV event, please have a major credit card available.
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Pivotal Labs

[Standup][SG] 2011-11-25 – Wonkiness with accepting an alert dialog in cucumber

Pivotal Labs
Thursday, November 24, 2011

Helps

“We are using page.driver.browser.switch_to.alert.accept in our cucumber steps in order to accept a JavaScript alert box. This appears to have an effect on the browser’s behavior afterward, causing future scenarios to fail when they pass on their own. We’re seeing timing issues, specifically around when the blur event is called when an input field loses focus. We didn’t manage to find the root cause. Any ideas?”

  • Sounds intense! No answers, though.

Interestings

  • It’s not possible to stub a delegated method; stub it on the object
    delegated to instead.

  • In order to get an accurate number of days since the epoch, do this:
    (Time.now.to_f / 60 / 60 / 24).round. The key here is the to_f
    instead of to_i to prevent losing precision early on.

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Tyler Schultz

[Standup][SF] 11/22/2011: Programmatic select box changes

Tyler Schultz
Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Help!

“How do I choose the value of a select box programmatically? The val function does not seem to do the trick.”

Try setting the desired option as selected and then trigger a change event on the select input.

*”A pair is looking for ‘multi file upload via iframe-transport’ expertise. Specifically uploads in FireFox 3.6.”

Interesting

  • The latest RubyMine EAP has improved code formatting options!
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