Interestings

Get your Rails mentoring on at RailsBridge this April 8th & 9th @ the Modcloth offices in downtown SF. It’s very rewarding.

If you have nested_attributes updating an attribute that is NOT in your attr_accessible attribute list on your ActiveRecord model you won’t get an exception – it will just silently fail. It will, however, output a warning line to your Rails log file. Fun for the whole family.

Using popen to open a process actually calls ‘sh -c’ to open your process, so the process you just ran is actually the child of the ‘sh -c’ process you just ran. This makes tracking down PIDs simply wonderful. :-) You can use ‘exec’ instead and your process will be the parent process. But if you’re using the new hotness you can instead use Process.spawn in Ruby 1.9.

Helps

Floating an image to the bottom right of an element and having text flow around it. Is there a pure CSS solution to this or is Javascript required?

Interestings

Adam wanted an easy command to run during deployment to get the remote master SHA1 of a git submodule.
The command he was interested in was:
git show origin master -- vendor/your-submodule-here

Josh mentioned that Capybara has a new DSL that makes steak unneeded. There’s a good post here on how to get started with it.

Ask for Help

We have an html table with rows that correspond to
database rows. We’d like an easy way to implement per- > row editing of this data, but <TR>s are not happy to be
wrapped in a <FORM>. How fix?

• use javascript to copy the data to a form element or do a straight AJAX post
• Backbone.js has the ability to link html elements to server-backed data models, might be handy here
• put forms around individual <TBODY> elements for the individual rows

We’re using ActiveResource as a foundation for our API client, but it doesn’t process JSON errors correctly. How fix?

This has been in the issues tracker for ActiveResource for over a year and is marked low priority. HttpParty was suggested as an alternative, anyone else have something they like?

Interesting Things

Some folks are using HTML5 Canvas and are taking IE9′s canvas support for a spin. Turns out that if you apply some font settings to text on a canvas and then rotate it, IE9 will actually shift the center point of the text, creating a surprising jump, diagonal in this case. If you don’t want your text to hopscotch across the page, you have to rotate it first, then apply the font.

Webrat used with selenium doesn’t follow redirects with Rails 2.3 on Mongrel. One team used thin instead of mongrel, which solves this problem. Using webrat with thin requires a patch

Ask for Help

“Is there a better way to work on a feature, set that feature set aside, do a small change, check that small change in, then resume work on the feature, all using Git?”

git stash was originally used. There were also suggestions to use a feature branch or use one of the Git GUI tools (gitx, tower, smartgit, gitti) that let you partially stage your changes then check in. Or git-friendly workflow scripts or the ol’ reliable git cherry-pick.