A standup of pivots (Sam Coward, Sean Moon, Peter Jaros, and Brent Wheeldon) have recently run into a bug in TeamCity that causes trouble with symlinks when using git.
If you commit symlinks into your repo, TeamCity will not properly transfer these to the build agents. They end up being copied over to the agents as plain text files.
The workaround for this issue is to use Agent-side Checkouts instead of Server-side Checkouts.
Over the past two years we’ve worked on Tweed, our webOS Twitter client, we’ve learned a lot about mobile development, JavaScript techniques and of course the Twitter client space. But the landscape has changed a lot recently so we’ve been thinking a lot about Tweed.
We’ve realized that it takes a lot of resources to maintain a Twitter client to the level of features and quality that Twitter users demand. The Twitter API changes frequently and new Twitter-related services appear all the time.
HP is shipping new webOS devices and has a new framework to go with them so we would need to reinvest a lot of time in order to keep up with the platform.
Add in that Twitter recently changed their policy regarding 3rd party client applications and the justification of continued effort is questionable.
After careful consideration we decided that the correct course of action is to formally end development and support for Tweed.
If you have Tweed on your phone currently, it will continue to work.
However, Tweed will (shortly) no longer be available in the App Catalog. This means you will no longer be able to purchase, re-download, or restore Tweed to another webOS device.
There are several ways to use Twitter on your webOS device, including Twitter’s excellent mobile web interface. But the application that has the richest, most-comparable-to-Tweed feature set is Carbon by dots & lines.
We’ve let dots & lines know about our plans and they’ve graciously offered to lower their price to $1.99 for a couple of weeks to help current Tweed users who want to migrate to an actively-maintained Twitter client. The price change should go live shortly.
Thanks to all of you who have bought Tweed, helped us find and fix bugs, and supported each other in the Twitterverse.
UPDATE Price drop for Carbon is live and dots and lines has some nice things to say on their blog
heroku_san + autotagger >>> anyone? anyone? Ken wants to talk to you.
versions in .rvmrc — use them. If you’re simply using ree@gemset things might fall apart after an upgrade. A better practice would be to use bundler, which will be more reliable in reinstalling your required gems if your ruby is upgraded.
Pair eXchange at Pivotal SF tonight. Bring your side project and your thinking brain, and look forward to some fun pair programming!
Mike Gehard mentioned that there is a movement to extract ActiveResource from Rails. For now, it’s been shot down. But don’t bet against the haters! Work is underway to rewrite it from scratch. We’ll probably hear more about this as RailsConf proceeds.
Todd taught us a new stretch that involved us standing with one leg crossed over our other knee while bending and touching the floor. I always wonder what we must look like to innocent bystanders.
Beware setting class variables in Rails Initializers: Schubert warned us that if you’re setting vars on your Rails classes inside of config/initializers, you’ll see weird things happen in development mode.
If you set a class var on a model in an initializer, the value will be available on your first request to the app. However, upon the second request, Rails will reload the class, but it will not reload the initializers. At this point, you’ll have lost the value.
Bash Brace Expansion: If you ever find yourself renaming a file in some faraway path, you think to yourself, “Wouldn’t be nice if I didn’t have to specify the entire path and filename twice?” Many shells provide you with a nice shortcut.
So, instead of:
mv /a/b/c/d/foo.feature /a/b/c/d/bar.feature
You can use:
mv /a/b/c/d/{foo,bar}.feature
It’s pretty hot. Of course, there are many other applications of brace expansion. Check out the reference here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Brace-Expansion
Schubert rewired a bunch of power cables in the server room. If you notice that something isn’t right, you now know who to blame.
Peter mentions that BarCamp NYC is this weekend, May 21, 22. It sounds like a lot of fun, and a great place to learn and meet interesting people.
Agile UX will be meeting here this Thursday. The topic will be Rails for UXers.
Finally, Austin lead us in stretches this morning. It was quite exhilarating. Most of us ripped our pants and snapped our credit cards in half.
As mentioned in yesterday’s standup blog, my pair and I encountered some problems with YAML parsing over the last few days, and now that I think I understand it I wanted to document it for posterity.
Psych is a new YAML parser which presumably is better than what came before it, but can’t merge hash keys correctly and doesn’t work with delayed job. The merging of hash keys is serious, as our standard databse.yml defines a common section, and back references it merging in individual database name and settings. When psych is loaded, we get a blank database name, which makes active record pretty much useless.
Ruby 1.9.2 optionally compiles psych into ruby if you have libyaml installed on the computer. Some gems will require psych if it’s available, thus poisoning any future YAML parsing which does not expect psych’s pedantic (and currently broken) behavior.
You can always look at the value of the YAML constant – it can varry between YAML, Syck and Psych, depending on what’s loaded. You can switch the yamler by adding YAML::ENGINE.yamler = ‘syck’, but you need to make sure this happens at every code entry point.
For now, I’m no longer install libyaml and libyaml-devel on servers, which got there because I had been following RVM’s information ruby prerequisites. I’ll also write a chef recipe to assert that libyaml is not installed.
require "psyche"; require "yaml"? WRONG! We’ve found you have to do them in opposite order or your parsing is “all screwed up”.
Kris Hicks reassures us that the vim path through git interactive rebases need not lead to maddness. If you’d like to do an interactive rebase in your editor of choice (rather than Textmate, the Pivotal default) you can set the GIT_EDITOR flag. So go ahead to the terminal and
export GIT_EDITOR=vim && git rebase -i origin/master
Vim will launch, changes will be made, commits will be squashed, and all will be right with the world. Until you try to save; after making your changes and :wq-ing, the terminal will admonish you Could not execute editor.
The problem is a vi + Mac OS X + git incompatibility with pathogen (the vim package manager). To fix it, add the following lines to your .vimrc file:
filetype on
filetype off
...pathogen crap...
filetype on
For more on this issue, see http://andrewho.co.uk/weblog/vim-pathogen-with-mutt-and-git
Rayban reminds us that you best yield before you exit the block.
For example:
around_save :check_something, :if => "my_attribute_changed?"
def check_something
return unless my_attribute == "foo"
yield
# do some stuff...
end
will not save unless my_attribute == "foo"— if your condition to run the around filter rarely happens you might not notice this fairly obvious behavior and be confused confused confused.
We’re planning to decommission our gems.pivotallabs.com RubyGems server on Friday, June 17th. If you are dependent on gems hosted there, and the logs suggest there aren’t many of you, please find an alternate source for your gems.
Since Bundler has become available, there are now other options for making custom or forked gems available to Ruby applications, so we no longer have a need for our own dedicated Gem server. You can point to rubygems.org or direct bundler to the github repos for all of the gems we are currently hosting. We hope this doesn’t cause any significant inconvenience and please leave a comment if you have concerns.