Ask for Help

“Rubymine is excluding code in our gem’s spec/ directory from being indexed, can that be changed?”

We assume this is an optimization, because most people aren’t interested in anything from a gem except the lib/ directory. There doesn’t appear to be a way to change this behavior.

“How can I override the gem version requirements on annoying gems in my project?”

We’re trying to bring in rails 2.3.2 + rack 1.1.x, but rails explicitly requires the old version of the rack gem. Can we do something sneaky to change the requirements without forking and modifying the gem??

“Is there a good set of practices for exposing ActiveRecord models to JavaScript?”

Like using Backbone.js model support? Or maybe just straight #to_json on models and embedding them into HTML templates?

Ask for Help

“A file is being loaded twice by Rails, and I’m not sure why. How do I figure out what’s reloading it?”

Try putting this at the top of the file:

puts caller
puts "-" * 80

#caller is a Kernel method which returns the backtrace at the time it’s called as an array of strings. Every time the file is loaded, you’ll see the backtrace of what loaded it. The second line makes a separator so you can see the break between stacktraces.

“Is there a command that will make a new file in a path of directories that don’t exist yet? Like mkdir -p but for files? Maybe touch -p?”

No. No one knows why.

Interesting Things

• Chrome Tab Overview: Chrome can now show you an overview of all tabs in a window like Exposé does for windows. It’s an experimental feature. To enable it, go to , enable “Tab Overview”, and restart Chrome. Then three-finger swipe down to see all your tabs.

  Your humble reporter reminds the reader that Camino pioneered the “Tabspose” feature in 2007.

• ERROR: current transaction is aborted: On Postgres, sometimes RSpec will show the error “ERROR: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block.” The backtrace of this error is not useful, because it’s the backtrace of the first operation to use the database connection after some error occurred. These errors are tricky to debug.

  The people who hit it had luck with temporarily turning off use_transactional_examples in the RSpec config, which let them see the error. Just remember to turn it back on, because transactions keep your tests clean and fast. (Note: use_transactional_examples and use_transactional_fixtures are synonymous.)

Ask for Help

“How can we expect in Jasmine that a jQuery dialog has closed?”

The dialog animates out (asynchronously, of course), and it’s hard to have a test pass when it successfully disappears.

“In Javascript, How can we create an array of n empty arrays?”

One attempt, (new Array(n)).map(function() { return [] }) failed, because new Array(n) creates an array, n elements long, full of undefined. As it turns out, map() skips undefined in an array.

[Correction: new Array(n) creates an array which says its length is n, but which doesn't have any elements, not even undefined. The following does map over the undefined elements (for n=3), but isn't very useful to us.

[undefined, undefined, undefined].map(function() { return [] })

Thanks to John Pignata for pointing that out.]

Interesting Things

• The latest version of Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer doesn't require admin rights to install.

Ask for Help

“How can you resize the browser window from a Capybara test before visiting the page under test?”

Interesting Things

Tommy had a suggestion for testing scopes in Rails controller tests.

Here is an example of the type of test that he does not enjoy writing:

<code>
it "scopes products to active and available" do
    not_active = Factory(:product, :active => false)
    not_available = Factory(:product, :available => false)
    active_available = Factory(:product, :active => true, :available => true)
    get :index
    assigns(:products).should_not include(not_active)
    assigns(:products).should_not include(not_available)
    assigns(:products).should include(active_available)
end
</code>

Here is a nice way that he found to write the same test:

<code>
it "scopes products to active and available" do
    get :index
    assigns(:products).should == assigns(:products).active
    assigns(:products).should == assigns(:products).available
end
</code>

The only question is what to do with pagination? A work-around is for the controller to do:

<code>
def index
  @products_scope = Product.active.available
  @products = @products_scope.paginate(:per_page => blah blah blah)
end
</code>

Ask for Help

“Why does RubyGems 1.8.1 say ‘No method “basename” for #’ when running Spork?”

It looks like RubyGems thinks that somethings a Pathname when it’s actually a String. That’s weird, since it seems to be entirely inside RubyGems’ own code. It might have something to do with all the changes happening in RubyGems. The team’s downgraded to 1.7.2 and the problem went away.

Interestingly, 1.7.2 is the version currently listed on RubyGems.org. 1.8.1, however, is what gem update --system installs.

Ask for Help

“Is flash RTMP streaming a secure way to stream video so it can’t be downloaded?”

We’re using this with CloudFront + S3. But will it protect our content enough?

“RubyMine + rspec 2.6, why won’t my focused tests run?”

We hoped this could be easily fixable by detaching the rspec gems and reattching them, but no luck with our usual fixes.

“MixPanel, is it a good tool for analytics and log analysis? “

Compared to normal analyics tools or splunk for log analysis?

“Anyone ever stubbed out 3rd party calls to a Thrift RPC service before?”

Is there a better solution than some sort of standard generic ruby stubbing & expectation tool?

Interesting Things

• Postgres is giving us some weird behavior on Heroku when we have column names longer than 27 characters. We think the update_attribute calls are not being persisted but no errors are generated.
• There are finally some viruses/trojans for mac OSX that are gaining traction. Careful what you download!
• The net-ssh-telnet gem makes running a scripted batch SSH session pretty easy. This might be a good tool for you, if you want something much less complicated than capistrano or chef server for remote automation.