Ask for help

• A team is migrating from PaperClip to CarrierWave and while the site seems to work fine, however tests are failing in strange ways. Specifically, tests about replacing images aren't saving any changes to the database, but there are no validation errors.

• What javascript charting libraries are cool?

The easy recommendation was HighCharts (http://www.highcharts.com/)

And there is also D3 (http://mbostock.github.com/d3/) but it is much more low level

Interesting things

• According to Amazons AWS newsletter, S3 now has 762 billion objects and is serving 500,000 requests per second.

The post Standup 02/23/2012 – Charts are cool appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for help

• Where are the cool parking garages around the new office?

There appear to be many options close by.

• What is the best way to estimate hosting costs? (e.g. how many dynos on heroku etc.)

One suggestion was to try load testing the app in the real hosting environment to get an idea on what you can realistically take.

Interesting Things

• A new version of Apache has been released that is trying to compete better with nginx

The post Standup 02/22/2012: Apache trying to compete with Nginx? appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for help

• Google's documentation says they won't server AdSense over SSL. Are there any workarounds?

No workarounds that anyone knew.

The post Standup 10/7/2011: Google says NO! appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for help

• Does the Rails 3 asset pipeline work on Heroku Cedar at slug build?

Resounding yesses from around the room.

• We're using Rails 3.0.10 and when we send emails with ActionMailer the timestamp in the header is marked as UTC, but it's really the local time of the app (PST). Is there any way to fix this?

No real solutions for this.

• We're getting an Internal Server Error, but not seeing the nice Rails stacktrace page. It appears that the error is buried in rack somewhere. Does anyone know how to get a better error report?

Hammertime was suggested.

• When trying to build a gem what are the versions of Ruby and RubyGems that you should use to allow the gem to work everywhere.

Suggested to build the gem with Ruby 1.8.7

The post Standup 10/5/2011: Where’s my stacktrace? appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for help

• We have ruby files where the class isn't named the same as the file. When we deploy to an environment that runs with memcache, the classes can't be loaded from memcache and we get a 'no constant defined' error.

Other than, "don't name your files like that" the next best answer is to setup some file that eager loads all of your classes by name before memcache gets loaded.

Interesting Things

• jQuery 1.6.2 crashes IE8 when the page has a background image on the body. If you see this upgrade to jQuery 1.6.4 unless you want to crash the most popular browser.

The post Standup 10/3/2011: filename.should == classname appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for help

• Some pivots on an Android project were trying to remember if there was any way to turn of overscroll glow in lists.

Interesting Things

• DevOps Days is coming up on June 17 & 18. They appeared to be sold out before, but are now inviting people off the waiting list, so if you want to go sign up.

• When using scp to get files from a remote machine, it actually uses ssh to get into the machine to do tab completion of the remote filesystem.

• When running specs through rake, FactoryGirl factories are evaluated before fixture data is loaded, which is the opposite of what happens when running directly with spec. This manifests itself with really broken factories if they need to load fixture data but do it too early.

All this means is, don't write your factories like this:

Factory.define :foo do |f|
  f.bar Bar.find_by_number(100)
end

Write them using the lambda syntax like this:

Factory.define :foo do |f|
  f.bar { Bar.find_by_number(100) }
end

• Some pivots were noticing what seemed to be strange behavior when using the 'and' keyword in ruby, because it has the lowest precedence in the language.

Some demonstrations:

> def foo1
>   puts 'foo' and false
> end

> a = foo1
foo
 => nil
> a
 => nil

If you try to wrap the 'foo' and false in parentheses, be careful of your spacing:

> def foo2
>   puts ('foo' and false)
> end

> b = foo2
foo
 => nil
> b
 => nil

> puts('foo' and false)
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb) syntax error, unexpected kAND, expecting ')'
puts('foo' and false)
           ^

Using && is a little more predictable

> puts 'foo' && false
false
 => nil

Or the difference when assigning not just printing:

> x = 'foo' and false
 => false
> x
 => 'foo'
> y = 'foo' && false
 => false
> y
 => false

The post Standup 6/10/2011: scp’s magical tab completion appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for help

• How do you specify a behavior for Backbone.js when there is no hash?

You specify a default behavior for the Backbone model.

Interesting Things

• If you have IdentitiesOnly turned on in your .ssh/config file, ssh will not connect to any hosts that aren't listed. This bit a team trying to set up heroku auto-deploys on their CI box, once they added a heroku Host to .ssh/config, everything worked fine.

The post Standup 6/6/2011: SSH IdentitiesOnly bites back appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for Help

Some pivots are trying to import a large number of images into paperclip, and it seemed to hang when shelling out to convert at different images.

Suggestions for troubleshooting included:

• look at the memory usage over the course of the import
• try running one file many time to see if it's just some bad images

The post Standup 1/27/2011: Paperclip hangs? appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for Help

A pivot was looking for help with using mod_proxy on apache. It only seemed to want to proxy the root.

The only real suggestion available was to use HAProxy instead, but that wasn't an option for this project

Some pivots were looking for help using bundler together with capistrano, but without rvm.

No real suggestions on what the problem could be.

Some pivots were wondering how long of a time-box they should set aside to get jasmine running in CI.

Consensus was that it should only take about a half-hour.

Interesting Things

• A pivot noticed that the battery life on his MacBook Air seemed to suddenly drop from about 8 hours down to only 4 hours. After some digging through top, it turned out that running rails server and rake jasmine:ci were causing the machine to never be able to fully enter sleep/hibernate to save battery life. So remember to turn those off when you put your laptop away.

The post Standup 1/27/2011: Rails server eats your batteries appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for Help

Some pivots were looking for experts with google analytics.

A pivot or two has had experience. Splunk was also suggested as a way to get some potentially different analytics, but warnings were given that it can take a while to get everything set up for Splunk to work correctly.

Interesting Things

• Typus allows easily adding the ability for admin users to edit structured content in your rails app.

• OpenSource Women's Leadership summit is this Friday. See here for tickets. And check this out for more info

The post Standup 1/26/2011: Rails bridge is cool appeared first on Pivotal Labs.