Ask for Help

“In an android web browser, if I have an autocomplete menu, and I click on one of the items, the click is registered on that item, but also seems to pass through to the elements behind it. For instance, a different text input was behind it, and became focused.”

“Yep, that bug sucks.” “The world may never know.”

Interesting Things

• Fixnum’s [] operator works! According to the ruby docs

  “Bit Reference—Returns the nth bit in the binary representation of fix, where fix is the least significant bit.”

  # 2:Fixnum in binary is 10, right? So…
  
  
  2[0] = 0
  2[1] = 1
  

  Also:

  a = 0b11001100101010
  30.downto(0) do |n| print a[n] end
  

  produces:

  0000000000000000011001100101010
  

• innotop innotop is a ‘top’ clone for MySQL with more features and flexibility than similar tools. It’ll let you do all sorts of dangerous things to your database! Have fun!!

• Parse.com apparently accepts job applications via API! Check it out at https://parse.com/jobs#api

• jQuery and the resize event – If you trigger a resize even on any object other than the window, it will not trigger the binding on that element. It will, however, trigger any resize bindings you have on window.

• Did you commit to git under the wrong author’s name and email? Use
  --ammend --reset-author after committing, but before pushing (unless you want a pain in the tuchus)

  mkdir foo
  cd foo
  git init
  touch README
  git config --global user.name "Santa Claus"
  git config --global user.email "santa@claus.no"
  git add .
  git commit -m "Commit from Santa Claus"
  git show
  # commit e5f4ebe6c689ddbf4ff595855fec544da5d8ce01
  # Author: Santa Claus <santa@claus.no>
  
  
  # Oops! I'm not Santa Claus
  
  
  git config --global user.name "Easter Bunny"
  git config --global user.email "easter@bunny.cl"
  git commit --amend --reset-author
  
  
  git show
  # commit d523479d487d04388972bea872913ffda734ef89
  # Author: Easter Bunny <easter@bunny.cl>
  

• Looking to game the system on Superbowl Game day? Check out Onsi’s Super Square http://supersquare.heroku.com/ stats app for your Squares pool.

Interesting Things

• When using TimeCop to travel in time in your specs, Time works normally, however DateTime will round to the nearest second. You have been warned

Help!

“What’s going on with Facebooker and :class/:class_name_?”

Normally, in an ActiveRecord class definition you can use :class_name to change the class of an association.

has_many :foos, :class_name => 'Bar'

With Facebooker installed, one project found that their project was able to use :class

has_many :foos, :class => 'Bar'

When Facebooker was removed, it all blew up. No one had a solid answer as to why this worked in the first place.

“How do can we tell if our app’s email has been marked as spam like Campaign Monitor claim to do? How else can I get spam reports?”

*”Does anyone know to get this info from ISPs?”

Services like Return Path can give you aggregate reports, but not specifics.

All other suggestions were vague and/or said “Contact the ISP.”

*”How do I sign up for Heroku with a Google Group email?”

Allow non-member emails. You want to do this before you sign up, because some Pivots have reported that they could not get a second confirmation message to be sent.

Ask for Help

“How can I make Watershed video streaming work with SSL? We changed page protocols and now it doesn’t work.”

This is probably a flash-based cross-domain (protocol) problem. You’ll probably have to contact Watershed support to get some help.

“How do I make the Facebook ‘Like’ button work over SSL?”

One team had luck with the FBML like button when using SSL. Remember to include the Facebook JavaScript library with a protocol-relative url
:

//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js

“We upgraded from Rails 2 to 3 and when upgrading RSpec to 2.0, our fixtures stopped loading. Halp?”

The options for global fixture have changed. The new version looks like:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.global_fixtures = :all
end

“Why can’t I run RSpec 2.6 focus tests in RubyMine 3.11? We downgraded to 2.5 and it works.”

Check out the new RubyMine 3.2 Beta. Apparently as of build 107.235 they have upgraded RSpec 2.6.0 compatibility.

Interesting Things

• Hacknight at Sharethrough in San Francisco tomorrow, June 30th, 2011.

• Rails Bridge is looking for Spanish speaking Rubyists to help with an upcoming workshop. You needn’t be fluent, they can help with technical vocabulary.

Ask for Help

“I am trying to use the Headless gem to run my selenium tests via an xvfb session on an ubuntu machine. The xvfb session is being launched correctly on display port 99 screen 0 but I am getting the following error from selenium:”

18:08:31.410 ERROR - Failed to start new browser session, shutdown browser and clear all session data
org.openqa.selenium.server.RemoteCommandException: timed out waiting for window 'null' to appear

“here is how I am running Headless:”

require 'headless'
headless = Headless.new
puts "starting Headless session on display: #{headless.display}"
headless.start
begin
  puts "rake spec:integration"
  Rake::Task['spec:integration'].execute
ensure
  puts "stopping Headless"
  headless.destroy
end

Has anybody out there had any luck with this?

Interesting Things

• Using Sunspot with Rails 3 and its rake tasks running a little slow?
  • Adding require ‘sunspot/rails/tasks’ to your Rakefile sounds like a great idea, but a couple of pivots found out that it can unintentionally cause Sunspot to index twice when the rake task was run.
  • The core issue is that Rails 3 automatically finds the rake tasks when the gem is included in your bundle.
• It’s the Year of the Rabbit!

Ask for Help

“Tellurium? Has anybody heard of Tellurium? Bueller?”

Apparently no one at standup had heard about Tellurium which is apparently a “UI module-based web automated testing framework” that “runs on top of Selenium“

“How do I get Bundler to uninstall old versions of gems from the system when new versions get out?”

Turns out that when a gem gets upgraded, bundle install does not necessarily kill the old gems on the system, even when using RVM gemsets. Which can be problematic if you have other systems which are expecting only the newest version of the gem installed.

The easy answer is to prepend bundle exec for every command you want to use. If you’re too lazy for that, then the simplest answer we could come up with was just to blow away your gemset before you deploy.

“Any more admin UI help?”

People are always looking for easy database admin panels for Rails projects. Last week and again today, the new kid on the block, Typus was brought up. Also mentioned today was admin_data.

Some even say the best admin available for a Rails project is actually Django.

Ask for Help

“Does my Rails application on top of Passenger get blocked when I upload a file?”

Nope! Passenger uses plain old apache to buffer the file upload so your application instance is free to service other requests while the upload is finishing.