Next week is the first Wednesday of October, and that means another New York City Ruby Happy Hour, sponsored by Outside.in and Pivotal.
Where: Outside.in, 20 Jay St Suite 1019 (10th Fl), Brooklyn, NY
When: 7-9PM, Wednesday September 3rd
Who: If you’re a developer who uses Ruby and would like to meet some other Ruby folks, toss around ideas, or just have a few beers, we welcome you with open arms!
There will be pizza, beer and wii-based entertainment for everyone. Click here for more details, and to RSVP.
Pivotal Labs is teaming up with Outside.In in New York City to co-host the monthly Ruby Happy Hour, on the first Wednesday of every month, starting Sep 3.
There will be pizza, beer and wii-based entertainment for everyone. Apparently these happy hours are getting quite popular, so please RSVP either in the comments here, or on Outside.In's blog.
Where: Outside.in, 20 Jay St Suite 1019 (10th Fl), Brooklyn, NY
When: 7-9PM, Wednesday September 3rd
Who: If you’re a developer who uses Ruby and would like to meet some other Ruby folks, toss around ideas, or just have a few beers, we welcome you with open arms!
Outside.in (www.outside.in) is the web's leading platform for neighborhood news and conversation. Outside.in's technology dynamically maps web content to offline locations, which enables hyperlocal news discovery and sharing for consumers. The company also recently released GeoToolkit (www.outside.in/toolkit), which provides powerful tools for content creators of all sizes to optimize, promote and monetize their local content. Outside.in is supported by leading investors including Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, Betaworks and the New York City Investment Fund. For more information, visit www.outside.in or the companyís blog at http://blog.outside.in.
Does anyone have any experiences with one of the object mother libraries like object daddy? (Answers at standup were "no, we always wrote our own object mothers in a domain-specific way"). The appeal of a library is that it might help keep track of what needs to be done to make an object pass rails validation.
Clock.zone now has exists. (Background, pivotal has a Clock class which has a now method which can be implemented either by a call to Time.now for production, or a mock clock which lets tests specify the "time"). This is so that the rails 2.1 features like Time.zone.now have an analog in Clock.
Looking for options to maintain a website of technical documentation with the following:
- A somewhat technical person, but not a programmer, must be able to maintain the site (think a technical manager or a tech writer).
- I need to display code samples, so this should be easy/convenient
- Somewhat skinnable (custom logo, custom fonts & colors)
The ideal examples would be the google chart api or google maps api
A possible solution is a wiki (mediawiki?). Something google-code-like gets extra points for the issue tracker. Google groups gets points for the mailing list. Google sites seems like is might be a decent basic option (it's easy to point a CNAME at it too).
Experience reports/recommendations appreciated.
Rails hackfest is on through the end of August. Get points for getting patches accepted, and win prizes.
Interesting
- firebug lite 1.2 is out
Ask for Help
We upgraded to rails 2.1 and polonium and our rspecs are not running on CI, but run fine if you simply use rake on the command line.
Check to see if you are using the rake extensions in pivotal core bundle.
Using setTimeout() to wait for DOM to update in JsUnit does not work.
Using setTimeout in tests is not going to do what you want, unless you mock setTimeout. Basically, setTimeout kicks off another thread which is not likely to effect the current test.
Interesting Things
- There was an edge version of Rails (this project has a frozen Rails at some point in the past) that had a bug where a namespaced route would send a POST that should go to
MyController#createwas instead going to a POST toMyController#index. The fix is to freeze to current Edge, or usealias_method.
Ask for Help
"Any way to turn off a validation in a re-opened class?"
No way to do this. Best to refactor by pulling the validation out of the class and then mixing it in, or not, at a different level.
Interesting Things
- Y!Slow + Firebug + submit a form will cause the result to be pulled from cache instead of hitting your server. The workaround is to disable Y!Slow.
- Some of our customers are requesting targeting Firefox 3, which has some rendering differences from FF2. So we're adding FF3 to the system image with a new icon and the correct trick to let it run side-by-side with FF2.
- How to Run FF2 & FF3 side-by-side on Mac OS X
- FF3 customer icon that is sufficiently different than Firefox's normal icon so you can tell the difference
- On a related note, rumor is that Facebook is dropping support for IE6. So is 37Signals.
- Interesting issues with the Globalize plugin & Rails 2.1:
- The currency formatting code does not work at all anymore - it always uses a '$'
- Their work for localizing templates, which involves injecting a fully-qualified path, breaks
#assert_template. The workaround is to comment out the path injection code, but this only works if you don't have localized templates.
- EngineYard's eycap gem version 0.3.6 now has better support for deploying from SVN tags
- Deploying from tag, since the URL was different used to do a
rm -rf, which takes a long time on EY's GFS disks for large file sizes. This was causing a customer's deploy taking ~20 minutes - The fix was to change eycap to use svn switch; the deploy now takes ~1 minute
- Deploying from tag, since the URL was different used to do a
Ask for Help
"Anyone seen/solved an issue with random font size increase using Firebug 1.1 or later?"
The issue is that at some point a page will render with much larger fonts and the CSS exploration won't tell you why. The work around is to launch a browser with Firebug disabled and run it side by side with the same page in a window with Firebug enabled (restarting the 2nd window whenever the problem occurs.)
Seeing this with Firefox 2 and 3 and any Firebug later than 1.05 (which doesn't run on FF3). This might be an issue with IFRAMEs, but we're not sure. No data found on this via Google searches or the Firebug group. We will post there.
Interesting Things
Model#update_allis your friend if you're not yet on Rails 2.1Like
Model#update_attributefor each attribute,#update_allwill save direct to the database, bypassing validation, updating only the columns you specify. In Rails 2.1, with partial model updates, you may not need this. But if you've not yet upgraded your application, then give#update_alla try.
Update: fixed per comment. Model#update_attribute does not validate. Thanks for the catch!
Interesting
The defer method in EventMachine allows you to spawn processes in Ruby, like this (from comment in eventmachine.rb):
operation = proc { # perform a long-running operation here, such as a # database query. # as usual, the last expression evaluated in the block will #be the return value. } callback = proc {|result| # do something with result here, such as send it back # to a network client. } EventMachine.defer( operation, callback )New art on the wall, check it out.
Help
- Can anyone recommend a good hosted wiki for casual use? Some of the suggestions so far include pbwiki, MediaWiki (perhaps a bit heavy weight for personal use), and Google Pages.
Interesting
- Ian Mcfarland talks to Geoffrey Grosenbach about Pivotal's agile culture in the May 17 episode of the Rails Podcast. Check it our here.
- This Wednesday's brown bag will be a round table discussion about "Tracker and the client: The real vs. the ideal". Lunch provided, as always.
- When something in Rails isn't working as expected, it may just be a bug that's been reported or fixed recently. Is a good idea to check the the Trac tickets at dev.rubyonrails.org.
Help
- Rails rcov seems to get stuck in an infinite loop on Leopard.
- Anyone know a good general practitioner within walking distance of the office?
- Confirm dialogs are tripping up Selenium (8.1) on one of our projects. Something related to focus, perhaps?
- What does Ní Hea mean?