Helps

• Using bundler seems to break some Rails plugins which try to extend Rails objects, such as Loofah, and no one is sure why. Probably something in the load order is different. A “workaround” is to find other ways of including functionality in your models, such as including modules in an ApplicationModel base class, which you should probably do anyway. Still, does anyone know what’s going wrong?

• On a few of our Snow Leopard machines, we’ve seen git slow to a crawl. Rebooting seems to fix it temporarily. We haven’t seen it on our Leopard machines. Anyone else seen this or have a fix?

Interesting

• On one of our projects, we have a rake task called deployed:versions which sshes into each of our deployment boxes finds the git version which is deployed, and presents the results in a nice table. It’s been a handy tool, and you may want to write one for yourself, especially if your project deploys to lots of boxes and environments like ours.

• If you’re using Snow Leopard and Firefox 3.6, you may have some issues with sqlite3 (of all things). Sauce Labs have fixed this in their Sauce RC, which is a replacement for Selenium RC. You don’t have to use Sauce RC to get the fix; just download it and replace the JAR files in Selenium RC with theirs.

• Speaking of Selenium did you know it has great drag and drop support? Here’s a Cucumber step for dragging items in a jQuery UI Sortable list:

  When /^I drag “([^"])” above “([^"])”$/ do |dragged_item, dropped_item|
  li = lambda { |text| %{//ul[contains(@class,"ui-sortable")]/li[contains(string(),"#{text}")]} }
  selenium.drag_and_drop_to_object(li[dragged_item], li[dropped_item])
  end

• On one project, have a lot of commits called “WIP” (”Work in progress”). It’s not a very useful message. Some people have taken to squashing their branches into a single commit before they put them on master. When there are lots of commits on a branch, this is also not very useful, as the details of what happened get lost. Instead, we’re striving to give commits good names and not squash them. When we do need to make a WIP commit, such as when we push work in progress at the end of the day, we amend to it later and give it a meaningful name.

  When it’s time to rebase onto master, you can do this:

  code(master)$ git rebase -i origin/master

  That -i means “interactive”. Your editor can open, and you can tell git to squash meaningless commits into other commits they belong with. You’ll get a chance to give the frankensteined beast a new commit message. You can also reorder, skip, or edit commits this way; see git help rebase for details.