Interesting

   >> false.blank?
   => true

• blank? first checks to see if a method responds to empty? and if not evaluates !self which in false’s case will always be true. This caused a pair a bit of confusion when trying to validate the completeness of a form that had a checkbox.

• Railscamp — an all-weekend hackfest — is being held in Rhode Island in March of next year.

• All API keys were recently reset on Gemcutter due to a security bugfix – in order to publish gems you’ll need to update your gemcutter gem to regenerate your key.

• Postgres will return an error if you attempt to ORDER BY columns that are not specified in the SELECT. This is painful in cases where you’re using DISTINCT with any kind of JOIN.

• One team cut their deployment down from 7 minutes to 30 seconds with a few cap recipe tweaks. Most of the time was saved by symlinking gem bundler-related directories to prevent bundler from building native gems on each deploy and by only running database migrations when anything in db/migrate had changed.

• When using the inherited hook for ActiveRecord::Base, beware of tables that have their name overriden by set_table_name. The inherited hook will execute prior to that statement being evaluated which can cause strange results.

• Getting Selenium to work with Snow Leopard involves some manual file renaming hackery — for anybody struggling with this there are a couple of posts out there to walk you through the process.