Interesting Things

• Rails tweaking: test startup times can be very slow due to Fixture loading, especially for HABTM. We monkey-patched the Fixture-loading code that handles HABTM, resulting in a test suite performance increase of 300% for one project! We’ll submit the patch to Rails core and keep you posted.

Ask for Help

• “Does anyone know an efficient algorithm for detecting overlapping rectangles made of up latitudes/longitudes… in SQL?”
  Or, in other words, detecting if two selections on a map overlap. The latitudes and longitudes are stored in a MySQL database. MySQL has some GIS features that we’ll explore.