Standup 03/21/2007

Interesting Things

We’ve forked several 3rd party plugins (yes, we need to send patches) and we’re using the “3rd Party Branch Pattern” from Software Configuration Management Patterns. We’ll keep you posted as to how it’s working.
rake db:fixtures:load does not turn off database foreign key constraints, so be careful. We’ll see if we can either fix this for our needs or make it configurable.
CSS: We’ve found a technique claiming that overflow:hidden can dispose of the un-hip <div style="clear:both;"></div> float-clearing div. This seems to have multiple side effects, including undesirable scroll bar behavior, so be very careful if you do this.
In FireFox for Mac, you will encounter problems if you are trying to hide a Flash components using an opaque div. There is a workaround involving a .png background image which has the desired alpha-transparency… a more detailed post will (hopefully) come in a follow-up post.
Even More CSS: though some suggest it’s dangerous, setting an element to position:relative often saves the day if you have having layout problems.

One of our new projects is using the Darcs source code management system… has anyone used it?
- We have a few who’ve read about it, but not used it… looks like we’ll have to RTFM.
If anyone has experience getting rake tasks to work on both *NIX and Windows, talk to AC.
Here’s a good sign: we’re out of chairs!