Interesting Things

• In response to our ask for help, Ray Baxter answered us in code with a script called Firefoxen. “It’s a script to automatically configure multiple installations of Firefox so that they open with different profiles.” You can grab Firefoxen on GitHub. Thanks Ray!

• IE7 sends odd Accept headers (*.* instead of an explicit text/html) which can cause undesired behavior in Rails. Someone suggested manually setting the format in a before_filter:

  params[:format] ||= 'text/html'

  This was discouraged because it can cause problems elsewhere. A better solution was to put the html format at the top of any `respond_to` blocks:

  def show
    respond_to.html # run by default when type cannot be determined
    respond_to.js
  end
  

• The Ruby MySQL Gem version 2.7 leaks memory for very large queries. The solution is to remove the 2.7 gem and manually install version 2.8 from source. This library is no longer a gem and must be installed from the mysql-ruby-2.8 tarball.

Ask for Help

“As a followup to Firefox SSL certificate problems…”

It turns out that our server running nginx had an old version of OpenSSL installed. Upgrading OpenSSL solved the problem.