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“‘Teamcity formatter missing’ error?”

Any ideas how to work around a “Teamcity formatter error” message when running specs (using RSpec 2) in RubyMine?

” Paperclip breaks when a filename contains a ‘#’ character”

Apparently this has been fixed but not released?

Interesting Things

• Selenium Conference is taking place in San Francisco on April 4-6.

• MongoDB apparently stores pre-epoch dates as far-future dates and converts them back from future to past dates automatically. However, it does not convert them when searching or sorting.

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“Is there a way to have multiple ssh.config files or include other ssh type configurations in your main ssh.config?”

Still searching for an answer here.

“What’s the best way to share cap recipes across multiple internal git repos?”

Git submodules will work, but also think about using a shared gem. The shared gem approach will enable you to keep your server configuration in one place as opposed to scattered across multiple repos that define their own server list.

Interesting Things

• Newer versions of RubyGems (v1.6 was explicitly mentioned) and Rails 2.3 are not compatible right out of the box. You can drop a block in to your environment.rb file to get around it

• Love your Lorum Ipsum generator, but you need English words? Take a look at Fillerati wich will let you create some paragraphs from books in the public domain.

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“Has anyone else had their Selenium tests break after upgrading from rails 2.3.8 to 2.3.11?”

One team was using Rack 1.1.0, Mongrel 1.1.5 and Rails 2.3.8. When they upgraded to Rails 2.3.11, their Selenium tests started failing. After some investigation they found this commit which they used to create a monkeypatch for Rack 1.1.0:

# Back-porting this patch: https://github.com/rack/rack/commit/f6f3c60938ea3b08f3292a2480e6753c293584e5
module Rack
  module Utils
    class HeaderHash < Hash
      def [](k)
        super(@names[k]) if @names[k]
        super(@names[k.downcase])
      end
    end
  end
end

Anyone have a better solution?

“Slower test suite with Spork?”

Spork can speed up the start-up time of your test suite, but has anyone seen it slow down the overall test run? One Pivot was seeing a 10% slowdown in overall suite speed.

Interesting Things

• Postgres can write a lot of stuff to your logs. You can quiet it down with the silent-postgres gem and by adding min_messages to database.yml
• RubyMine 3.1 has support for Spork!

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“jQuery throwing a syntax error when using is("[data-foo]")?”

Has anyone seen jQuery throw a syntax error when passing a data- attribute name to the is() function? This code often works, but started throwing a syntax error after some markup was removed and then re-inserted into the DOM:

$("#foo").attr("data-bar") = 5;
$("#foo").is("[data-bar]");

Interesting Things

• Rails 3.0.5 has been released.
• The Nordic Ruby Conference call for proposals ends today, so hurry up and submit.
• Rails Conf 2011, which is being held in my hometown of Bal-ti-more, just announced its keynote speakers. Check them out.

Ask for Help

“bundle install seems very slow everytime, but bundle check seems fast. Why doesn’t bundle install use bundle check before doing its thing?”

Consensus was that this seemed like a good idea.

“When setting up a cc.rb box, the box could not connect to Github, yielding the ‘You don’t exist, go away!’ message. How do we fix this situation? We can get to github through the command line without any issues.”

• One thing to check is your protocol. The git protocol is closest to SSH and obeys most of the settings SSH does.
• Also check your agent forwarding settings. Is your box explicitly doing everything that it should?

“In Rails 2.3, we tried mocking a has_one association. However, it looks like the association isn’t mocking. Why?”

Rails 2.3 associations have a proxy object that delegate to lower level objects. This proxy isn’t mockable, but the target (proxy_target) is.

“What is the current best of breed passenger config beyond what you get from the passenger site?”

Recommendations were given for mod_speed.

“What are some easy ways to implement CSS spriting on my site?”

For a quick definition of CSS sprites, look here. Recommendations included Compass/SASS.

Interesting Things

• jQuery 1.5.1 is out! It is the first jQuery that explicitly supports IE 9, so it’s recommended for next generation web site development.

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“When I tried to clear cookies on IE8, the cookies stuck around anyway. I was only able to delete them through the developer toolbar. What’s going on?”

The consensus theory was that the developer toolbar might be affecting IE8′s cookie behavior (IE8 is not known for its robust extensions). More investigation seems in order.

Interesting Things

• After upgrading to Bundler 1.0.10/Rubygems 1.5.2, build time on one of our projects shrank by 2 minutes. Hurrah for caching!
• jQuery 1.5 changed its AJAX implementation, causing us to upgrade our mock Jasmine library. Our jQuery 1.5 fork is here.

Interesting Things

• When jQuery attaches <script> tags, they quickly disappear. It adds them to the DOM, executes them and then removes them. If you switch to document.appendChild, you can search for and find the tags at a later point. jQuery may be trying to work around browser limits on the number of script tags.

Ask for Help

• “What’s the best way to start a gem?”

bundle gem scaffolds a simple gem. Don’t forget to add a license!

More info on how jQuery handles script tags.

Interesting Things

• An upgrade to Rails 3.0.4 broke RSpec’s =~ Array matcher (which disregards ordering). Oddly, there are times when == (which respects ordering) passes but =~ fails.
• Check out the Trove Hack Day. Trove lets you access photos from a variety of sites through one API.
• We’re excited about the new Palm webOS App Framework, Enyo.

Ask for Help

“We’re deploying green builds directly to production. But the depend option isn’t working on the CI box. Any ideas?”

Run capistrano with trace to get reports on which dependencies are or are not being used.