Help

“Anybody have a favorite for charting on the client-side?”

Google charts works well for getting something simple going quickly, use Flot for anything beyond that. Some people mentioned the existence of Raphael.js, but nobody had much experience with it.

“We had to make sure we were using rvm as a function instead of a binary and-”

You installed it wrong – the install checks that rvm is a function.

“We are seeing a lot of errors (more than the hoptoad limits) going to hoptoad and newrelic for error types that are handled by rails built-in rescues, like 404s for ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound. The app is serving up the correct error page, but still sending an error to the services.”

These services hook in lower than that so they can get all error info. Make sure nothing happened to their config of which errors to ignore, because they have their own way of skipping them.

Also consider turning off the default route to cut back on crawlers. This would likely just trade 405s for 404s, though.

Help

“Yesterday we agreed to always check in the Gemfile.lock, but 1.8 and 1.9 versions differ slightly so…?”

It wouldn’t quite make sense to maintain a whole separate branch, but someone cleverly suggested making the file a symlink and having your .rvmrc manage which file the symlink points to.

Ask for Help

“Does everybody check their Gemfile.lock into source control?”

Yes! Yehuda said so and if you don’t the earth might fall into the sun.

“Anybody have any experience using chef client-server?”

A number of people said they had seen it go down in flames and get ripped out of projects in favor of chef solo.

*”Is there a way to get IE7 to render in quirks mode, but IE8 and everything else in standards?”

Not that anybody knows of. IE6 can be triggered by an xml prolog before the doctype, but they fixed that for IE7. So your choices are IE6 and earlier in quirks and IE7+ in standard, or all IEs in quirks.

Interesting Things

• A pivot had trouble with rspec being not be installed in development mode and getting rake spec to run right, but others had had no trouble with it in test env only.

• You can do layouts in pure css that used to be a lot of work, like 100% height with fixed px headers/footers, using the display:table|table-row|table-cell styles.

This will work in the standards based browsers and IE8+. This means you need to use an alternative for IE7, either js, expressions in an IE only stylesheet, or a quirks-mode based layout using fixed padding. I experimented with this over the week-end and blogged about it: The new css 100% width and height with header and sidebar

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“S3 is giving us 400 timeout responses on every first upload for a request. All subsequent uploads for the same request seem to work fine.”

This turned out to be a bug in the HEAD version of Paperclip. They added a fingerprint method that creates a MD5 hash out of the original file, but the method forgets to rewind the original file when done. So S3 times out while waiting for data, but then rewinds the file before trying again. So it does ultimately get uploaded, but it was leading to ~10 second delays in the middle of the request.

Interesting Things

• Be careful when doing MyModel.find_by_column-that-is-a-string in ActiveRecord. If you pass it an integer it won’t do a type conversion and will pass it down to SQL as an unquoted integer. MySQL will then not use any indexes you have on that column. This is with Rails 2.3.x and MySQL 5.0.x

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“Does anybody have solutions for a public sandbox?”

They want people to be able to modify their data, but want the data to roll itself back to the clean state at specific times, or after certain events have happened.

Some people are having problems with the latest RubyMine EAP build. When using our standard keyboard map they are unable to make new lines, they have to use Shift-Enter.

Interesting Things

• People have good things to say about http://html5boilerplate.com/
• A team ran into a problem with https and S3. Using the bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com syntax instead of the s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname syntax can fail when using https if your bucketname has too many segments. This is a known limitation of wildcard certificates.

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“Facebook(or other third party service) is down, and my build is broken. What should we do about this?”

Without extensively mocking Facebook, some of our projects have separated tests that require any third parties. Then, you can accept builds even if tests from that collection fail.

“How to remove errors from validations?”

The best way to handle this is to disable the validations in question by overriding them, though in some cases it may require you to dive deeper into ActiveRecord. Most likely you want to refactor to not have to do this, and if its a plugin you’re using, modify that. Our own Socialitis project is rumored to include code to accomplish this as well.

Interesting Things

“document.execCommand”

Adam has been doing work with execCommand, which may be useful to you if you’re trying to add text editor-like features to your webpage.

“range.surroundContents”

If the end of your range has an empty element, surroundContents can choke. The best thing to do is programmatically alter your range when it is in this situation, or you may get an exception about a “partial selection”. Also, you’ll need to be careful to insert the right sort of node depending on the contents of your range as to not introduce invalid markup into your page.

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“Rails 3 / mysql2 gem: Errors from ActiveRecord due to DB handler going bad while running Cucumber tests. What to do?”

Cucumber does some forking, which may result in your connection being shared in multiple processes, which in turn results in Bad Things©. There may be a way to disable this behavior in the Cucumber rake task. A blunter, less desirable solution may be changing ActiveRecord to reconnect more frequently.

“How do I get HopToad-like errors back from my client-side Javascript?”

Put an error handler on document. You could make an AJAX request back to your server from there to send debugging information. Alternatively, making an AJAX request at the time of your error may not be safe, so you can also put a request in the source tag of an image or script tag, and this may be more reliable.

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“Any issues with git-submodules in projects?”

Comments from Pivots regarding git-submodules:

• Heroku doesn’t currently support them
• You could use Bundler to include your potential submodules as a dependency.

“What do we do about spam on our blog posts? Disable comments?”

Our blogs have a forthcoming spam filtering service. Hopefully we will see this deployed soon! Until then, filtering is manual.

“What are people using for role-based permissions?”

• declarative_authorization plugin
• CanCan plugin is noted to be possibly a lighter weight solution for simpler cases.

Interesting Things

• Enabling auto-flushing in Rails 3 should be done with care, as it can cause exceptions to be thrown when combined with nested permissions in possibly unexpected places.
• When using default_scope, there is still issues with ordering your scopes in Rails 3.
• Rails 3 automatically escapes user input thus adding a layer of protection against XSS attacks.