Interesting Things

• Rubymine, just released a new beta revision 856. So far it “seems to work”.

• When using Object-Mother patterns for creating objects in tests (i.e. Fixjour, FactoryGirl) one gotcha that caused one of our teams some pain was when inadvertently setting an object and object_id for the same association. For example, setting person = @nate and person_id = @david.id in the same object creation will cause really weird problems. Our team debugged and solved this by validating object creation … essentially writing tests for your test objects.

• Try mapping SHIFT + Space to the underscore character, and save your underscore finger from unnecessary travel.

Interesting Things

• Webrat, the acceptance testing framework that is all the rage right now, has a neat lesser-known save_and_open_page command that is helpful for debugging when your tests go wrong. Essentially, this command dumps the current HTML to the browser and lets you inspect the state of the page visually at any point within your test.

• Rubymine, Pivotal’s favorite Ruby IDE, doesn’t really support UTF8. You can type UTF8 characters seemingly fine … but somewhere along the way it doesn’t save properly. Apparently this has been an issue with Rubymine for quite some time. Frustrating.

Ask for Help

• Anyone know a reliable way of CSS regression testing? When we are refactoring CSS or markup, it would be great if there was an automated way to detect visual breakages. Some ideas floating around involve taking screenshots through Webkit’s API and comparing them pixel by pixel. This kind of thing has been attempted twice by Pivots without much success. Anybody have a good solution?

Interesting Things

• Many thanks to Pivot Josh Susser for his hard work co-coordinating this past weekend’s Golden Gate Ruby Conference. We also want to thank our Live Blogging team: Chad, Ryan, Zach, and David — who all did an excellent job of documenting the event. We also recorded videos of every talk, which will be posted to Talks within a week or so.

• Something to be aware of if you are running your production app on EngineYard: Because of their shared disk setup, running disk intensive jobs on your staging environment may affect the performance of your production environment on the same slice. One of our teams ran into severe slowness on production due to tasks running on staging. This problem isn’t immediately apparent because of the way the EY storage system is well abstracted for each environment. Submit a ticket to EY support for more details if this is a problem for you.

Ask for Help

• Adam Milligan submitted a patch to Rails a while ago that refactored the implementation of HasOneThroughAssociation. To his severe disappointment, the patch was rejected because the Rails core “doesn’t apply refactorings.” Adam is asking for help from Pivots and friends to add their comments and support to the patch so hopefully it will be applied to the upcoming Rails 3.0.

Interesting

• Nothing interesting happened on the internet yesterday. Sorry to get your hopes up.

Help

“Using compass and sass to generate css, how do we get line numbers in the compiled css indicating the corresponding sass declaration?”

The suggested answer is using the non-silent variety of sass comments in an old skool pragma-mark type fashion.

“Is there a canonical setup for dealing with failover when you have two HA proxy load balancers and round-robin DNS across their two IP addresses?”

Interesting

• Regarding compass, sass, and line numbers, Chris Eppstein dropped some knowledge in the comments section on the 4/7/09 entry:

    config.after_initialize do
      Sass::Plugin.options[:line_comments] = true
    end

That will grants you wondrous and magical comments in your css. Cheers, Chris!

Help

“IE does not let you float an element in front of a select — how can I get around that?”

Use an iframe; jquery has an example in they’re modal dialog box

Help

“How do I encrypt a user account on a Mac?”

The short answer is to use the FileVault. The drawback is that disc corruption will eat the entire home directory, instead of maybe just eating part of your home directory and leaving you some salvageable files. [Time Machine was also suggested as a possible solution for encrypting user data.]

Correction: TimeMachine, the back up util that comes with OS X, has trouble with the FileValut due to the encryption.

Interesting Things

• Erik Hanson points out that Amazon has released a web service called Elastic MapReduce which aims to “easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data [in parallel]“. It supports development in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++. MapReduce is already being used to run a test suite by one of our clients.
• Related to MapReduce and Hadoop (the framework tused by Amazon’s MR) is Zvents’ HyperTable which enables the use of structured data with high performance. HyperTable will be presenting at GoGaRuCo.
• StackHub, a tool for making “the collection, analysis, reporting, and notification of your application logging events easy”, is looking for Beta users (Java only). Stack Hub is in the same category as services like HopToad, but promises to differentiate itself from the pack.

Interesting Things

• Amazon, in a push to make “cloud computing” a tangible concept, deployed blimps as part of its new FACE service which supports 65K+ EC2 instances, with 40% of their power being generated from solar cells on the blimp surface. San Francisco pivots seemed to like the idea that a data center could be earthquake proof given a recent shakedown in the south bay.