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Sean Beckett

Standup 08/04/2008

Sean Beckett
Monday, August 4, 2008

Ask for Help

“Does anyone know why a Selenium click event might not trigger the same activity as directly triggering the DOM id through javascript? We have a form submit button that works fine when directly activated but doesn’t work in Selenium.”

It was suggested that perhaps this is a timing issue. Maybe some required JS for the form hasn’t loaded before Selenium is trying the event.

One workaround would be to test only the form submission called by on-click instead of the click itself.

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Chad Woolley

Standup 8/1/2008

Chad Woolley
Friday, August 1, 2008

Interesting

  • If you need to add inflections in Rails, make sure you do it before your initializer block in environment.rb. If you put it after the initializer, it will cause your routes to be re-parsed, which will slow down app/test startup significantly. For example:
  require 'active_support'
  ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
    inflect.irregular "criterion", "criteria"
    inflect.irregular "Criterion", "Criteria"
  end

  Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
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Chad Woolley

Standup 7/31/2008

Chad Woolley
Friday, August 1, 2008

Interesting

  • There is some strangeness with Rails’ handing of invalid dates outside of the range for a Time object. For example, February 31, 1900. This involves Rails turning it into a Time object, and then back into a Date.

  • Multiple have found an interesting edge case bug in MySql which results in inconsistent ordering. It has been repeated in versions 5.1a and 5.1b, but we didn’t navigate the MySql bug system yet to find/report it. Here are the query conditions to reproduce it, which could be common in test scenarios for some projects:

* LIMIT <= 5
* ORDER BY id DESC
* > 5 rows in table
* Where clause has index (not compound with id)
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Chad Woolley

Standup 7/30/2008

Chad Woolley
Friday, August 1, 2008

Interesting

  • We had an excellent tech talk on Vertebra from Ezra Zygmuntowicz and the folks at EngineYard. If you’ve ever been a sysadmin responsible for many boxes, you’ll appreciate the awesome potential of Vertebra…

  • NetBeans and symlinks: a team was having problems with symlinks in SVN disappearing after a client edited the project in NetBeans. No, he was not using Windows…

  • Here are some tips for working with acts_as_paranoid (We have helpers for some of these in our common libraries):

Add :scope for validates_uniqueness_of

validates_uniqueness_of :user_id, :scope => :deleted_at

Add :conditions for named_scope with :joins

named_scope :friends,
          :select => "users.*",
          :joins => :paranoid_relation,
          :conditions => 'paranoid_relations.deleted_at IS NULL',

Ask for Help

  • acts_as_paranoid isn’t upgrading well as we move to newer Rails versions. What are the best alternatives?

  • A team was is having problems getting PHP to read php.ini…

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Chad Woolley

Standup 7/29/2008

Chad Woolley
Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Interesting

  • There are now fixes in the master branch of Desert on GitHub. This addresses some problems with views in Rails 2.1 and Edge Rails.

Ask for Help

What are the best practices for managing dependency plugins or libraries that now live on GitHub (such as Desert)?

  • Chad put some info and thoughts into a separate blog post
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Pivotal Labs

Standup 7/28/2008

Pivotal Labs
Monday, July 28, 2008

Interesting

  • firebug lite 1.2 is out

Ask for Help

We upgraded to rails 2.1 and polonium and our rspecs
are not running on CI, but run fine if you simply use rake on the
command line.

Check to see if you are using the rake extensions in pivotal core bundle.

Using setTimeout() to wait for DOM to update in JsUnit does not work.

Using setTimeout in tests is not going to do what you want, unless you mock setTimeout. Basically, setTimeout kicks off another thread which is not likely to effect the current test.

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Davis W. Frank

Standup 7/25/2008

Davis W. Frank
Friday, July 25, 2008

Interesting Things

  • There was an edge version of Rails (this project has a frozen Rails at some point in the past) that had a bug where a namespaced route would send a POST that should go to MyController#create was instead going to a POST to MyController#index. The fix is to freeze to current Edge, or use alias_method.

Ask for Help

“Any way to turn off a validation in a re-opened class?”

No way to do this. Best to refactor by pulling the validation out of the class and then mixing it in, or not, at a different level.

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Pivotal Labs

Standup 7/24/2008

Pivotal Labs
Thursday, July 24, 2008

Interesting

mysqldump and load

  • There was war story told involving software that’s not generally available. However, one tidbit that may be of general interest is a reminder that you don’t necessarily get a perfect copy of your mysql database when restoring from a dump of that database. Mysqldump by default writes the data of each table preceded by a DROP TABLE IF EXISTS and a CREATE TABLE statement. This covers you in most situations, but misses when new tables have been created since the dump was made — those new tables are not deleted. They may not cause problems, but some systems are sensitive to the existence of those tables, such as rails and the schema_info and schema_migrations tables.

Ask for Help

  • question: Is merb hosting different from rails hosting?
    • answer: no
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Davis W. Frank

Standup 7/23/2008

Davis W. Frank
Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Interesting Things

  • Y!Slow + Firebug + submit a form will cause the result to be pulled from cache instead of hitting your server. The workaround is to disable Y!Slow.
  • Some of our customers are requesting targeting Firefox 3, which has some rendering differences from FF2. So we’re adding FF3 to the system image with a new icon and the correct trick to let it run side-by-side with FF2.
    • How to Run FF2 & FF3 side-by-side on Mac OS X
    • FF3 customer icon that is sufficiently different than Firefox’s normal icon so you can tell the difference
  • On a related note, rumor is that Facebook is dropping support for IE6. So is 37Signals.
  • Interesting issues with the Globalize plugin & Rails 2.1:
    • The currency formatting code does not work at all anymore – it always uses a ‘$’
    • Their work for localizing templates, which involves injecting a fully-qualified path, breaks #assert_template. The workaround is to comment out the path injection code, but this only works if you don’t have localized templates.
  • EngineYard’s eycap gem version 0.3.6 now has better support for deploying from SVN tags
    • Deploying from tag, since the URL was different used to do a rm -rf, which takes a long time on EY’s GFS disks for large file sizes. This was causing a customer’s deploy taking ~20 minutes
    • The fix was to change eycap to use svn switch; the deploy now takes ~1 minute

Ask for Help

“Anyone seen/solved an issue with random font size increase using Firebug 1.1 or later?”

The issue is that at some point a page will render with much larger fonts and the CSS exploration won’t tell you why. The work around is to launch a browser with Firebug disabled and run it side by side with the same page in a window with Firebug enabled (restarting the 2nd window whenever the problem occurs.)

Seeing this with Firefox 2 and 3 and any Firebug later than 1.05 (which doesn’t run on FF3). This might be an issue with IFRAMEs, but we’re not sure. No data found on this via Google searches or the Firebug group. We will post there.

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Davis W. Frank

Standup 07/22/2008

Davis W. Frank
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Interesting Things

  • New Relic is presenting at our Tech Talk this week. Expect good information about using their real-time performance monitoring tool on your Rails projects.
  • Pivotal Tracker, our home-grown Agile project management site, should get even more beta tonight. Users should be able to create their own projects! Check it out.
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