Help!

• Instance variables in Selenium? We're setting up a User model instance in a setup method. We want to use that User instance in our test, naturally. But when we get into the test, the User instance has no methods on it. It's a standard Test::Unit Selenium test. Any ideas?
• hoe/rake/rspec dependencies and CI? The following combination will break CI. The issue is that RSpec 1.1.11 depends on Hoe 1.8.2 and Hoe 1.8.2 requires Rake 0.8.3, which will break our CI environment. RubyGems may also need to get upgraded to get this combination to work. Sounds like a bit of work...
• Uploaded file encodings? We're getting truncated content when uploading files encoded with ISO-8859-1 Windows. Any ideas why this is happening? Can we check the encoding when the file is uploaded?
• Clock.now with a time zone in a named scope in the TEST Rails environment does not use the MockClock class (which lets us manipulate time in our tests). Why isn't it being used?
• Demo environment DNS propagation & Apache configuration. The expected demo URL isn't working. It sounds like Ops just recently set the name in DNS so it's probably still getting propagated around.

Interesting Things

• Apparently Treetop does not let you assume equality in the usual Ruby ways. Just something to look out for.
• Last night we hosted a panel in conjunction with our partners Venture Archetypes called Project Startup. It's a regular panel we've been hosting for a while now. It happens roughly every 2 months.

Interesting Things

• Libxml has been giving us some more strange behavior on Linux. If you do

parser = XML::Parser.new
parser.string = '<foo></foo>'
document = parser.parse

# Now watch me fail, but only on Linux!
parser.string = '<bar></bar>'
document = parser.parse

• We're hosting a MagLev tech talk today compliments of Martin McClure.

• Joseph Palermo has won the annual Pivotal Labs Mustache Competition. Granted, he was the only entry. But don't let that affect your admiration of his work. Photo to follow.

Ask for Help

• "Help! We've been Rick Rolled!"

Interesting Things

• If you want to run your Selenium tests in parallel, it looks like ThoughtWorks has released Selenium Grid.
• When testing Live Query, you don't always want the event queue to be processed asynchronously, so we've submitted a patch that will allow a triggered event to return synchronously instead. The patch has not been integrated into Live Query yet.
• Git - lets investigate where or when we can spike on this using a small internal project.

Interesting Things

• Rails is gradually moving to git. Should we? There's a brown bag today about git from a guest speaker. We'll talk about it then.

• port install bash-completion

• plus your custom completion configuration
• plus your alias

• equals

  work proj[TAB]

• mod_proxy_html - if you're hoping to get this to work, you may have to worry about INFLATEing the html response coming from the server you're proxying to before being able to parse the html and change its urls. We ended up using SetOutputFilter INFLATE;proxy-html;DEFLATE to pass the html through the Apache2 proxy instance correctly.