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.