Interesting Things

• There's a new release of Backbone - 0.9.0. It's billed as a release candidate for 1.0, and seems to be a bit buggy, as RCs can be. However, it's exciting to see that Backbone is getting close to that milestone.
• You should default boolean fields to true or false, at the database layer. Otherwise your queries have to deal with three-valued logic.
• Rails 3.2 has some unexpected behavior. First, the generated form ids have changed ... what used to be id=user_new is now id=new_user. Second, if your routes file is missing an entry, you will no longer get errors in controller tests. If you liked that behavior, try out request specs.

Ask for Help

• "Anyone seen problems with the latest REE and iconv?"

Everything works on the Linux machines, but on Macs, there's an error about an unrecognized target encoding. Iconv works on the command line, so it's something about REE.

Interesting Things

• A few people have had problems with a change to named scope in Rails 2.3.3. The gist of the change is that if you chain named scopes, one of which uses a lambda that executes queries with the same model class, those queries are evaluated with the scope built up by the chain, not the default scope of the model. with_exclusive_scope may get around this, but could lose the default scope (or break things like acts_as_paranoid).

• Rails 2.3.3 + Passenger fails with certain system configurations. Rails 2.3.3 does not bundle Rack, although 2.3.2 did. This may also be the cause of Mongrel failures someone noticed with script/server.