Interesting

• A Pivot noted a facepalm + headdesk moment when debugging an issue whose cause turned out to be related to two adjacent string literals being auto-concatenated by Ruby's parser.

  >> "foo" "bar"
  => "foobar"
  

In this case, a missing comma in a method call went undetected because of this language characteristic. Whether or not this follows the principle of least surprise is an exercise left up to the reader.

• Another pair warned that while this is valid syntax in Ruby 1.8.7 and beyond:

  define_method(:burninate) { |&block| block.call("burninating") }
  

.. in 1.8.6 you can't use a block as a parameter of a block.

• Another pair noted that exceptions with Sunspot can cause wider failures on a site than just those that touch Solr. The symptom on this project was that if Solr was inaccessible for any reason every page on the site would throw an error. Their fix was to use Sunspot's SessionProxy to wrap methods with some exception handling love.

• Lastly, GoRuCo -- the Gotham Ruby Conference -- will be held on May 22nd at Pace University's downtown campus. The roster of talks is up and registration is open for business.

Help

Does anybody have any good techniques for dealing with STDOUT/STDERR and exception handling when shelling out in Ruby on Windows?

Nobody did. Do you? Please share in the comments.

Interesting

A pair ran system updates on their Snow Leopard box which caused bunch of test failures in their project. Most of the failures were occurring around the parts of the application that used BigDecimal. After digging they found:

     >> BigDecimal.new("1.01").to_f
     => 1.1

Oops! Looks like Apple shipped Ruby 1.8.7 p173 with a recent update. p173 has a bug that some dude introduced into BigDecimal. The fix was to update to p174 which was released quickly after this was discovered.

While on the subject, BigDecimal is kind of a drag. Its #inspect output is inhumane and new'ing up BigDecimal objects requires an ugly call to its constructor. A Pivot recommended using the undocumented bigdecimal/util which adds a convenience method to Float for creating new BigDecimals:

    >> require 'bigdecimal/util'
    >> 3.14159265.to_d 
    => #<BigDecimal:10056bea8,'0.314159265E1',12(16)>

And a nickel's worth of free advice?

    >> BigDecimal.send :alias_method, :inspect, :to_s
    >> 98.6.to_d
    => 0.986E2

Unless you prefer:

    #<BigDecimal:101137c78,'0.986E2',8(8)>