Interesting

• Ruby MRI seems to have taken a step back in time, a dangerous, but useful feature (to some) is the goto statement.

• It appears that DateTime object has some issues with doing math.

  DateTime.now - 1.hour #raises TypeError
  DateTime.now - 3600   #works as expected
  1.hour.class          #Fixnum
  

• Reading the CSS property background-position in Chrome returns an invalid value. Don't rely on it.

• Github was hacked! They had a security issue that was a result of attr_accessible being uses incorrectly. Remember to authorize your SSH keys.
• Need help with cron? Use http://cronwtf.github.com to convert cron into friendly English.
• &&, ||, and ! vs. and, or, and not. It is highly recommended to always use the strict logical operators (&&, ||, and !) because the keywords (and, or, and not) don't have the same operator precedence.
• When evaluating variables in strings with bash, its better to use ${var} than $var. The curly-brace allows you to evaluate a variable with copy behind it. For example, ${var}asdf and $varasdf evaluate differently because of the expected variable name.

Help

• Rails <3.1 has some gotchyas when using :inverse_of option.

  class Note < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :contacts, inverse_of: :note
  end
  
  
  class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :note, touch: true #for triggering the note observer when the contact is updated
  end
  
  
  class NotObserver
    def after_touch(note)
      note.contacts # does not have the new attributes updated unless you specify the :inverse_of
    end
  end
  
  
  # Somewhere in the code...
  contact.update_attributes....
  

• When table names are not namespaced on a class. What is the best way to work with this if we want table names to be namespaced?

  class Foo::Bar < ActiveRecord::Base
  end
  
  
  > Foo::Bar.table_name == "bars"
  true
  

Interesting

• When using validates on an association, remember for uniqueness validations to use the associated attribute.

  validates :foo, :uniqueness => true
  

  Should be

  validates :foo_id, :uniqueness => true
  

• You can get a quick an easy git blame with a string, rather than a line number.

  git log --pretty=oneline -S'some string'

Help

• What is the advantage of using scope over a class method?

  scope :new, order(:id)
  

  or

  def self.new
    order(:id)
  end
  

  Some Pivots seem to think that scope doesn't add the default scope in some cases (a bug?). It appears that class methods are the preferred way moving forward in Rails.

Events

• Tuesday brown bag was a series of Youtube videos of Alan Key speaking about programming.
• Thursday UX Book Club is meeting to discuss Steve Jobs book.

Interesting

• Trying to load Ruby 1.9.3 with RVM on OSX Lion and having problems? Adam has found a solution here.

Events

• Simple made easy was the tech talk (video) today. The implications being what is easy might not be the best for your code maintenance.

Interesting

• Git 1.7.8 is out!
• We have a new gong in the office!
• When using Timecop.timetravel in your tests, make sure that you use before setting up your test data. Otherwise the data could potentially be created before that time existed!
• git whatchanged gives you a normal git log with a list of changed files.

Help

• Rails console history is crazy! On opening a new session, and pressing up for history, random data appears from history, many eons ago. Two files are written to with each rails command -> irb_history and irb-history. Any idea what's going? Some people think that it might the interaction with wirble.

Interesting

• If you are trying to get REE on Lion make sure that you have GCC 4.2 or higher. Learn more.
• If you are still using a mouse with scroll wheel in Lion, disable the middle click annoyance with Mission Control.

Help

• Donate for Movember we are team 'Pivots NY'. We grow facial hair for Man Cancer Awareness Month.

Interesting

• Heroku has released Scheduler. Their replacement functionally for cron, which allows you to schedule processes to be run (limited to a 10 minute interval).

Events

• Monday - Raise Cache @ 7pm
• Wednesday - node.js meetup @ 6:30pm
• Wednesday - Machine Learning study group @ 7pm

Interesting

• Cucumber has better support for within selectors. You can actually chain withins together for more precise selection. The selectors for within are looked up in the selector.rb file. Then I should see "Hello" within the header within the page
• Over the weekend Heroku Cedar was having trouble with deployments. Every deployment got the "gray" screen of death. It appears that they were having issues.

Help

How do I test a custom will_paginate renderer?

If using RSpec, test the custom render in a helper spec by using helper.will_paginate and the options you need to test your rendering settings.

When testing with Devise, my custom Devise views are not loading in the specs, instead Devise's default views are. Why?

Interesting Things

• When using Devise in integration test, users were logged in when they shouldn't have been. The culprit was that in the integration test there was before block that logged a user in and in the same scope a pending test. The logged in user was never officially logged in, so later in the test suite a view that did not require login had a logged in user. Be careful how you log in users and clean your session!

Help

"Does Postgres have an equivalent MySql Myisam high write performance?"

A Pivot was wondering what settings in Postgres can be enabled for high performance INSERTs (willing to sacrafice SELECT performance on said table).

"Why is Paperclip giving a Stream close error when in development?"

When using Paperclip in development, any file upload results in a Stream IOError. Trying to replicate the problem with Paperclip on its own causes no problems, so it appears to be a conflicting library.

Interesting Things

• An update to yesterday's Rubymine font size issue. The file drawer can not be specifically updated, but the overall system font can be under Preferences > Appearance > Fontsize. Make sure to restart Rubymine.
• Google Voice has been added as a service on to GMail. Make phone calls for free to anywhere in the US from your browser.
• An update to yesterday's Safari 'Back' button issue. Safari caches the previous ajax call (dubbed ajax zombie) when going back to a previous page. The fix had to do with changing Rails default "Cache-control" header to be "no-store".

Help

"How does Mobile Safari handle the back button?"

When pressing the back button in Mobile Safari can cause the access to the DOM to be lost. It appears to happen because of resources of "forward" facing pages taking over the cache.

"How to set the font size on RubyMine project (file) drawer?"

With the increasing size of resolution on monitors, some of are experiencing the small font issue. Is there a setting to control the RubyMine project browser?

Interesting Things

• Updating ImageMagick from 6.6.1 to 6.6.3 fixes a bug with color palette when trying to resize images using Paperclip.
• Rails 3 RC2 has dropped fixing many bugs and this much closer to the final release. The Rails team would like to find any blockers specifically in Bundler and ARel.