Ken MayerKen Mayer
 [Standup][sf] 5/20/2011 DVORAK? I hardly knew her!
edit Posted by Ken Mayer on Friday May 20, 2011 at 11:55AM

Helps

"Can I use after_initialize to set up nested associations for use with Controller#new actions?"

Not recommended. It is better to write a custom #new_for_form method in your model that pre-populates your instance variables with the 1 or more nested objects. That way you can test drive it, too.

"DelayedJob YAML parser in Ruby 1.9 is having issues."

The compiled-in psych library has issues, use the tenderlove/psych gem instead. You have to use Bundler, however. Invoking require "psych" will use the compiled-in version.

"RubyMine is not honoring a DVORAK keyboard layout properly (it is mapping keyboard shortcuts to the QWERTY layout)"

Use a hardware dongle.

"Jenkins is trying to kill off Postgres?"

Does anyone have Jenkins CI working with Postgres? It seems that after a build is complete, some java deep down inside Hudson is trying to parse the process table, and it is choking on the Postgres entries. (Postgres re-writes ARGV[0] to display status info, you can't rely on it be the original command line.) It remains a mystery why Jenkins would even need this information.

"Is anyone using Chrome in CI? The windows are transparent"

Sounds pretty. Odd, but pretty.

Interesting

"brew info ... is your friend"

Can't remember how to start or stop a daemon under OS X? If you installed it via Homebrew you are in luck:

brew info <foo>

Will print out the original install instructions, including exact lines to pass to launchctl(1), etc.

"More 'special' keywords to avoid in your models: target and source"

ActiveRecord Polymorphic Associations use a method called target internally. If you have an attribute in your model / database, also called target, then strange things will happen.

"Paperclip's <model>.attachment.exists? is slow; it goes out to S3 (or whatever the store is)"

And it happens in strange places. Be warned. Or mock out your network calls.

Comments

  1. Mike Perham Mike Perham on May 20, 2011 at 04:05PM

    Regarding launchctl, you can also use my lunchy gem which turns this:

    launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/io.redis.redis-server.plist

    into this:

    lunchy start redis

    More info here:

    https://github.com/mperham/lunchy

  2. Peter Jaros Peter Jaros on May 22, 2011 at 08:05AM

    It is better to write a custom #new_for_form method in your model that pre-populates your instance variables with the 1 or more nested objects. That way you can test drive it, too.

    That's a great idea! Might I also suggest instead using a method #prepare_for_form which does that work and returns self? Then you can call:

    @post = Post.new.prepare_for_form

    or

    @post = @user.posts.build.prepare_for_form

    Also, sometimes which associations should be filled out is highly dependent on which form you're rendering. In that case, you may want to use a form-backing object:

    https://pivotallabs.com/users/jdean/blog/articles/1706-form-backing-objects-for-fun-and-profit