Interesting:

• bundle install --without test excludes the test group in your Gemfile from the install. It works well for reducing the size of your Heroku slug. However, there's a glitch with this option on Heroku -- when you specify it, Heroku reinstalls every included gem every time you deploy. It does respect your Gemfile.lock, so you're trading a smaller slug for a longer deploy.

• Pivotal's open source CIMonitor project now supports OpenID! Thanks Tyler and Josh.

• Arel has a bug that makes it difficult to use in rails console. Every time you add a predicate, the number of internal objects in the Arel result increases exponentially. So, by the time you have 5 or 6 predicates, the console finishes generating the expression more or less instantly, and then spends 15+ minutes calling to_s on the resulting Arel object in order to display it to you. tl;dr: when you're playing with Arel in rails console, end every line with ; nil to avoid having it print out the result. The exponential object explosion will be fixed in Rails 3.1.

Is it possible in Jasmine to spy on a getter such as myObject[key]? We want to know when local storage is accessed.

No. Jasmine's spyOn only works with functions, and in JavaScript getters are not implemented as functions.

Local storage has a functionally equivalent getValue function, which you can spy on, but the spy is not triggered when you access the value via [].

Interesting:

• On unicorn, the random number generator is seeded before the fork. So if you are depending on a set of unicorns to generate different random numbers, you need to reseed the random number generator manually after the fork.

• If you want to make absolutely sure you aren't generating any queries in your Rails views, try no_querying_views - which explodes if your query comes from view code.

• Other ways to track down inefficient queries that folks have successfully used: bullet and query_reviewer

• Skype 5 beta is out for Mac, which allows group video chat. Everyone must be on the beta for it to work.

Help:

Do people put bundler in the Gemfile?

Yes. Bundler is smart enough to omit it from the cache. It does, however, still follow the rules for version. We recommend using ~> 1.0.0 as the version string, because 1.x is supposed to be backwards-compatible with the current Gemfile format.

If you instead use = 1.0.0 and your managed hosting environment updates bundler to something more recent, things will ASPLODE.

Interesting:

• Tech talk that was going to be today has moved to Thursday, due mostly to noise concerns. See you tomorrow.

Help:

We made a branch in git called "--track" by accident, and now we can't get rid of it. git thinks it's a command-line argument, even when it's in quotes.

Here's the command what did it:

$ git checkout -b --track origin/actual_branch_name
Branch --track set up to track remote branch refs/remotes/origin/actual_branch_name.
Switched to a new branch "--track"

Consensus: kill it through RubyMine or gitX. There is also a way through the command line:

$ git branch -d -- --track

...but make sure you get the dashes in all the right places.

Interesting:

• reset after tail - sometimes, if your PS1 has colors (or square brackets, or ... ?) you can lose your Terminal after tailing a file. To get it back, type reset, which should work even if you can't see it echoing. You may need an extra return before it.

• The Giants seem to have won! There's a parade tomorrow, right in front of the office. If you're coming for the tech talk, leave extra time as streets will be closed and they're expecting a crowd.