Pivotal Blabs

Interesting Things

• In response to our ask for help, Ray Baxter answered us in code with a script called Firefoxen. "It’s a script to automatically configure multiple installations of Firefox so that they open with different profiles." You can grab Firefoxen on GitHub. Thanks Ray!

• IE7 sends odd Accept headers (*.* instead of an explicit text/html) which can cause undesired behavior in Rails. Someone suggested manually setting the format in a before_filter:

  params[:format] ||= 'text/html'

  This was discouraged because it can cause problems elsewhere. A better solution was to put the html format at the top of any `respond_to` blocks:

  def show
    respond_to.html # run by default when type cannot be determined
    respond_to.js
  end
  

• The Ruby MySQL Gem version 2.7 leaks memory for very large queries. The solution is to remove the 2.7 gem and manually install version 2.8 from source. This library is no longer a gem and must be installed from the mysql-ruby-2.8 tarball.

Ask for Help

"As a followup to Firefox SSL certificate problems..."

It turns out that our server running nginx had an old version of OpenSSL installed. Upgrading OpenSSL solved the problem.

Interesting

• There was war story told involving software that's not generally available. However, one tidbit that may be of general interest is a reminder that you don't necessarily get a perfect copy of your mysql database when restoring from a dump of that database. Mysqldump by default writes the data of each table preceded by a DROP TABLE IF EXISTS and a CREATE TABLE statement. This covers you in most situations, but misses when new tables have been created since the dump was made -- those new tables are not deleted. They may not cause problems, but some systems are sensitive to the existence of those tables, such as rails and the schema_info and schema_migrations tables.

Ask for Help

• question: Is merb hosting different from rails hosting?
  • answer: no