Interesting Things

• Rails reminder: flash[:notice] = "Good Job" will survive a redirect, while flash.now[:notice] = "Good Job" will not. In general, flash.now is used when you render a template without a redirect, such as when a form submit has validation errors.
• Good Books: Several folks have recommended JavaScript: The Good Parts.
• Pro bono: Would anyone like to help out KUSF for free? Their new website project has been stalled for a year.

Ask for Help

"How do you get Selenium to work with Firefox 3?"

If you know how, pull the jar files out of a later release and use those. Good luck!

Interesting Things

• Engine Yard has made some changes to their ssh-key setup:

  ...any non-approved keys will be removed from the root user's authorized_keys file. It should be noted that customers should not log in directly as root but rather should log in as their user and use sudo for any commands that need super user privilege. If you are currently using the root user to log in and have your key in roots authorized_keys file it will be removed when this change is made.

  If you are having any ssh problems, contact them.

• One team discovered a jaw-dropping issue with has_many :through. Given the following:

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :user_photos
    has_many :photos, :through => :user_photos
  

  • a_user.photos.create will create and persist both a Photo object and the UserPhoto join object
  • photo = a_user.photos.build followed by photo.save will create and persist the Photo object only, and will not persist an appropriate UserPhoto join object.

• Rails 2.2: Test::Unit::TestCase extentions have been removed from Rails Core and are now in ActiveSupport::TestCase. As stated in the Groups Thread about this, use ActiveSupport::TestCase instead of Test::Unit::TestCase in test/test_helper.rb.

Interesting Things

• We recently updated Pivotal Tracker's extensive JSUnit test suite to be compatible with the Google Chrome browser. Check out the extensive Notes on Google Chrome Compatiblity post by Pivot Chad.

• ActiveScaffold + Rails 2.2 = BOOM. ActiveScaffold will work with Rails 2.1 if you get the version from github. Read about it.

• Rails 2.2 + Rspec 1.11 = FAIL

Interesting Things

• Teaser: Selenium for Flash! We've developed a Selenium-like framework for Flash. It's pre-alpha, and needs to be extracted from it's current home inside a project. Are you interested in a Selenium-like framework for Flash, or have you written one yourself? Let us know!

• STI-weirdness. Rails surprise of the day: given a query of a has_many :photos where Photos has STI subclasses (got that?) Rails will build a SQL query that includes the subclass types of Photo, which you might not want:

  foo.photos.find_by_type("Photo") 
  # query will have "... WHERE type IN ('Photo', 'OriginalPhoto', 'ThumbnailPhoto')"
  

• It appears that the retardase_inhibitor might not work with Rails 2.1.X due to fixes in ActionMailer.

• JetBrains has been hard at work: they have released both a new Ruby plugin for IntelliJ, and a ruby-specific IDE (based on IntelliJ) named RubyMine.

• Check out Pivot Jonathan's wife's art exhibit at Artist-Xchange Gallery in San Francisco, Friday 11/7 from 7-10pm:

  
  3169 16th Street
  San Francisco
  CA 94103
  

Ask for Help

"I want to create a custom launcher for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 with different profiles. Perhaps the real question is how do we create a custom version of a Mac application launcher, passing in the arguments we need?"

... without having to invoke it on the command line every time.

"We're trying to delete cookies in our Controller, but they keep appearing in the headers anyway."

Suggestion: make sure you are specifying your URL paths and domains correctly.

"Why won't our CSS and other assets load the first time when accessing an SSL-protected domain on Engine Yard?"

It's most likely not Engine Yard or Firefox 3's fault. More research needed.

Interesting Things

• It's election day! If you are taking the time to read this geeky blog, you better have voted!

Ask for Help

"Is there some order-dependency issue with `has_many_polymorphs?"

We have a test that passes in isolation, but fails when the whole file is run.

"Any advice to setting up Lucine to allow us to search for strings with special characters, such as '-', without having to wrap them in quotes?"

We have some Lucine knowledge here but feel free to give us your suggestions as well.

Interesting Things

• We discovered why a Flash widget was reloading itself: changes the CSS position value. We were hiding the Flash widget by moving it's containing div off the page with position: absolute; left: -9000, and removing the class that had those values to show it again. It turns out that changing that position value causes the Flash to reload. By keeping the position:absolute setting when we both show and hide our container div, the Flash no longer reloads.

Ask for Help

"When using Rails's date_select helper, is there a corresponding helper method to turn that date format into a Date object in the controller?"

Some Snippets are available, but how about a Rails built-in solution?

• Where am I? -- Ever need to find the name of the method you are currently within? Here's a this_method method! The magic is in the REGEX, of course.

module Kernel
  private
  def this_method
    caller[0] =~ /`([^']*)'/ and $1
  end
end

• One project wanted to test a very ActiveRecord-specific Module in an isolated, generic way. After spending time researching techniques of mocking and stubbing the many, many ActiveRecord methods that would be touched, they decided to just dynamically create an ActiveRecord and a DB Table for it on the fly! They even used single table inheritance (STI)

  describe "MyMagicModule Mixin" do
    before(:all) do
      ActiveRecord::Base.connection.create_table "some_base_models",
                                                   :force => true do |t|
        t.string   "name"
        t.string   "type"
        t.integer  "some_model_b_id", :limit => 11
      end
    end

    after(:all) do
      ActiveRecord::Base.connection.drop_table "some_base_models"
    end


    class SomeBaseModel < ActiveRecord::Base;end

    class SomeModelA < SomeBaseModel
      include MyMagicModule

      belongs_to: :some_model_b
    end

    class SomeModelB < SomeBaseModel
      include MyMagicModule
    end

    it 'should use special belongs_to stuff from MyMagicModule' do
       model_a = SomeModelA.create!(
                        :name=> "Model A",
                        :some_model_be => SomeModelB.create!(:name => "Model B"))
       # test the functionality from MyMagicModule
    end
  end

Ask For Help

Once again, a project is asking for everyone's favorite IE 6 .PNG alpha transparency fixes -- more rounded corners! Examples include the CSS Behavior code, using .PNGs or .GIFs with on/off transparency, regulating IE 6 to the square Web 1.0 world, and even using on/off transparency and just knocking a pixel or two off of corners for a "good enough" rounded look.

What are your favorite IE 6 rounded-corner and/or alpha-transparency fixes?

Interesting Things

One client decided that Web 2.0-style rounded corners are only needed in Firefox and Webkit-based browsers because they are "free" with CSS properties built in for those rendering engines: -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius. Internet Explorer is going to be left in the 1.0 world, at least for now, due to the over head of managing rounded corners.

Feel free to promote your personal favorite rounded corner techniques in the comments.