Interesting Things

• If your wanting better out-of-the-box error messaging you can use one or both of the following plugins:
  • active_record_full_messages_should_be_nicer
  • validates_associated_displaying_associated_errors

If you choose to use both however ORDER DOES MATTER (use the order specified above) otherwise the validates_associated one just doesn't seem to work.

• Hash Iterations is very expensive (this includes my_hash.keys and my_hash.to_a etc...). We think this is related to the way hashes are stored in large, sparsely populated hashtables. If you can, avoid iterating over a hash, and if you must, try using a SequencedHash (which is provided by the collections gem) which solves this by storing hashes as both traditional hashtables and arrays, allowing for fast random access (the hashtable) as well as fast iteration (the array).

Ask for Help

"We want to load a different set of libraries for our selenium test than our regular tests. We tried to create a 'selenium' environment and pass that to the rake:test task but that didn't work, anyone know why?"

You cannot run in non 'test' environment with the rake tasks as the 'test' environment is hard coded into the test task, and passing a different RAILS_ENV seems to only have the effect of telling the 'test' environment what database to base it's schema off of.

Proposed work around - pass a second environment variable e.g. selenium=true and switch on that. (it's not ideal so we are still open to better solutions)

Help

• Edward was wondering if anyone had any experience using XMPP4R or the XMPP protocol in general.

Interesting

• Brown bag today has changed from RR to Lightning Talks. Anyone can present. The focus will be on interesting technology used on the various projects.

Interesting

• Brown bag for tomorrow 04/26/2008 will be Brians Double framework called RR, speakers will be anyone using the framework

Help

• Steve was having problems getting rspec to run in Intelli-J Idea using some key combo including F10, it was suggested that he use Alt-F11 which runs ruby on the currently focused file.

Interesting

• Nick Kallen's has_finder has been integrated into the rails trunk as named_scope, and will be available in the rails 2.1 release
• Safari 3.1 implemented getElementsByClassname which breaks prototype's version. Courtenay has suggestions for a fix
• Voting today for this weeks brown bag should know by tomorrow
• Brown bag on Dtrace scheduled for 04/02/2008 with guest speaker Brian Cantrill
• Brown bag on Merb scheduled for 04/09/2008 with guest speaker Yahuda Katz
• Daemon, Brian, Nathan S., and Cory will be onsite with the client M-Th for the next 4 weeks
• Intelli-J Idea 7.0.3 is available. You will need to update the ruby plugin (some people had trouble installing the plugin but most have had no problems) unsure about the entire new feture set but Edward noted that YAML files have syntax highlighting.