Autotest is a great idea. When it worked for me, I loved it. But I hardly ever used it. Our complicated codebase choked on it - something to do with accounts as subdomains or double-loading of test_helper when running the test suite or some such. Frankly, I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the multiple two-hour wild goose chases to try to get the lovely software to work for me. Unfortunately I wasn’t up to the task.

New Rails handles a lot of timezone stuff for you. Set the appropriate time zone for the request and get an object from the DB, it’s created_at date will be translated from UTC to the request’s time zone.

When writing tests, it is often desirable to bend time to test limits and edges of the day. It is especially useful to warp time to test results across the timezones of the world. Manipulating time is also useful to assure a day of the week, month or year every time the test runs.

Rails apps love flash messages. Little notes providing information, confirmation or warnings to the user. Typically implemented in a partial like so:

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<div class='flair'>
<a href="http://www.windycityrails.org">
<img src="http://m.windycityrails.org/images/windycityrails_125.gif" width="125" height="125" alt="WindyCityRails - September 20, 2008 - I'm attending!" style="border:none;" />

Four years baby. Soon the blog will be toting a lunch pail and school bag, off to decades of education. Next thing I know, my little baby will be married and have little blogs of its own. Blog, you grow up so fast!

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<div class="flair">
  <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3039/2328731162_c8f837d78a_m.jpg" width="240" height="144" alt="Post St." /><br />
  <div class="text-backing">&nbsp;</div>
  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/axis/">Terry Bain</a></div>

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<div class="flair">
  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/96/225360722_8ef2a43077_m.jpg" width="240" height="160" alt="Hay Rake Third Version" /><br />
  <div class="text-backing"> </div>
  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbat/">JBAT</a></div>

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<div class="flair">
  <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2032/2541589315_d20f683b6c_m_d.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Baked NYC" /><br />
  <div class="text-backing">&nbsp;</div>
  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterhellberg/">Peter Hellberg</a></div>

Just wanted to drop a note in my blog, here, that I will be attending RailsConf from Friday through Sunday. If any lurkers out there are gonna be in attendance, do drop me a note. Let’s meet each other!

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/45/139177165_e3855c6686_m_d.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Dung repository" /><br />
  <div class="text-backing">&nbsp;</div>
  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/cheesygarlicboy/">Chambo25</a></div>

Last week, the fellas at Iridesco and I put together a fun little Internet clock for your time-telling needs. It’s officially online and ready to give you the time of day in a world-conscious way.

When testing Ruby on Rails, every so often you’ll find that rake fails in testing while running a test directly succeeds. How frustrating!

The crux of the problem is typically a missing fixture in the test class. What happens is that the data from your missing fixture is loaded in the test database, masking the problem when running a test individually. Since the order of operations on a rake test is clearly different than running a test singularly, there is a good chance that the data your test depends on simply is not loaded during the rake process. Unless you add that missing fixture, of course.