Most bizarre bug hunt this month!

Posted by andy

Today I spent about an hour hunting down the cause of some bizarre behavior in one of our new Rails projects. The action in question handles both GET/POST. In the GET part I do an XMLRPC call to an external system to generate some hash value and store it in the session. This data is then shown on screen and further interaction with the customer is done through Ajax. The content on screen however did not match the value stored in the customer’s session. It turns out the application received two or sometimes three GET request in short succession! However, the browser (Firefox) would only display data from the very first GET request. Where were these other ghostly GET’s coming from??!! They came from this piece of HTML in the default layout template:

<link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="" />


So Firefox (and any other browsers?) will call the current request path of your application for elements with empty hrefs. I think this is proper behavior from the browser, but it might cause some really nasty side effects in your application!! Suffice it to say, the dude responsible for this template will be punished sever…oh crap, that was me too!

2 months with a Mac

Posted by andy

About 2 months ago I switched from a Dell laptop running Ubuntu to a Macbook Pro running OS X. The transition went relatively smooth. My motivations for switching to a Mac were threefold;
  1. Trying something new
  2. Bang for the buck
  3. As a fulltime Rails developer it’s probably a competetive disadvantage to not be on OS X :)

After years of running Linux exclusively it’s quite refreshing to see how things work on the other side of the fence. Very good job on the GUI! I think that’s really the strongest point of OS X, the programming API is enabling and Apple did a wonderful job with Xcode. I would imagine it’s much less painful to write against Cocoa than it is to the Gnome API, anyone with experience in both? The nextgen graphics arch for Linux must still emerge (XGL/AIGLX/EXA/Glucosee/etc?) and hopefully everyone will look beyond the silly wobbly windows RSN! There are a couple of things I do really miss from the Linux Dell experience:

  • Debian/Ubuntu repositories. I’m using Fink but it doesn’t even come close to the cohesion of the Linux repositories;
  • If you want OSS stuff to work, it’s better to compile it yourself on OS X, this can be a real time waster if you’re used to just apt-get installing stuff, see first point
  • Audio/Video support, strange as it may sound, Linux is much better at playing out media than OS X IMHO. Playing Quicktime movies in fullscreen actually costs money! Digital content creation is another thing though;
  • Picasa, iPhoto really really sucks, c’mon Google, port!
  • High resolution laptop LCD, I went from 1920×1200 to 1440×900, ouch!

These do make it up:
  • OS X’s GUI, excellent!
  • Multimonitor support, plug & play!
  • Sleep/Hibernate works flawlessly
  • Dual Link-DVI support!
Some commercial apps I really love:
  • TextMate
  • Parallels
  • Keynote
  • OmniGraffle Professional
Unmissable OSS apps:
  • Firefox 2.0 (Aqua)
  • Thunderbird
  • NeoOffice Aqua
  • Adium
  • X-Chat Aqua
  • Gizmo Project
  • Fugu
  • Chicken Of The VNC
  • pgAdmin III
  • Azureus
  • Audacity
  • SSHKeychain
Conclusion: I’ll definitely be sticking with OS X as a development platform for now. Next year we’ll see what the other laptop vendors have to offer, Apple’s offering is the one the beat IMO!

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