I’m getting more and more follows from “Twitter Whores”. Generally I can tell they’re spam follows before I even click on the link because they’re username will be something like Username1975. Anyway, this is a completely useless post, but on the up-side it’s good to know that Twitter is taking action and suspending their accounts.

While upgrading our Rails app to version 2.3.2 I ran into a painful bug when running our unit tests. Previously, we defined ActionMailer instance variables to be used in our views like this:

@body["name"] = user.name
@body["feedback"] = feedback
@body["when"] = Time.now

I had to refactor this to use a hash as the ActionMailer documentation suggests:

body {:name => user.name, :feedback => feedback, :when => Time.now}

It turns out this doesn’t work and generates an error. So I removed the hash and did the following:

body :name => user.name, :feedback => feedback, :when => Time.now

Now all is well. It cost me an hour of my day and hopefully it will cost you much less now that you’re informed. If you can share any information why the hash doesn’t work then please feel free to share. Thanks!