So I had mentioned that I had encountered difficulties with Rails 2.1 partial updates and I was suspicious of it being related to a plugin. Turns out the flextimes plugin was causing partial updates to not work as well as other subtle errors. The plugin was employed simply to enable a 12-hour with am/pm timeselect and selecttime functions. It had worked fine for a long period of time and only really caused problems with partial updates. However, once I started putting more tests into place I found other problems leading me to believe that flextimes probably broke functionality under Rails 2.0, The problem with unmaintained plugins is that they may continue to do their task but create seemingly unrelated problems elsewhere in the code.

I know there are other cheatsheets out there but I want one that’s close to home. I find myself needing to look up strftime parameters quite often in my Rails development work. Particularly difficult is remembering the different forms for the same time item. Anyway, here is a list formatted for my usage.

I’ve been reading through the launchpad bugs for Xen and thought that I could use them to illustrate some tips and tricks for using Xen in Ubuntu or Debian. I ran into some problems with Xen today on a system after having been upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04 and from Xen 3.1 to Xen 3.2. This should help as a checklist when diagnosing various Xen problems.