Rails - Jan 2006 - Changing scaffold''s text_field to a password_field causes white screen of death in mozilla?

I had posted earlier about ''silent failure of a controller'',
what seemed to
be an intractable problem where I was getting failure of a particular action
in a controller while others worked. What was irritating was that there were
no useful messages. Nothing to the browser, nothing in logs, and even the
breakpoints wouldn''t hit. Finally by a process of elemination I found
that
the culprit was a password_field which I had put in place of a scaffold
generated text_field...actually a text_area since I was going to use Sentry
to encrypt it...so I had made the field in the db a ''text''
type. WHen I ran
unit test on the controller I would get a message like .."expected a
redirect_to but found <200>", Obviously this is why the browser
blanks out.

Can some one explain to me this behaviour? This happened to me on 3 seperate
machines (work, home and laptop)  which I use for development (all running
Debian Sarge).

While on the subject I would much appreciate if some one can clarify for me
the difference between
FormHelper<http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormHelper.html>and
the
FormTagHelper<http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormTagHelper.html>.
Ihave read the docs a few times as well as the Agile book, and may be I am
just to tired, it does not make sense to me. It seems like both require me
to provide names and values and both behave much the same way!?

Thanks in advance,

bakki kudva
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