You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2007.
The end of the month is always such a nice time for consultants. I get to send out monthly bills.
- Webrat - Ruby Acceptance Testing for Web applications - version 0.1.0 released! : Testing via the DOM. Looks interesting & useful.
- 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer - Well, the author of this post certainly wouldn’t hire me - and I don’t think I’d want to work for him. But then, I never could answer most of those “100 essential trivia questions your next .NET developer must know the answer to” and that never seemed to hurt my success in that field either. Actually having experience and being able to make clients happy is worth more than arbitrary sets of requirements, in my non-humble opinion.
- Testing in Rails: Part 4 - Unit Testing in Rails - Next part of an ongoing beginners’ series from Null is Love.
Trying to write some LSL after writing only Rails (well, Rails and nothing at all) for a couple of months was…difficult. Apparently my brain doesn’t like to hold more than one programming language in reserve at one time.
- Rails 2.0: Release Candidate 2 - Which should put us within a week or two of Rails 2.0 final.
- sanitize_params - Whitelist-style plugin to make sure ill-mannered users do not inject junk into the parameters of your Rails views on their way back.
Now that I’m getting settled in, working in the suburbs is much the same as working in the boondocks - except I can actually see when the mail gets delivered.
- Thomas Fuchs consulting - The mind behind script.aculo.us is available for hire. His new personal site will give you some previews of what’s coming in the next version of script.aculo.us, too.
- Better Rails Migrations: Retroactive Migrations - Allows management of merged migrations from multiple developers, as well as dropping or reloading individual migrations without unwinding the entire migration stack.
The sites I’ve been working on in Rails are slowly going live. Not sure whether this means I’m going to have more free hours after next month, but I’m always on the lookout for new opportunities. Meanwhile, a few more links.
- Free Rails PDF: Only 3 Days To Go! - The PDF of Patrick Lenz’s intro Rails book is worth grabbing if you haven’t already.
- How to turn your rails site into an OAuth Provider - This looks like an area in flux but it’s coming along.
- RSS feed being reset every time I edit something - Well, someone else is having the same issue with Mephisto’s RSS that I am. Not that that helps solve the problem.
I actually spent much of the weekend writing Rails code (along with a bit of LSL code). It feels good to be back in the saddle again.
- Running gem_server on Leopard - Making up for Apple’s oversight when you want local documentation.
- ANN: Spraypaint - yet another tagging library for rails - In case the other tagging plugins don’t quite float your boat.
It’s the Thanksgiving holiday here. With luck that will mean fewer interruptions than usual, and I can actually get some work done.
- RubyWorks Production Stack on Amazon EC2 - Capistrano recipes for getting up and running quickly on your shiny new EC2 instance.
- AddonUpdateSecurity - The first major annoyance I’ve hit in Firefox 3. With their newly-tightened security, you cannot install an extension that isn’t hosted securely (like, say, BugMeNot). I understand the arguments for this, but just like version compatibility issues, I think you ought to be able to set a key to shoot yourself in the foot if you want.
The big open source event yesterday was the release of Firefox 3 beta 1. I’m soaking in it right now, and so far it’s working stably for me (no opinion yet on whether it’s any improvement on the RAM front), so let’s start with a few related links.
- Firefox 3 Beta 1 Release Notes - With a link to the download page.
- How to have Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 running at the same time - Useful if you don’t want to gamble too much. If you’re on a Mac remember to put the package in a folder somewhere so you don’t overwrite your Firefox 2 install.
- Extension Versioning, Update and Compatibility - This page at the Mozilla Development Center has the details on the configuration setting (type about:config in the address bar to get there) that you can make to turn off extension version checking entirely. If you turn it off, you can install any add-on you want to Firefox 3, whether it’s been updated or not. Don’t blame me if you break something.
- Nightly Tester Tools - If you do an upgrade and your add-ons stop working, you can install the Nightly Tester Tools to get a button in the extensions dialog that will re-enable them.
- Assembla - Another online workspace for your development team, with Subversion, Trac, and unlimited team size at their free level.
Oops, comments here were broken yesterday. My fault: I hadn’t gotten DNS resolution set up properly on the server hosting this blog, so it was biting its own tail and dying when trying to contact Akismet. Ah, those wacky networks.
- Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial - Not new, but something I need to look into, since I’m involved with one project that may be switching from solr to Ferret for full-text indexing and searching.
- Code Spaces - Project hosting, issue tracking, Subversion hosting, on-the-fly backups. Free for 2 users and 1 project, pay plans as you want to host more there.
- Wuby - Self-contained Ruby web server and lightweight application framework. (via Ruby Inside)
I’m back!
Yes, well, it took somewhat longer to get moved and get a new, decent, Internet connection installed than I had planned. And then there was a long while spent getting the darned router configured correctly; I’m still not 100% happy (I prefer not to have to do port forwarding if I can help it), but I’ll live. This site probably isn’t visible to everyone yet, due to DNS propagation delays, but at least some of you lucky (?) folks can see it now.
Anyhow, I’m still here, though “here” has changed to Newburgh, Indiana (just east of Evansville). And I’m still making my living off of non-Microsoft computer alternatives, primarily Ruby on Rails development. Now that I have this soapbox again, I’ll go back to keeping track of useful links.
- Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano - This one came in handy for me last night, as I had to deploy past a firewall that is now enforcing just such a requirement on me (at least, I haven’t yet figured out how to get the internal NAT‘ted addresses to see the external port-forwarded address for the Subversion server). Remember to require /lib/tasks/patch_capistrano.rb in your deployment recipe if you use this. Or you could just upgrade to Capistrano 2.0, but I haven’t had time to climb that hill yet.
- Sinatra: Classy web-development dressed in a DSL - Yet another quick way to bang together those web applications.
