You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
So Microsoft has put out a hostile (and high) bid for Yahoo! For me, that means it’s time to start making a list of new services to boycott. Flickr, del.icio.us, and Messenger would all inconvenience me somewhat to dump, but not so much that I want to get sucked back into the Microsoft fold.
- Better Reporting with Sparklines - Introduction from topfunky. I’ve got a site that would probably benefit from this, though I’m not sure the client would agree
- ActiveMerchant 1.3 released - Just in time for the PDF that just went by.
- Segregated page cache storage - Some discussion of tweaking Rails’ page caching, kicked off by Josh Susser. Read the comments too.
- Get ready for the TextMate “Trundle to Rails 2.0 Bundle” - Dr. Nic takes over maintenance.
We now have Rails apps being developed on two developer desktops in this household - another small victory for the forces of light.
- Super-fast bulk data imports in Rails with ar-extensions - There’s a gem out there to make for quicker batches if you’re faced with this problem.
The joy of independence: trying to nail down an elusive contract. There might be room in my dance card coming up in the future if you’re interested in talking.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #5 - better eager loading and more - This series continues to be the best way to keep up with developments in Edge Rails without actually installing the software yourself.
- Beanstalk - Hosted Subversion system with hooks to FogBugz, Basecamp, and Campfire. Been around for a bit but just now crossed my radar.
- ActiveMerchant PDF - The latest print publication from PeepCode, covering e-commerce in Rails.
- RailsConf ‘08: Registration is open! - Sure enough, it is.
Yesterday was going swimmingly until the 3-hour power failure. Felt like I was back in the sticks again.
- Rails REST 101 meets Rails 2.0 - If you learned REST with Rails 1.2, here’s an update.
- RailsConf ‘07 keynotes on video - Just in time for RailsConf ‘08 tickets to go on sale. It was fun once, but I’ve got better things to spend the money on this year.
- Creating bubble tooltips….. - Another design technique to spiff up your Rails applications.
I’m hoping some renewed energy and inspiration comes out of somewhere today, because I sure didn’t have any this weekend.
- Merb Supports rSpec Text Stories - Merb is reaching a tipping point very quickly, I think.
- The Maria engine is released - A new plug-in storage engine for MySQL.
- MultiRails 0.0.5 - A way to test your Rails code in multiple versions of Rails. Most useful to plugin authors, I think.
- Simpler than dirt: RESTful Dynamic CSS - Technique for having CSS that depends on the details of the current model instance. Check out the comments for some other alternatives.
- Write Only Ruby - Jay Fields takes DRY to its logical and absurd conclusion.
Woke up this morning to emails from two different clients, both promising to ship over spec for more Rails work today. I think I’ve made it.
- Upgrading to Rails 2.0. A Recipe - A quick look at the major steps involved in upgrading an existing application.
- One Hundred, Two Hosts, Three Engines - Looks like there may soon be a new Rails blog engine in town.
- E-TextEditor Cheat Sheet for Ruby on Rails - For those of you still on the dark side.
- Easy Integration: From XML to the Datastore Without the Mess - Using XML::Mapping to get arbitrary XML into Rails. This worked out nicely for me yesterday.
I fear I have code that is best written to use regular expressions. Hopefully this is not one of those “now you have two problems” cases.
- Testing in Rails: Part 8 - Validations - More from the continuing series over at Null is Love.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #4 - faster routes, easier form partials - The latest news from the cutting edge.
- Prototype 1.6.0.2 cheat sheet - Some day I’m going to learn Prototype. No, really.
- Feeds for Free - How to get Atom feeds with hAtom decoration and a bit of shim software.
I wrote a whole 39 lines of code yesterday. I was proud of myself, till I realized about half of them weren’t the right lines of code. At least I didn’t ship them.
- Living on the Edge (of Rails) #3 - X-Sendfile and many other sexy enhancements - More news of what’s coming in Rails 2.1.
- chartpart - Type in data, caption, and so on, and get back the Google Chart API chart and URL.
- Bridging Rails to Amazon SimpleDB using ActiveResource - As I expected, folks are working on hooking up the latest Amazon offering to Rails.
- Merb Routing in 0.5 - Toolman Tim adds some documentation.
Having twice as much RAM means working for twice as long before Firefox memory leaks get out of hand.
- Commit, Recover & Transactions in Ruby - A quick look at Transaction::Simple.
- BleakHouse - Library for finding memory leaks in Rails and other Ruby applications.
- Ruby OAuth Gem - Now up to version 0.2.0, probably worth keeping an eye on.
Well, I was charging along on implementing the next feature, and then discovered that I may need to patch ActiveRecord. More fun looms.
- Merbful Authentication Update - More Merb activity to keep an eye on.
- Datebalks: a slimmer datebocks - JavaScript/DHTML code for nice date entry.
As I ease into the weekend I’m contemplating whether I can cram in a bit more work each day. I think not, but there is just so much new stuff to learn…
- Skitch - Fun little graphics and photo-sharing app for the Mac that’s just gone into public beta.
- Navicat 7.1.0 - My tool of choice for MySQL on OS X has just had another little version bump.
Having clients on the far side of the Atlantic means occasionally having to get up early to deal with an emergency. Ah well, that’s why I make the big bucks, right?
- Howto: Write a plugin - Brief outline for the aspiring Rails developer.
- vlad version 1.2.0 has been released! - Less-complex alternative to Capistrano for application deployment.
Yesterday one client sent the “final” list of items for a lookup table. This morning I woke up to find the “final and definitive” list in my email. I wonder what’s next?
- BuildingWebApps - New information portal largely focused on Rails development, with links from all over.
- On the Road to Merb 1.0 - Notes on the plans for a full release of Merb, with refactoring and documentation and stuff. More details here.
- 10 Alternative Ruby Web Frameworks - Rob Bazinert rounds up the suspects. Rails is not the only game in town.
There’s a fine line between doing what the client wants and explaining to them what you think they should want.
- Jungle Disk 1.50a - This is the release version with the “Jungle Disk Plus” functionality. I’m using Jungle Disk for my daily offsite backups and loving it.
- Instant Rails 2.0 Update, Instant Rails 2.0 Lite Coming… - A smaller footprint version is in the works for those with limited space.
- Starling - Twitter’s lightweight persistent queue server, now released as a gem. (via Marston Online)
- RubyStack 1.0 released, Catz and Matz rejoice! - The BitNami folks are now out with a wizard-driven Ruby/Rails/etc. installer for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Good to see; the BitNami installers I’ve used so far have been excellent.
- pgAdmin - This looks like the de facto standard PostgreSQL admin tool.
- PostgreSQL for Mac - I’m gearing up for some potential PostgreSQL-backed development, and this proved to be the easiest way to get it up and running on the Mac (I looked at MacPorts as well, but that was a pain in the butt). See also the notes here.
- Ultrasphinx Updates - Notes and links related to the Sphinx text search engine.
Whew, long weeks are good for billables but they make me ready for weekends. Oh, wait, I’m planning some work this weekend too.
- RSpec User Stories - The latest PeepCode screencast. I think I need to watch this one too.
- Run BASIC - On the other hand, I could just get back to my roots with this implementation of simple Liberty Basic as a web language.
Yesterday’s fun included fixing bugs on the fly on a live server. I’m ready for a quieter day today.
- Merb-0.5.0 is out. - And high on the list of things I need to take a look at soon - probably as soon as I get a paying project using it.
- List open ports on your machine (Mac OS X) - I’ve needed this more than once so it’s time to set a marker to it.
- Bento - There was a time I’d have snapped this up immediately; now I seem to be subsisting on the Mac quite well without a desktop database. Anyhow, it’s shipped.
Had a great deal of fun the last couple of days figuring out how to deploy a Rails site to a client’s client’s xserve.
- Testing in Rails: Part 7 - ActiveRecord Relationships - More from Null is Love.
- SiteUptime - Yet another online website monitoring service. There are too many of these darned things.
- Auto-populate socket value in rails database.yml using TextMate snippet - Dang, how much time did I waste trying to figure out which socket various mysql instances were running on before I found this?
I’ve managed to go through and update tags on all the past content on this site. Still haven’t gotten a handle on moving old comments over. Perhaps I never will.
- The Jolt Finalists - Always some fun stuff to be found in this list, though they cover so much breadth that I find I use very few of their nominees.
- Ruby In Steel Text Edition - Overview - Fresh $49 text editing/IDE solution for Ruby/Rails developers on Windows.
- Trace Modeler - If I was doing anything with UML, this cross-platform sequence diagram editor would be pretty neat. Fortunately for me, I’m not doing anything with UML.
As I expected, I’m really enjoying getting back several hours a day that I used to spend keeping up on .NET news.
- Skynet - Ruby implementation of Google’s Map/Reduce framework for distributing work across multiple computers. (via Anthony Eden)
- Thin - A new, and apparently faster, alternative to Mongrel for serving web sites. (via Ruby Inside)
- A Guide to Deploying Rails Applications - Setting up a Rails server isn’t really easy, but guides like this one are making it easier.
- Migrating from Test::Unit to RSpec - How to go from TDD to BDD in a few easy steps.
- Monitority - Another online web monitoring site.
I spent far too much of yesterday figuring out how to build ruby-filemagic on Leopard. Stuff like that is the dark side of open source.
- Monitority - One more online web-site uptime monitoring service
- TM Themes - All the TextMate themes you can shake a stick at. (via TUAW)
I don’t know whether anyone else is trying to do this, but I just wasted four hours of a perfectly good day getting this tiny piece to work right. To save you the time, here’s what (finally) worked for me:
- Install MacPorts
sudo port install file- Download ruby-filemagic-0.1.1.tar.gz
- Open a shell and unpack it somewhere reasonable.
sudo -(This prompts for your password rather than the root password)cdto the ruby-filemagic-0.1.1 folderARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" ruby extconf.rb --with-magic-dir=/opt/localmakemake install
Not so much to report this morning; I think I had more, but a Firefox 3 crash ate a bunch of open tabs when I wasn’t looking. Such is the life of beta software.
- Living on the Edge (of Rails) - the pilot - Chu Yeow provides a summary of what’s changed in Edge Rails lately. This will be useful.
Welcome to those of you who wandered over from the Daily Grind in the last few days…as always, the links here are to things I’m currently interested in. I’m not necessarily proselytizing.
- Mercurial - Yet another open source distributed source code management system. They’re sprouting.
- Java is becoming the new Cobol - If this InfoWorld headline were actually accurate, this would be a great time to learn Java. The folks left who can actually maintain large Cobol systems are pretty much guaranteed employment-for-life at the moment. What they really mean is “Java Isn’t Sexy Any More.”
- Rails is a Ghetto - Essay from Zed Shaw, probably best known to many as the author of Mongrel. He no doubt has some valid points here, but the presentation is so full of trash talk that it’s hard to take seriously. And yeah, Zed, you probably could wipe the floor with me in a fair fight. So what?
- Changes - Commercial visual diff-and-merge tool for OS X, now in beta. (via TUAW)
- Say hello to acts_as_family_tree - Like acts_as_tree, but with multiple parents per item.
- faker - This fake data generation ruby class now does Lorem Ipsum text.
