You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2008.
Had the great fun of setting up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, since my sweetie is in the process of joining me in Rails-land.
- Github Pricing - Looks like they plan to begin charging for private repos on a sliding scale.
- gibak 0.3.0 (backup tool using Git): OSX support, extended attributes, bugfixes - Yup, you can use git to keep backups of your stuff.
- Moving on from centralised-decentralised development, or: what’s after github and gitorious? - Some folks are starting to worry that we’re repeating centralized version control in the Ruby community using a theoretically decentralized tool
- Wireshark 1.0 Released - An actual mature open source project. Amazing.(It’s a pretty decent network protocol analyzer, in case you didn’t already know).
- Top 100 Rails Sites - As measured by Alexa data, so take the list with a grain of salt.
I find that I’m not in any particular hurry to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.
- Deploying Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard - Another article from the Apple Developer Connection.
- MySQL Workbench - Visual database design tool for MySQL, including the ability to reverse-engineer a schema to a diagram. Alas, Windows/.NET only at the moment.
- StrokeDB - Embeddable distributable document database written in Ruby.
- Exciting Times in Rails Land - A rundown on what’s coming in 2.1.
- Rails CHM Documentation - Another version of the docs for 2.0.2 in downloadable form.
And now I get to become an instant Liquid expert. I’ve got the greatest clients.
- Managing Required Gems on Rails Projects - Check out the comments, too. Turns out there are a whole bunch of solutions. I must investigate.
- Cyndicate 1.2 - The web site isn’t updated yet, but version 1.2 is out. This continues to be my newsreader of choice for the Mac.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #13 - Git script/plugin install, has_one :through - And other changes to edge Rails.
- markItUp! Universal markup editor - jQuery plugin to convert any texarea to a markup editor, in a variety of formats.
- Rapid Rails part 1: Command-line Mastery - A variety of tips to make your more productive in Rails-land.
- ADS Mantis Hosting - New alternative for managed Rails hosting.
Three major projects in the air at one time is close to my limit. Doing a lot of juggling these days. But it’s fun!
- Is Windows a First-Class Platform for Ruby?- Peter Cooper asks the question. The answers bring out the best and worst of the Ruby community.
- Introducing Whistler - Whitelist markup filter that works in merb (or elsewhere).
- Become an Xcoder, Leopard Edition - Free ebook I could have used a while ago.
- Managing SEO-Friendly HTML Titles with Rails - A small discussion of the ways to do this.
- Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails for Apache) Preview - Rails deployment on Apache will become a good deal easier when this ships. Right now you can watch a demo movie.
Deployment day today…I’d better get back to this CSS.
- Things (in the Rails World) You Don’t Yet Understand - Interesting exercise: what do you know you could comprehend, want to learn more about, but haven’t found time for yet? Mine would include the ins and outs of deployment and server stacks (even though I’ve done it), Test/Unit (I skipped right to RSpec, which is hurting me on a project right now), and ActiveMerchant (which I need to implement real soon).
- The Language Question - Jay Fields considers some of the reasons (other than technical superiority) why devs pick a particular language to specialize in. In my case, the move to Ruby was, of course, driven by my desire to abandon Microsoft and my perception of where the markets were.
This week I appear to be finally getting enough CSS into my brain to use it without thrashing. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.
- DRY(a): Year After Year- Tiny Rails plugin to handle updating the current year in views.
- Rails Migrations in git Branches - Tool to handle renumbering and merging.
It’s shaping up to be another busy week. Can’t complain about that.
- Safari 3.1 Breaks Your App - Apparently the new Safari doesn’t play nice with Prototype. Here’s a workaround.
- DownThemAll! - Firefox add-on that came in very handy the other day when I needed to grab all the images from a page redesign. If you use Images, View Image Information from the Web Dev toolbar you can build a page that has URLs for everything including CSS background images.
- Absolute Moron’s Guide to Forms in Rails, Part I - From the Softies on Rails guys.
- RailsMan - Rails application management utility for OS X, aiming to replace the now-discontinued Locomotive.
If there’s a really good crosstab query solution for Rails, I wasn’t able to find it yesterday.
- Customizing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard - Another bit of evangelism from Apple.
- How to Export Data as CSV - From Rails, that is. Proves to be trivially easy.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #12 - More incremental progress is coming our way.
All of a sudden my plate is very full again. But good full: interesting projects, friendly clients. So I’m not complaining.
- Our Most Fulfilling Web Service Yet - Amazon continues to expose more of its underlying business via web services. I’ll bet we see this one wrapped for Rails pretty quickly.
- Big Name Companies Using Ruby on Rails - While this sort of list is nice to crow about (how many times have you seen “our software is in use by 450 of the Fortune 500″?), it’s ultimately uninformative unless you know what “using” means. A huge company has lots of corners where a single Rails project can sneak in without meaning jack about corporate acceptance.
- Google Visualization API - It’s a good day for big companies to be opening access to useful code. There are some neat ways to display data available here with relatively low pain.
Remember, if you declare yourself to be an expert, most people will believe you. Of course, then you might have to actually deliver some time.
- Ebb 0.1.0 - This alternative lightweight web server has moved over to git and bumped up a version.
- For attaching files, use Paperclip - A new alternative to file_upload and the like.
Ran into my first git problem last night - fixable, but annoying. I think I haven’t found the right workflow for use with this system yet.
- Gitnub - OS X client for browsing git repositories.
- Everybody Meet Lovd, Lovd Meet Everybody - Open source scaffolding for social network sites, written in Rails.
- Eclipse Announces New Runtime Initiative around Equinox - For the love of God, Montressor, do we really need another runtime?
- Generate Ruby on Rails CHM Documentation - Notes on how to do it, together with a handy pre-built 2.0.2 CHM so you don’t have to go messing around on Windows yourself. Yeah, the real developers use an API site online. I find local searchability trumps that for usability.
- UUIDtools - Gem to generate GUIDs and UUIDs in Ruby. I found this one via Using UUID/GUID as Primary Key in Rails (though that’s not what I need to do with UUIDs at the moment).
Back to my regularly scheduled program of Rails work today.
- Open Source Licensing: Obsolete or Of Importance? - A good run-down of some of the current issues from RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady.
- Rails Search Benchmarks - Evan Weaver compares sphinx, ferret, and solr. Sphinx comes out ahead. I’ve not had a chance to use sphinx (the one client I have doing massive search refuses to look at it due to a perception of missing features), but I think I’ll be trying it for an app I’m starting to work on.
- Ruby on Rails: the Duplo Generation - Matt Aimonetti complains about developers who just use a ton of plugins to create things, complain without giving back, and don’t understand the Rails internals. I think I disagree; much as I try to avoid mindless reuse in my own applications, I think that enabling this sort of easy development by less-talented or less-committed developers is a necessary part of building a popular platform. Of course, it’s clear that some core Rails folks don’t want Rails to be a popular platform.
- can_flag plugin sees the light of day - Support from Courtenay to allow users to flag objectionable content from other users.
Tomorrow I give my first set of conference talks in a while…3 hours on beginning LSL. Virtually.
- Attributes in the migration generator - A Rails 2.0 change I’d missed until just recently, but which comes in very handy.
- rsync 3.0.0 - Major version bump released this month. Timely for me, as I need to get an rsync server set up.
The problem with social networks is that they force you to be social :)
- Microsoft Activities for Firefox - New Version - Didn’t take the open source community long to clone that feature.
- Integrating Scribd with your Rails application - Ben Curtis has some details.
- RadRails 1.0 - This open source IDE (now integrated with Aptana) has reached release. Looks pretty nice. Peter Cooper from Ruby Inside likes it.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #11 - Summary of another week in development land.
- QGit - Replacement for gitk built on Qt.
I really don’t like being in a situation where I don’t know whether the tests are bad or the code is bad.
- Use attr_protected or we will hack you - How to tighten up security on your user models.
- A three finger salute to git - Combining the latest “swipe” gestures on Mac touchpads with git commands.
- iPhone SDK Bug Filing - Rogue Amoeba appears to be leading the charge to make the iPhone a more open system. Good luck with that.
- SVN Externals are Evil; Use Piston or Braid - Why you don’t want to keep your plugins in your repo as externals.
- Braid - Like piston, but can handle SVN or git repos.
Having fun ramping up to a higher level of RSpec use, though it still makes my brain hurt sometimes.
- Firefox 3 Beta 4 - Just in time for me to hope that it fixes some CPU-spiking issues I was having recently with beta 3. Release notes are here.
Today is going to include code in Cocoa, Ruby, and LSL. I hope my brain can keep them sorted out.
- Komodo IDE 4.3 - ActiveState’s IDE now includes unit testing integration. I’m still happy with TextMate, but if I was going to switch to an IDE, this is the one I’ve liked best so far.
- TextMate Tip: HTML Tags - Chris Kaukis at ADS has been doing a series of these. So far they’ve been useful.
- UNA - New tool for real-time long-distance collaborative software development, combining a multi-user IDE and chat with a client-server backbone. Looks interesting.
- Low Pro: Unobtrusive Scripting For Prototype - I knew this was out there, but I just had to hunt up a copy for a plugin that wanted it. More to learn…
- TMail 1.2.2 - The mail handler used by Rails is now compatible with Ruby 1.9, and the documentation has been improved to boot.
- Delta Indexing Support in Ultrasphinx - More progress on the Rails full-text index front.
- Automatic Asset Minimization and Packaging with Rails 2.0.x - A good idea from Dave Troy, with implementation.
It’s safe to say that I’m not looking for more work at this point. When it rains, it pours.
- SCO: Will the Fat Lady Ever Sing? - Now that I’m writing for OStatic, I had a chance to get my own kicks in on the rotting corpse of SCO.
- iPhone Dev Center - Even though I have no concrete ideas, yesterday’s announcements made me interested in iPhone programming. Probably the effect of the reality distortion field combined with the $100 million number. But hey, I did just learn XCode and Cocoa.
Sick kids at least mean I can get to work a bit early. Because, of course, they got me up in the middle of the night.
- Merb-0.9.1 Developer release - The API is stabilizing, they say.
- RVG and SVuGy: create vector graphic with Ruby - Not that I actually know anything about SVG, but this looks potentially useful.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #10 - Looks like it’s been another quiet week out at the edge.
- Mac GNU Privacy Guard - I just needed to install GPG. This turned out to be the easy way. And GPGMail was also very useful.
- rscribd gem - Library for the Scribd API.
Today I need to buckle down and churn out some code.
- Tutorial: Publishing RubyGems with Hoe - I had occasion to look at Hoe last night. This was a good starter.
- OStatic - New open source news site from GigaOm. Looks like I’ll be doing some writing there.
Looks like my dance card may be filling up nicely again. Still, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to chat about work. I can always squeeze in a few more hours somewhere.
- attribute_fu - Plugin to make building multi-model forms in Rails a bit easier. I could have used this a while ago. (via Tim Haines)
- Ebb - Yet another web server alternative for Rails apps, this one written in C for higher performance. (via Ruby Inside)
- Compiling Ruby, RubyGems and Rails on Ubuntu - I’ve had to install this stack a few times, and there’s always been a certain amount of thrashing involved. Here’s some guidance from the FiveRuns guys.
- Ascribe - a Case Study on View Specs - I’ve shied away from testing views, but here’s some evidence that such testing is a Good Thing.
- How to use github and submit a patch - Another run down on the sexy new source code control system.
Another weekend of slinging Rails code - but I made the deadline.
- Gemedit - Gem to make it easy to edit the source code of other gems. Useful for learning.
- Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard - Very basic article from the Apple Developer folks, but it does show how to use XCode for Rails development if you don’t have another preferred project editor.
- Howto use the Ext JS Treeview (Ext.tree) with Ruby on Rails - And with lazy loading, to boot.
- jQuery plugin: Treeview - Plugin for the jQuery JavaScript framework. Useful to me, since I just had to implement a treeview in a Rails project that was already using jQuery.
