You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2008.
And a new month dawns…I might actually have some spare hours this month if anyone is looking for them.
- Exif jpeg header manipulation tool - This one came in handy for me last night when I had to nuke the metadata out of a bunch of photos.
- 37signals and the pain of the below-the-fold button - Yes, the web is not an excuse for bad UI. Well, it shouldn’t be.
- Architecture Astonauts Take Over - Joel Spolsky makes some of the criticism of Live Mesh that I might have gone with if I’d bothered to waste any space on it.
Spending a good deal of time playing SQL monkey, recovering stuff out of a soon-to-be-legacy database. At least it’s some variety.
- Git Internals PDF - The latest from PeepCode.
- Webistrano 1.3 - New release of this web-based tool for managing Capistrano deployments.
- Free Open Source Projects in Lighthouse - Just in case you needed a reason to track your project’s bugs there.
- Creating More with Less Effort Using Ruby on Rails - A List Apart discovers Rails.
Bother. A pesky bug I thought I had swatted has resurfaced in another guise.
- Juggernaut - Push data plugin for Rails. Looks interesting, though I have no current use for it.
It was a productive weekend; I got a major feature shipped for one of the sites I work on. Now back to the regular workweek.
- Pitfalls in RESTful “wizards” - dealing with page-caching fun in Rails.
- Nightly Tester Tools 2.01 - I don’t think I could live on edge Firefox without this. The ability to selectively recover tabs from the previous session is a winner.
- Stage 0.3.1 - Code generator for Rails and Merb using the presenter pattern.
- Prototip - Flexible tooltips for Prototype/Scriptaculous.
- Scripteka - Library of extensions for Prototype.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #18 - It’s been a quiet week.
- Making Compact Forms More Accessible - Easiest way I found to get hints in textareas that vanish when users start typing.
- The Apple “i” - Nice sendup of the prototypical Apple keynote.
- Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls - Probably more Ruby VM gossip than you really need.
And just like that I’m back to having plenty to do. The life of a consultant is never predictable for long.
- Keep Google Happy: SEO for Online Stores - What to do and how to check it.
- Migrate from Jira or Trac to Lighthouse - In case you want to move your issue tracking to the new popular home in the Rails world.
- CruiseControl.rb 1.3.0 - A release with a few improvements. Git support is planned for the next release.
- Hey Rails, Nice Rack! - Ezra Zygmuntowicz is hacking on Rails to give it Rack support. This would be a big win for various deployment scenarios.
My initial reaction to Live Mesh is that it’s just another attempt to co-opt the web with a proprietary Microsoft platform, no different conceptually than the original MSN/”Blackbird” (which failed, as you may or may not recall). Perhaps I’ll change my mind later.
- TMTOOLS plugin - For those who want to do some low-level TextMate hacking.
- RubyAMP TextMate Bundle - Adds another grep implementation, better completion, hooks into tail and firing up servers, and other goodies for Rails & Merb developers.
- New in Rails: ActiveResource Timeouts and why it matters - Protect yourself from the vagaries of other peoples’ servers.
- Today - Tiny event & task manager that synchronizes with iCal.
- What’s up in Ruby? - Dedicated search engine based on Ruby community RSS feeds.
- Software as a Service Rails Kit - New bootstrapper that gets you up and running quickly with ActiveMerchant, SSL, multiple levels of accounts - all the stuff under your typical Web 2.0 app. $249 base price.
- Better messages for ActiveRecord validation errors - A tiny bit of fit and finish work for your Rails app.
The latest nightly of Firefox 3 is working much better for me than Beta 5 - at the cost of losing Firebug. That’s a mixed blessing at best.
- Rapid Rails Part 3 - Desktop Mastery - A medley of useful tips.
- Slapp: A simple wall chat Merb tutorial - Get up and running with the Merb framework. (via Ruby Inside)
- Active Shipping: Plugin that gives a unified API for retrieving ship costs.
I spent a bit of time playing with Google App Engine over the weekend. One thing that hasn’t been widely reported is that it’s trivial to set up a folder to serve files statically. This means, I think, that App Engine might make a good asset host for Rails apps looking for distributed storage.
- First class vendor/gems - A variant approach to storing the required gems with a Rails project.
- Hobo 0.7.5 Released - Better documentation and other goodies.
- CapGun - Email notifications for Capistrano deployments.
- Deferred requests with merb, ebb, and thin - Fine-tuning the deployment stack.
- Radiant CMS 0.6.5 “Chisel” Release - Lots of action in this Rails CMS project. Another thing I need to dig into someday.
- Symbols Are Not Pretty Strings - Josh Susser says we’re all using too many symbols.
- Preview Releases: Net::SSH, Net::SSH::Multi - With news that a new Capistrano release is coming soon.
- ERb Syntax highlighting in gedit - I don’t expect to be hacking Rails on Linux again soon, but if you do this could come in handy.
- ActsAsOptions - Plugin to simplify generating option lists for <select> tags.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #17 - A fairly quiet week for Rails development.
Up early with an earthquake. Just like when I was a kid.
- May We Help You? - Amazon is getting more serious about support levels for AWS.
- QuickBooks Integration Plugin - For Rails. I have a project that will need this eventually.
Today it’s back to the CSS mines for me. Seem to be lots of folks wanting work in that area lately.
- Freezing Rails with Git - Using git submodules. I’m probably going to have to learn this sooner rather than later.
- MacUpdate Parallels Bundle - Interesting to me not because I want Parallels (so far both my Macs are 100% Microsoft-free, and I intend to keep them that way), but for some of the other packages.
- Introducing Mingle 2.0 - Major rev of the commercial agile management tool from Thoughtworks.
Today I need to sort out deployment issues on a couple of sites, I think.
- Boxcar Conductor - Rails Deployment Made Easy - This stuff makes me wish I could afford to host sites at Boxcar.
- TDD With Rails - Slides from a recent talk.
Rolled out big new features on two jobs last night. I wonder what the chance is of the clients not finding any major changes they want made?
- Storage Space, the Final Frontier - Amazon is getting ready to add persistent storage volumes to S3. I think they’re still safely ahead of Google AppEngine as far as being a useful cloud computing platform goes.
- Open Source Rails - Budding gallery for, well, open source Rails applications.
- Grep in Project Command for TextMate - I need to take a look at this; I’m getting fed up with the sloth of TextMate’s built-in full-project search.
Well, I know a good deal more about cron than I did yesterday. Which isn’t actually saying much.
- textmate-missingdrawer - UI tweak for TextMate. Doesn’t float my boat, but some folks will like it.
- LearningRails - A Rails course in the form of free podcasts and screencasts for beginners.
- Phusion Passenger - a.k.a. mod_rails for Apache. Now available in beta form.
- Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview - Good info on what’s coming down the pike. (via Riding Rails)
- Mack Framework - Yes, it’s yetanother Ruby web framework. (via Ruby Inside)
- Crappy Graphs - An online generator, just in case you need one.
- Psystar OpenMac - White box Mac clone & a lawsuit waiting to happen (via Gadgetopia)
- Living on the Edge of Rails #16 (Github edition) - The latest from Edge Rails development.
Making code while the sun shines.
- RDoc 2.0.0 - It’s out.
- Avoid Variable Collisions in Rails Controllers - Just a reminder that using some magic words for instance variables can cause you grief.
- Rails or Merb, What’s Best for You? - Discussion, with some quick benchmarks.
- Absolute Moron’s Guide to Forms in Rails, Part 5 - In this installment, listboxes.
Next up on the learning curve: ActiveMerchant.
- ShellShadow - Collaborative terminal client based on Putty that works with their web site to allow two people to share a shell session. Windows-only client, though.
- AppEngine World - “One-stop resource for Google AppEngine”.
- Ruby’s Not Ready - Another Ruby/Rails vs. Python/Pylons comparison. Ruby loses. Expect rebuttals to continue this endless cycle.
Another day, another site deployed.
- Setting up CruiseControl.rb with/for Git Based Projects - The git mania continues to wash over the Rails world.
- Pastie Packer - Tool to transmit entire groups of files via Pasties.
- Git for RubyForge Accounts - Dr. Nic explores.
- Merb Tips II - More pointers from Matt Aimonetti.
Looks like I am solely a Rails developer now; I’ve reached the point with SL’s continued problems that I no longer want to invest time there. Makes me antsy to have all my eggs in one basket, so I’ll have to think about what’s next.
- Absolute Moron’s Guide to Forms in Rails, Part 3 and Part 4 - More info from the Softies on Rails guys.
- How to Build ohcount on Leopard - Fun tool for coming up with loc counts. Not that they mean much.
- Welcome to the New hobocentral.net - Relaunch (or at least facelift) for the Hobo project.
- Morph eXchange - New approach to SAAS deployment for Rails developers.
- RailsConf 2008 Schedule - Some fun-looking sessions, but I won’t be there. Can’t justify the time or cost this year.
After writing about it most of the weekend, I may actually understand how Liquid templates work now.
- Fleximage - Another rails image uploading and management plugin.
- RailsBrain - AJAXified version of the Rails help, including Edge Rails. You can download a prebuilt Fluid app to use it on your Mac from Rails Jedi.
- Merb Tips I - A medley.
- Rails Diagramming Stencil for Omnigraffle - In case you’d like to draw your own pretty ERDs.
- Living on the Edge (of Rails) #14 and #15 - More news from the front.
A word to the wise: getaddrinfo failures during rake db:migrate do not necessarily indicate trouble with mysql. In my case, it was caused by a missing SMTP server.
- Git TextMate Bundle - A batch of Rails developers will be wanting this soon.
- The Web Development Clients’ 10 Commandments - Amusing.
- Branchable migrations - A new take at handling migrations when multiple developers are on a Rails project.
- BannerZest - Tool for making Flash navigation banners for web sites. Looks useful. (via MacApper)
- Custom Forms Validation Without ActiveRecord - Using the validatable plugin.
Still mired in HTML/CSS design across multiple sites. But still billable, so I don’t mind learning new tricks.
- Acts as ASP.NET (a Ruby on Rails Plugin) - I missed this yesterday, but it’s still amusing.
- Static Pages for the Enterprise - There’s been some discussion lately of how to best serve those little mostly-static pages that any Rails site needs.
- Scalr - Scaleable Web Sites with EC2 - It’s getting ever-easier to set up a server farm using Amazon as your backend, complete with load-balancing and automatic launching of new instances.
- IBM to Host Private Second Life Regions - This may explain in part why Linden Lab doesn’t seem to care much about keeping regular customers happy lately. Other fish to fry.
- Rails is Moving from SVN to Git - The URL for the git repo actually leaked yesterday, but it’s not actually active yet. Soon, though.
- Git Magic - This looks like a useful tutorial.
Setting up a Rails server hasn’t gotten any easier since the last time I did it. Bah.
- Data Visualization with Ruby and RMagick - Where Are Those Bikes ? - Nice little mashup including the Google Maps static API.
- Seed - a seed data/fuzzing plugin - Generate random but realistic data to bulk out your Rails app database for testing or demos.
- Absolute Moron’s Guide to Forms in Rails, Part 2 - More tutorial from the Softies on Rails.
- Cobol on Cogs - I think this was the only thing I actually laughed at yesterday.
