Double Shot #169

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.

Double Shot #168

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.

Double Shot #167

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).

Double Shot #166

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.

Double Shot #165

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.