Double Shot #103

No doubt there is some tool to make the data cleanup I spent yesterday afternoon doing easier, but if it's the sort of thing that only needs doing once in a while, straight SQL queries are as easy as anything else. At some point it's not worth learning one more tool for occasional use.

• Instant Rails - Drop-in and run install for Windows with Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL. Looked like it was taking a dirt nap but a new project admin is in place and it's moving again.


• BackgroundFu - Another way to run Rails-launched tasks in the background.


• Fluid - Wrap up web applications as faux desktop apps for OS X Leopard.

Double Shot #102

I spent a bit of time yesterday poking around for alternatives to looking at RDoc-generated documentation with the stock RDoc templates in a web browser, which I find terribly ugly and unintuitively organized.

• The RDoc Dashboard Widget - This would be exactly what I'm looking for, except that it's a dashboard widget. I find the enforced context switching of OS X dashboard widgets terribly offputting.


• Allison - An alternative HTML template for RDoc. At least it's prettier than that stock abomination.

Double Shot #101

I sent out pretty much the last round of advertising invoices for the Larkware site yesterday. That site is winding down fast.

• Heroku - Create a Rails site online, edit it in the browser, in fact go through the whole development cycle without touching anything other than a browser. In limited beta. Looks interesting.


• BackgrounDRb - Ruby job server and scheduler, intended for running long-running tasks in Rails without bollixing up your application's responsiveness. Now at the 1.0-pre-release stage.


• Merb - Bookmarking the Merb framework site for my own use, since it looks like I may end up involved in a Merb-backed project soon enough.


• DataMapper - Ruby-based ORM which, among other things, works with Merb.


• Engines Plugin - Now updated for Rails 2.0.


• Safari AdBlock - Simple new ad-blocker for Safari. I looked at switching from Firefox to Safari on my Mac the other day, but for the number of tabs I run with (typically 40-50) Safari gobbles up just as much RAM, takes nearly as much CPU, and loses out completely on customizability. So poo on it.


• Rails 2.0 - a feature a day - Chu Yeow promises to dig into some of the more obscure changes in the new version.


• Free Online Ruby Programming Course - Online, instructor-led course starting in January. If you're new to Ruby and learn better with company, this looks like a good bet.

Double Shot #100

Wow, 100 of these. I guess that's some indication that I'm sticking with this non-Microsoft universe. In fact, I'll be completely shutting down my .NET-oriented blog at the end of the year, as I've transitioned all of my work life over to other things.

• Pulse - Configuration manager for Eclipse-based products, now available for the Mac.


• Dynamic System Modeling in Second Life - Jeff Barr used Second Life to build a 3D animated representation of a complex Amazon Web Services system. I think there's a lot of promise to this approach for architectural discussions.


• Testing in Rails: Part 5 - Unit Testing ActiveRecord Models - Part of the ongoing series from Null is Love.


• Installing RMagick on Leopard - I just had a good long wrestle with this, complicated by a stale MacPorts install of ImageMagick. This is the article that finally sorted out all the bits for me.


• Advanced Rails Recipes Now in Beta - Now that Rails 2.0 is out, here's some good reading to go with it.


• Rails 2.0 Final Released! - Summary of Features - Ryan links to a whole mess of articles he's written about the new stuff.

Double Shot #99

Now that I'm back to writing Rails code daily, it's all starting to make sense to me. Well, almost. Just in time for a new version!

• Rails 2.0 - it’s landed - Looks like a release announcement is imminent.


• Redirecting nginx to Tomcat. - Somehow I hope never to have to do this. Most of the Rails deployment stack is still a black art to me, even though I've managed to set it up successfully a few times. A failing, I know.


• MacSanta - A dangerous site to watch if you have a relatively new Mac and like utilities. 20% discounts on different vendors' software every day until Christmas. They have an RSS feed too.


• SVNMate - Subversion integration directly in the TextMate file tree. (via Softies on Rails)