Subversion Monitoring Service

Found this one via Mike Clark's article on Piston. Subtlety takes the URL of a public Subversion repository and creates an RSS feed of changes for you, so you can monitor what's going on with that project. A sweet way to have one less place on the net that you have to visit, and one more piece of information in your own hands whenever you want it.

More on Piston

Mike Clark has a good writeup at Managing Plugins with Piston . So far I'm liking what little I've done with Piston myself. Indeed, I may even find some use for it in my Windows corporate life.

Now That I’m Using Mephisto…

It's nice to see this Mephisto Theme Gallery (via HappyCodr)

Another Database Manager

Lightning Admin for Postgresql and MySQL gives you a tabbed workspace for two of the major open source databases. Looks interesting, and $19.99 is a reasonable price, but I'm trying not to install any more Windows-only applications these days.

It’s Always Something

This morning I had to hunt down Copying a MySQL Database From One Machine to Another in the course of moving a Rails app from a development server to a production server, as I didn't feel like re-entering a bunch of data (and I hadn't used data migrations to put the data in the database in the first place).

This just goes to remind me of two things about this career transition:

1. There are a zillion things that I know how to do in the Microsoft universe (like copying databases from one server to another) that I need to relearn as I move sideways to a world of other software. This is a cost above and beyond whatever I spend on new hardware and software and directly learning my new core competency.


2. Fortunately, it's all out on the net somewhere, and I'm darned good at hunting things down quickly.