Another long day looms.

• Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past - Yeah. Almost. Getting better though. I've got two clients now concentrating on modern browsers, so feeling hopeful.
• List.js - JavaScript to search/sort/filter plain HTML lists.
• Beautiful Docs - Collection of links to well done developer documentation.
• Capybara, Cucumber, and How the Cookie Crumbles - This was helpful in sorting out a testing quandary this morning, though I'm not 100% happy with mocking the CookieJar.
• Rubular - You probably already know this Ruby regex tester. Now it's updated with a choice of ruby versions.
• The Wunderkit beta goes public - Welcome one and all! - New web/iPhone/Mac collaborative project and other stuff management app takes the wraps off.
• iBooks HTML Widget Boilerplate - If the license didn't turn you off, people are building authoring aids for iBooks now.
• CoffeeScript - Interactive reference for iBooks, $4.99. You can read it, or edit and run the examples.
• A Chat with Nick Quaranto About RubyGems.org Internals - Including some notes on how you can help out.

Software is cool. Health insurance is painful.

• Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0 - Looks like the new iteration of Twitter's UI framework is live.
• The Front Line - If I had any important content on Flickr I'd sure be backing it up elsewhere now. Firing your topline support is a bad sign.
• Compass/Rails Integration in v0.12 - A new gem offers tighter integration of the Compass CSS framework with Rails 2.3+, including the asset pipeline.
• A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB - With some detailed notes on the quirks of the API.
• "Can you solve this program for me on the whiteboard?" - Detailed demolition of interview-by-whiteboard, using a fun little analogy. Not that it'll convince anyone who interviews that way.
• psd.js: You Guessed It - A Photoshop Document Parser in CoffeeScript - Insane but interesting.
• Why Serenade? - Another JavaScript MVC framework hits the streets, with an attempt to return to the original definition of MVC.
• Initializr 2 - HTML5 responsive template generator.
• Zsh is your friend - I supposed some day I'll need to try zsh.

Time to move a few of these browser tabs from my desk to yours.

• CocoaPods - Like Bundler, but for Objective-C.
• Vim for Rails developers - "browse Ruby, RSpec and Rails docs quickly."
• Support Details - Quick sniffing of browser settings to help you troubleshoot customer issues.
• HTML5 Storage Wars - localStorage vs. IndexedDB vs. Web SQL - Summary: it's a mess.
• SQLCipher 2.0 Released - A 256-bit transparent encryption add-on for SQLite.
• Backbone.js 0.9.0 - Here's the changelog.
• I've finally decided that REST is Stupid - It'd be nice if this provoked some discussion. I tend to agree that some of Rails' conventions are senseless.
• Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting - Complete with some recommendations for low-cost hosting.
• DMARC.org - A new standard for more aggressive email authentication. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Mou - Markdown editor for web developers. Currently in free beta.
• The evil unit test - There are some good points in here about writing sensible tests, though overall it's a bit muddled.

Week of January 22-28, 2012

Not so much, really. There were still plenty of cleanup commits during the week, but new features slowed to a trickle.

• c8504b1b deletes ActiveSupport::TestCase#pending. We can all just use skip instead.
• 080bd83d introduces a create_join_table migration helper to easily create HABTM join tables. About time.

Looks like it's gonna be another busy week - not that the weekend was very quiet either.

• "middleware" violates English grammar rules - Amen to this. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one to find writing about "rack middlewares" to be borderline illiterate.
• It would be nice if you could avoid bundling 3rd party libraries - More fun from GitHub issues. There's a generational divide in Open Source between Rubyists and Linux maintainers.
• Patched ruby 1.9.3-p0 for 30% faster rails boot - Via installing a bunch of pull requests that core ruby team hasn't accepted. What's past the bleeding edge?
• End of Firefox Support for Windows 2000 - Alas, the build chain can't handle it any more.
• Using capybara as a javascript capable replacement for Mechanize - At some point I may have to stop waiting for a Mechanize update to do this and move over some of my own code.
• Testing File Downloads with Capybara and ChromeDriver - There's always some edge case that requires hair-tearing.
• Devise 2.0 released - With a bunch of cleaned up code removing compatibility with old versions. But the migration path is well-documented.
• Quixey - Search engine for Apps across a variety of platforms.
• The WHY of WAT - Just because you can explain JavaScript's quirks doesn't mean they make sense.
• Gemfury - Private Gem server hosted in the cloud.
• vim-jquery-doc - Vim plugin to let you quickly look up online jQuery help.
• IcedCoffeeScript - Fork of CoffeeScript that brings await/defer keywords for asynchronous coding. Remember folks, it's turtles all the way down.
• Jekyll-Bootstrap - No muss, no fuss blogging with Jekyll and GitHub Pages.
• hollywoodr - Serve annoying bullshit content to visitors to your web site from the MPAA and RIAA.
• axlsx - Ruby generator for Office Open XML spreadsheets including charts, images, and more. There's also an ActiveRecord mixin and a blog.
• thinreports - Report designer for Ruby with a GUI and a planned generator for Rails.
• Upcoming changes to the pg gem - If you've got some time for testing, here's an easy way to contribute to open source.
• Ruby Learning - A high-level roadmap to becoming a software developer, aimed at motivated students.

Oh dear, I missed putting one of these out last week. Well, I haven't stopped working on stuff, let's see what I can remember touching.

• RubyGems - Got myself added to the rubygems team on GitHub - that's kind of scary, really, as now I can break code for the entire community. Used my newfound power to fix some grammar and license issues. Also kicked off a thread on sorting out the RubyGems documentation.
• RubyGems Guides - Added some new content to the Resources page.
• Command Line Reporter - I proposed a new NullFormatter. Ultimately this pull request wasn't accepted, but it did inspire a similar feature.
• What's New in Edge Rails - This series of posts is still going strong, as you presumably know from reading this blog.
• Larkistrano - I've actually worked a bunch on this deployment gem, but not pushed most of the work publicly because I'm doing some severe rethinking of architecture. Hopefully will get something out next week. It is definitely not usable in its current form.
• shoulda-context - Fixed the documentation to match the code. Updated the copyright while I was in there.

So…nothing too spectacular, but doing my part. That's enough for me.

This week just shot by. Must mean I'm enjoying the new job.

• factual-ruby-driver - Gem to access data from Factual, which has various big datasets for your application's use.
• JRubyConf 2012 - Coming this May in Minneapolis.
• Tiny Letter - Possibly micro-email newsletters will be the next big thing.
• Testing Backbone.js Best Practices - Some of this will apply to other JavaScript frameworks as well.
• My five favorite "hidden" features in Rails 3.2 - More goodies!
• Dentaku - a calculator for Ruby - Parse and evaluate Excel-like formulas right in your Ruby code.
• Isolator - Focus on any one app on your Mac.

Past the midweek hump, hooray.

• DocumentUp - Formatter for your GitHub readmes.
• Kendo UI Mobile - Native UI widgets for building HTML5 applications for iPhone and Android.
• Enyo - Yet another JavaScript library, derived from HP's TouchPad work.
• Make Authlogic and Cucumber Play Nice - One of the things I'm currently wrestling with.
• Taming a Capybara - More pieces of the testing puzzle.
• New RubyStack upgraded to Rails 3.2.0 - More easy Rails installs from BitNami.
• AWS Storage Gateway - Amazon is getting into on-premises work. It'll be interesting to see what builds on this. Once they have a box on your side of the firewall, seems like there are a lot of possibilities.

Early morning: that time before other people muck up your day.

• Updating our privacy policies and terms of service - I think this might be the straw that drives me off of Google. Not real interested in them deciding to transfer names, profile pictures, and what-not between sites.
• RVM Stable and More - Lots of changes in rvm lately.
• Vivify - Color scheme editor for vim.
• On-Site Service - Jeremy McAnally offers to work in your office for a flat rate for a few days. If I were still single and footloose I'd be all over this model.
• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages - Computer geek humor.
• Jed - Gettext style internationalization for JavaScript.
• ql.io - "A declarative, data-retrieval and aggregation gateway for quickly consuming HTTPS APIs" that puts a nifty SQL-like scripting language on top of the web.
• Tenzing - Now that Google has everyone moved to NoSQL through MapReduce, they've layered SQL on top of it.
• Bootstrap 2 ready for testing and feedback - More CSS frameworkery from Twitter.

New job is new and shiny and distracting me from most everything else.

• Keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate - An argument that the way we do views in most web frameworks is broken. I'm not convinced, but it's an interesting read.
• SimpleAWS - An Amazon Web Services API wrapper that strives for future-proofing by being very close to the Amazon API documentation.
• gerbil - Minimalistic testing framework for JavaScript. There's also Gerbil::Rails to integrate it into the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline.
• Tork - Continuous testing tool for ruby that relies on *nix forking and lots of little things working together.
• The Little Redis Book - Free short ebook from Karl Seguin.
• BitNami Cloud Tools now supports DynamoDB - That was fast.
• tconsole - Testing console for Rails.
• HTML5 Please - "Use the new and shiny responsibly" by finding out which features are really ready to implement.
• Firefox for Android: After the Reboot - What Firefox gained by moving to native Android widgets for UI.

Week of January 15-21, 2012

Lots of refactorings this week cleaned up the internals of ActionController and ActionView. Fortunately if you've been paying attention to deprecation warnings these should not have an impact on your applications when you upgrade to Rails 4.

• In a nice bit of tidying-up, 2c72f2a9 adds app/mailers to the list of things reported on by rake:stats.
• 5a6ea535 adds the ability to set config.actionview.logger independently of other loggers.
• number_to_percentage takes a :format option as of c0a3fe3c.

I'm happy to be starting work for Labrador Omnimedia today.

• Rails 3.2.0: Faster dev mode & routing, explain queries, tagged logger, store - Yes, there's a new Rails out. I'm looking forward to using it on a project.
• SSH Mastery - eBook about making SSH a more useful part of your toolset.
• Factory Girl 2.5 Gets Custom Constructors - I really need to dig back into FG, it's been too long since I was up on the current API.
• git-extras - Lots of nice little commands to add to your git-fu.
• Wat - A bit of fun web developer snark.
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial, second edition (updated for Rails 3.2) - Well, partly updated, but new material is scheduled to come out quickly.
• ProCSSor - Online CSS prettifier.
• Modularized Association Methods in Rails 3.2 - Josh Susser digs into one of the nice "under the hood" changes.
• docs_on_kindle - Project to make Kindle versions of popular API docs, starting with Heroku's.
• SenseiDB - "Open-source, distributed, realtime, semi-structured database" from LinkekdIn.
• Sir Sync-A-Lot - S3 sync tool that uses *nix commands to be awesome (& fast).
• Backing up with Backup - Pat Allen endorses the backup gem. I'm rather fond of it myself.
• RFC for the 7XX Range of HTTP Status codes - Developer Errors - Humo[u]r from RailsCamp.
• bash autocomplete for SSH - A short tip with ponies.
• StillAlive - Scriptable service for checking that your site is not just available, but functioning.

Fresh bread rising for later this morning. All's right in the world.

• acts_as_api - Rails 3 support for more flexible XML and JSON APIs.
• rack-git_sha - Somehow putting in Rack middleware to serve up the git sha of currently-deployed code seems like overkill to me. Don't you know what's on your servers?
• Form letter template for acquired startups - Oh so true.
• Amazon DynamoDB: First Look - Solid analysis from RedMonk (as always).
• How to run rvm scripts as cron jobs? - Some sysadminish advice.
• xScope 3.0 - I'd be happier if it weren't $20 to upgrade, but I'll probably buy it anyhow, considering how frequently I use version 2.5.
• Strano - Web UI for Capistrano that automatically uses the configuration from GitHub projects.
• The Trello Tech Stack - These are the tools I'll be using about two years from now.
• The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA - If Apple thinks they own my output because one of their tools touched the creative process, they can go stick their head in a pig. It'll be a cold day in hell before I use iBooks for anything with this nonsense involved.

Slept in, and now I'll be behind the entire day. Oh well, onwards!

• Twitter Web Analytics - Coming soon, see how your Twitter integration performs. I'm a bit skeptical that this sort of analytics balkanization will survive in the long run.
• Fastly - Edge content network with some attractive try-out pricing.
• padrino_gelflogger - Integrate your Padrino applications with Graylog.
• New BitNami RubyStack with Rails 3.1.3 released - Perhaps the easiest way to spin up a working Ruby 1.9.3 + Rails 3.1 environment.
• Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web - Where the cool kids are heading these days.
• Amazon DynamoDB - NoSQL as a managed service. Launch announcement is here.
• A Primer on Ruby C Extensions - Worth knowing about, though so far I have not needed to go there.

Let's just convert the entire internet to JSON and be done with it.

• Das Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac - Looks like Matias has some competition in the high-end mechanical keyboard for Mac biz now. Probably too late for me; with early signs of arthritis in my fingers, I think a low-impact ergo keyboard is next for me.
• Formtastic 2.1.0.beta1 Released - Now compatible with Rails 3.2, among other advances.
• Faster TDD feedback with tmux, tslime.vim, and turbux.vim - A setup to see editor in one pane, tests in another, all in the same window.
• private_pub - A pub/sub messaging setup for Rails.
• Introducing Postmark Inbound - Commercial service to convert incoming emails to JSON sent to your application via POST.

Just a few scavengings today.

• Vesper - Ruby web application framework built on top of Sinatra.
• rails31nav.vim - Vim plugin to find logically related files in a Rails 3.1 application.
• jQuery Collapse - Plugin for expanding/collapsing content built with accessibility in mind.
• Flint - Campfire client built for OS X Lion.
• Blog Rolling with MongoDB, Node.js and Coffeescript - Tutorial with a side of BDD using Mocha.
• Pusher - Hosted API for adding realtime "push" notifications to your applications.

Week of January 8-14, 2012

A fairly quiet week on the Edge Rails front. Still lots of general cleanup and refactoring going on, plus a few new features.

• Support for the old schema_info table was finally dropped in f82e244a. This will require a 2-step migration for very very old applications but in practice I doubt it will bother anyone.
• f194ff9d adds a "What to update in your apps" section to the release notes. It'd be excellent if this were up to date on release day.
• 16c4cb04 adds 'on' and 'off' to the values that ActiveRecord will properly typecast into Boolean columns.
• Migration internals were heavily refactored starting at bc276fbc, but it looks like there's no effect on the external API.

Time to do battle with another week.

• js.js - A JavaScript interpreter written in JavaScript. Or rather, cross-compiled from SpiderMonkey.
• twostroke - And here's a JavaScript interpreter written in Ruby.
• Huboard - Github issues made awesome - Kanban system built on top of GitHub's API.
• GitHub is a fish bowl - Why yes. Yes it is.
• How to get MDN swag (doc sprint January 20-21) - Looking for a way to get started contributing back to open source? Here's one that comes with t-shirts.
• LazyGem - One-step installation of all the gems that you've subscribed to on rubygems.org.
• Firebug 1.10a1 - Time to upgrade if you like being on the bleeding edge.
• Celluloid - Concurrent objects for Ruby. Go nuts calling everything asynchronously if you want.
• Bootstrap Generator - Fill-in-the-blanks customizer for Twitter's Bootstrap CSS.
• RetroShare - Open source cross-platform peer to peer communication platform.
• Understanding CoffeeScript Comprehensions - I'm just amused that a feature so many people find incomprehensible has this name.
• Labnotes - If you like A Fresh Cup, you'll probably like the Labnotes blog as well.
• Juvia - Open source commenting system (like Disqus) implemented in Rails 3 and designed to be friendly to AJAX pages.
• redmon - Sinatra dashboard for redis.
• gemnasium-parser - Parse gemfiles and gemspecs using regular expressions, to avoid the danger of executing rogue code.
• AWS Free Usage Tier now Includes Microsoft Windows on EC2 - Yes, you can run a Windows server up to 750 hours per month, for free.

As promised, another report on what I've been up to in my open source time. It wasn't a super productive week, but I found a few broken windows to fix, which made me happy. The details:

• larkistrano - My planned gem of Capistrano extensions for Rails 3 and up (mostly based on the rubaidhstrano code I've been maintaining) is moving along. It's not ready for prime time yet though. Hopefully I'll get to a version that can actually deploy things over the weekend and then start dogfooding it in my own projects.
• Rubygems Guides - I did some more work on cleaning up and extending the Command Reference this week, including adding the various gem options and fixing an escaping issue. I also added a new Plugins page to the site. As a result of this flurry of activity, I'm now a committer for rubygems.
• What's New in Edge Rails #3 - I plan to continue running this series indefinitely, especially because it helps me keep tabs on the coming changes.
• rubygems - While I was working on the Command Reference, I realized that the rubygems help for 'gem lock' referred to it as 'gemlock'. That was easy to fix.

So…for the first 12 days of 2012, anyhow, I've managed to give back to the open source world at least a bit each day. Care to join me?

Being away from the computer for a day did me good. Can't say the same about my inbox though.

• Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices - I'm sure people at Microsoft are pleased by the notion of a computer that can never have any operating system other than Windows installed. I'm not so keen on it myself.
• Tactile One keyboard - Matias keyboards are great. This new one acts as a wireless external keyboard for your iPhone as well.
• Stylizer - Real-time CSS editing in your browser.
• Sparrow - Open source game engine for iOS. I dunno that I'd use "inspired by the Flash API" as a selling point myself.
• Command Line Reporter - Project for providing output from your Ruby scripts without a litter of puts statements.