Reflecting on how happy I am not to be at CES.

• HashInit - Gist showing how to simplify object creation by supplying a hash of ivar values.
• MacGap - Write OS X applications using WebKit technologies. That means you can design a desktop app using HTML/JS/CSS.
• Braumeister - Catalog of available Homebrew packages.
• join.me - Free screen sharing application. Not as full featured as stuff like GoToMeeting but way cheaper.
• Victorinox squeezes 1TB of high-speed storage into a Swiss Army Knife - Is that a terabyte in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
• Sublime Text 2 Build 2165 - I've been using the nightly builds, and this is definitely getting to be a very slick editor.
• assert_nothing_tested - Why minitest doesn't have assert_nothing_raised.
• Designing Great API Docs - Nice article from Parse.

Still plenty going on in the corners of the development world that I follow these days.

• confstruct - Yet another ruby configuration gem with many options for syntax and 1.9 support.
• Ruby DataMapper Status - Ambitious plans afoot for this alternative to ActiveRecord. It'll be interesting to watch them come to fruition.
• scriptogr.am - Dropbox and Markdown based blogging system. Follow the link to their own blog for some documentation.
• shim - Node.js app that runs on OS X to enable synchronized browsing so you can easily test multiple devices/browsers at the same time.
• campaign_cash - Gem for interacting with the NY Times campaign finance API, a nice bit of public service.
• HTML5 Doctor - If you want the scoop on all the new HTML5 elements, this looks like a good place to start. Personally, I expect to learn them about five years from now.
• Smooth CoffeeScript Interactive - The online book forked and modified so that you can run and change the code samples in any HTML5 browser.
• Introducing the Backbone Boilerplate - A set of best practices and utilities for backbone.js applications from Bocoup.
• Experimenting with Draper - A decorator generation gem for Rails.
• Delivering a Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release - Looks like there will be a version of Firefox for enterprises who can't cope with a version bump every few months.

Most days habit propels me through the first hour.

• Introducing ExpectThat: A CoffeeScript Assertion Library - Works with Pavlov, QUnit, and Jasmine.
• HTML5 Local Storage Intro - Yes, it's pretty trivial. Also pretty useful.
• Streaming Files from MongoDB GridFS - Cool technique that avoids reading the whole file into memory before serving it.
• Announcing Scout Real Time - Get Scout performance metrics without waiting for the usual polling.
• Lightview - Flexible HTML5 jQuery lightbox library.
• DDD Aggregates in Rails with ActiveRecord - Sometimes it makes sense to nest AR models.
• RSpec Best Practices - With an eye towards more human-readable output.
• Zero-width space - Useful for, among other things, preventing table cells from collapsing and making sure nothing in your toolchain converts two hyphens to an en dash.

Week of January 1-7, 2012

There's still a big party going on in Rails master to get rid of Ruby 1.8-specific code; that accounted for most of the commits this week. Among other things, MiniTest is replacing Test::Unit throughout the Rails code. But there are some other significant happenings too:

• Big News: Rails plugins are deprecated in 3.2 and removed entirely in 4.0, as of dad7fdc5734a3813246f238ac5760b2076932216. This is an obvious simplification to Rails, as most add-on functionality has moved into gems. If you still need to use a plugin, you can use bundler to manage it as a file or git dependency.
• You can still use the plugin generator - it just generates a new gem in your application now. As of 8ac53db5eedca8f2605ef7f91bbc956018ae1c50 it automatically adds that new gem plugin to your Gemfile as well.
• ActionController:
:TestCase gained the ability to send real documents in 5b9708840f4cc1d5414c64be43c5fc6b51d4ecbf.
• 439d3407eaef1f1b3abc94c766dedac220e59785 adds a font_path helper method that gets the path to a font in the public fonts directory. Personally, I wouldn't mind having Rails bake in a standard way to do cross-browser fonts.
• Logger has morphed into ActiveSupport::Logger. The work was completed in 00236435221a39441af3f1e76110767fba4154a8.
• 904e544cc8f5846de7c31827bb5556c6a238c0de adds a benchmark helper that works in ERB. This allows your views to contain things like <%= benchmark do %>Hello World<% end %> which then puts the benchmarking results in the log.
• A couple of small changes in the sprockets compiler were merged in 7cfd1bd76a41bea528c945d821a9fbc3902af479. First, you can specify in options which file types should be gzipped in your assets. Second, the default list of types to gzip now includes html, svg, txt, and xml in addition to js and css.

Busy weekend on the Intertubes…

• TorqueBox v2.0.0.beta2 Released - This software for setting up a JBoss/JRuby based application server is moving along with a more current JRuby, among other changes.
• Capybara 2.0 and ambiguous matches - Potentially big API change coming in Capybara 2.0; take a look if you've got a big Capybara test suite.
• Git in the Trenches - Scenario-based training on how to use git.
• Trello - List-of-list management tool that got a burst of HackerNews publicity last week. Other tools along the same lines if you're in the market: Blossom and AgileZen.
• Firebug 1.9.0 - has been released. Here's a list of the new features.
• Yak Shaving - Josh Susser explains yak shaving for the layman. (Also see the classic email on the subject.)
• 17 Years Later, The Internet Still Sucks - Why yes, yes it does. If you can't buy reliable net service in NYC for $$$, I sure can't get it here for any amount I can afford.
• Ak47 - General purpose reloader. Want to restart thin or mongrel or whatever every time some directory changes? Now you can.
• ngx_zeromq - "a transport module which allows nginx to use ZeroMQ message-oriented transport layer while communicating with upstream servers." I am informed by my sysadmin guy that this is awesome.
• Underscore.js - Spiffy new site for this JavaScript utility library.
• Hubot Minecraft - Set your Hubot chat bot loose on your Minecraft server.
• TextMate 2 .tm_properties - Some cobbled together documentation on the settings files for the new TextMate.
• Introducing Nettuts+ Fetch - Sublime Text 2 plugin to let you grab remote assets into a new project.
• Radiant 1.0.0 Release Candidate 4 - Getting close to a 1.0 release on this CMS.
• Accessing application session in capybara - Where was this a year ago when I needed it?
• issues - CLI interface to GitHub issues.
• titlus.js - JavaScript libary to handle things like animating the document title with various messages.
• csv-mapper - Builds on CSV/FasterCSV to make it easier to map CSV files to Ruby structs or ActiveRecord models.
• Smooth Sync for Cloud Calendar - If you're on OS X Lion and use an Android device, you need this.
• respondto.it - Service for stubbing and debugging web hooks that expect to get back JSON or XML. You can also deploy your own copy via Heroku if you don't want to depend on the existing one.
• switch_user - User impersonation that works with devise or authlogic.
• New Year - Updated Ubuntu Rails Setup - Everything you need to get started on Ubuntu 11.10.
• Fbootstrapp - Bootstrap-based styling for Facebook applications. Looks useful, even if the documentation is a bit uncertain how many 'p's should be in the name.
• The GitHub Job Interview - beats the hell out of programming trivia questions.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions. Rather, I try to develop good habits regardless of the date on the calendar. Recently I've started doing something new: trying to make at least one contribution to the world of open source, large or small, every single day.

Now I've decided to publish a few notes on these contributions. Why? Two reasons, really. First, it helps hold me accountable. Second, it might inspire someone else to make their own contributions. One of the big lessons, I think, is that it's not hard to do your part to make the open source world better. None of my contributions are at all earthshaking. But if we each move a pebble when it bothers us, eventually the whole mountain will be on the march.

Anyhow, enough philosophy. Here's what I did over the past week:

• RubyGems Guides - Submitted a couple of changes to improve the formatting for the Command Reference page. This pull request hasn't been merged yet, so I'll have to follow up next week and see what I did wrong.
• Rails Guides - Did a general editing pass on the Asset Pipeline guide. There's more work to be done in here: we need sections on caching and adding your own pre-processor. Feel free to get to that before I do.
• What's New in Edge Rails #2 - Darned straight I count those posts as an open source contribution.
• Rubygems - Added a tiny bit of command-line help for the gem owner command. 3 lines of code, but maybe it'll make a difference to someone.
• larkistrano - Haven't done much here yet, but my intent is to bring over the stuff that I'm still using from rubaidhstrano into a gem that can be used with Rails 3+.

Hey, a day with no Scouting commitments. How did that happen?

• haml-js - Server-side templating language for JavaScript with HAML syntax. My brain hurts.
• Why we don't hire programmers based on puzzles, API quizzes, math riddles, or other parlor tricks - Amen. If more developers would say no to participating in these shenanigans, they would (I hope) die out.
• Rack Server Pages - All the beauty of php and asp - only for ruby, built as a Rack middleware.
• Cognitive Decline Begins in Mid-Life - No wonder I can't keep up with all these newfangled development languages any more.
• Rackspace Open Sources Dreadnot - A continuous deployment tool based on ideas from Deployinator.
• My Command Line Dashboard - Geoffrey Grosenbach tricks out his zsh install.
• Puma - "A web server built for concurrency" for Ruby applications.
• Capybara, Cucumber, and How the Cookie Crumbles - Getting real cookie support in your Capybara tests.

So far 2012 is balancing between optimism and terror for me. Maybe I just need more sleep ;)

• Rails 3.2.0.rc2 has been released! - Why, so it has. If you're upgrading you'll also need to move to the latest releases of sass-rails and RSpec.
• The Big Three-Oh - Delayed Job 3.0 is out. Here's an overview of the changes, including the addition of named queues.
• gitgraph - Javascript chunk to let you display Github participation graphs using HTML canvas.
• migrator - Migration support for node.js.
• quickie - Quick tests you can embed in your ruby classes. I rather like the idea of not having separate test files.
• The Future of CouchDB - According to original author Damien Katz, it's the new Couchbase Server, not the existing Apache CouchDB project.
• code.nasa.gov - Early alpha, serious open source code from the space agency.

Always fun to wake up to a server-down message.

• Golden Grid System - "A folding grid for responsive design", aimed at making your layout work even as browsers get big or small.
• Initializr - Another responsive template system designed to scale well from mobile to large desktops.
• Geeklist - "An achievement-based social portfolio builder" because CVs are so yesterday.
• Katamari Hack - Roll up the text and images on any web page.
• text-align: centaur; - Pretty much just what it says. Web designers are silly.
• Momentum - SPDY server for Rack applications.

• Tilde's Pairing Setup - I don't do any pair programming these days (too far out in the wastes of middle America for that) but if I did, this would be a nice setup to have.
• Learning to Eat Well and Stay Healthy - Jeremy Zawodny seems to have followed a pretty similar diet path to mine: low carb, high protein. It works, at least for me. (Where "works" is defined as feeling good, not feeling hungry, and keeping weight off).
• Clean Your App Permissions in 2 Minutes - A good bit of housekeeping for the new year.
• Backbone.js, Rails 3 and asynchronous interfaces - Advice on building frontend-heavy applications.
• Bad - Jeremy McAnally takes on Uncle Bob Martin. These handwavey sorts of talks are one reason I don't go to conferences any more.

A lot of the activity over the past week went for removing Ruby 1.8.x support code from the Rails codebase. I'm not going to list out the dozens of commits from a bunch of contributors; suffice it to say that Rails, like many people I know, went on a sudden post-holiday diet.

Week of 12/25-31/2011

• Rails uses Rack 1.4.0 as of 0d01e09c6c78c2276433e69671af5c211e243d50. You should too - or else upgrade your older version of Rack to the latest point release to fix a security issue.
• With the extraction of ActiveRecord::Model into a module, there's a need to include configuration on those models. This is supplied in 93c1f11c0a5097a5431819a1551a02a869a16a38 as an ActiveRecord::Configuration module which provides a config_attribute macro - but this is not considered a public API, so use at your own risk.
• We're moving towards explicitly declaring which tables to eager load with an eager_load predicate, rather than trying to deduce them from other parts of an Active Record relation. c99d507fccca2e9e4d12e49b4387e007c5481ae9 has a chunk of work on this; Issue 950 is tracking overall progress.
• 8a130edb0f7b3aacf74d080d3da3b2d871f650d6 adds a second parameter, flush, to content_for. If this is set to true then the supplied block replaces any existing block rather than concatenating to it.

Let's start 2012 off with a bang. Or at least a big mess of links.

• This Week in REST - Weekly roundup of links and discussions related to the REST architectural style.
• Bats 0.1.0 - "Bash Automated Testing System", a testing framework for UNIX applications.
• smoking - "Simple mocks and stubs for javascript."
• SCSS.tmbundle - SCSS highlighting for Sublime Text 2.
• SCSS.sugar - And SCSS highlighting for Espresso as well. I wish someone would make an editor as powerful as Espresso's embedded CSSEdit 3 for SCSS files.
• Stop whining and start hiring remote workers - DHH discusses the simplest way to increase your labor pool: hire remotely. As an underemployed remote worker, I wholeheartedly agree. Also check out Wynn Netherland's follow-up Look locally, hire remotely.
• Hashify - Forget about short URLs; you can put an entire document in a URL (well, with a dependence on a short url service).
• Semantics Over Aesthetics: Use Destroy Buttons Instead of Destroy Links - If you don't like Rails requiring javascript for delete links, just fix it.
• Advanced Git - The latest from PeepCode, released just in time for the new year.
• Stay - OS X software to restore windows to your preferred position when you connect or disconnect displays. I didn't know this existed, but it's a great aid to my own workflow.
• Go2Shell - Add a toolbar button to Finder to open the displayed directory in a terminal window. Works fine with Total Finder and iTerm 2.
• jQuery UI Bootstrap - Apply Twitter Bootstrap styling to jQueryUI as a theme.
• What's PaaS.io All About - These folks are planning to build a platform on top of Cloud Foundry but aimed at small businesses instead of the enterprise.
• LastHistory - If you happen to have a bunch of history scrobbled to Last.fm, this visualizer is a fun timewaster.
• impress.js - JavaScript-driven 3D CSS transform presentation thing.
• 16" Portable USB Monitor - Even powered off the USB connection. Yet another piece of nifty kit to lust after.

Enjoying the quiet week at the end of the year to reset a few things. Here's hoping for a good 2012.

• task.js - Threading in JavaScript. We continue to invent new and interesting ways to shoot ourselves in the foot.
• fnordmetric - Realtime user activity tracking for your web applications based on eventmachine and redis.
• What to do when Amazon's spot prices spike - Oh look, another way to spend way too much money by making a mistake.
• Backbone patterns - Guidance for using backbone.js.
• Rackamole - User tracking software built as Rack middleware.
• MailCatcher - Gem to run a local SMTP server and display it in a Web UI for debugging.

Some day I'll have enough electronics, right?

• Ruby Gems API Console - Courtesy of the folks over at Apigee.
• rubygems-bundler - Glue code designed to eliminate typing "bundle exec" all the time.
• Amazon S3 - Object Expiration - More management tools for cleaning stuff out of Amazon S3 buckets. I smell a cache-expiration strategy waiting to be built here.
• Learning Rails: A Glossary - Terms and tools the new Rails user may run across.
• Security News - New releases of Rack: 1.4.0 (no more support for Ruby 1.8.6), 1.3.6 (Security fix), 1.2.5 (Security fix), 1.1.3 (Security fix). Details of the attack at the JRuby 1.6.5.1 release announcement. Ruby has a new release too (1.8.7 patched, 1.8.6 not patched, 1.9.x not vulnerable). Other software is affected: see the advisory at oCERT. Looks to me like this is worth upgrading to fix, but not the end of the world if it takes you a little while.
• URI.js - jQuery-style library for manipulating URLs. Includes normalization functions.
• Cantango - Access control system for Rails 3 that extends CanCan and integrates with Devise, among other things.
• Who Needs Process? - I don't think I've tried every possible software process, but I've tried a hell of a lot of them. These days, I'm inclined to agree with Ted Dziuba's promotion of anarchy in this article over most anything else.
• Minitest Quick Reference - Handy, especially if you haven't dug into Ruby 1.9's default testing framework yet.
• Kaminari - Paginator written from scratch for Rails 3. I should look at this for the next project.

I noticed yesterday that qrush was hunting around for a new gem name - and this morning he's released m, a Test::Unit runner that can find a test by line number. This got me wondering: how many short gem names are left for Rubyists? Without further ado, here's the list of all released (on RubyGems.org) one-letter gems:

• - - Appears to be junk.
• Q - Quick HTML generator for use in helpers and such.
• _ - Write Ruby scripts using only the underscore character.
• a - Appears to be junk.
• d - Start a debugger in your code with a single 'd' character.
• f - Some file utility methods.
• g - Kernel.g is like Kernel.p, except that its output goes to Growl.
• h - Cryptographic tool to generate message digests.
• j - A command-line task manager.
• l - Command-line tool that unifies ls and less.
• m - Run Test::Unit tests by line number.
• n - Kernel.n is like Kernel.p, except that its output goes to notify-send.
• o - Configuration DSL superseded by optimism.
• q - Command-line activity logger/time tracker.
• r - Appears to be junk.
• t - Command-line interface for Twitter.
• u - Alternative support for Unicode supporting both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.
• v - Threaded wrapper for git commands.
• x - A few Ruby utility methods. Appears defunct.
• z - Appears to be junk.

Please don't grab the remaining letters unless you have a good reason. We have enough gem namespace pollution already.

As for the two letter gems, I'm not going to spend time this morning exploring them all. But here's the list, in case you want to do so:

SI, ae, af, ap, at, bb, bj, c2, cb, cg, cp, cv, db, dd, de, di, dj, dl, do, dp, ds, ed, ey, fb, fs, ft, fu, gm, go, gr, gx, ht, hx, io, ip, it, jp, km, ko, le, lh, lj, mg, ml, mm, mo, mq, mu, mw, my, nr, nu, og, oh, om, os, ox, oz, pa, pb, pd, pg, pi, ps, pt, qr, qu, r2, rd, re, rm, rq, rr, rs, rt, rv, rx, s3, s4, s7, sh, ss, tb, tc, td, th, ti, tm, ts, tu, tx, un, up, uv, ve, vk, wb, wc, wf, ww, xs, xx, ya, yo, zd, zk

Things don't really seem to have slowed down this week.

• Presto - "A simple web framework aimed at speed and simplicity" built on top of Rack. The "inline testing" approach is interesting.
• IP over LEGO train carrier - Put a few more cars on this, add some switching, and you could actually end up with a pretty good classroom demo.
• Introducing filer.js - Javascript wrapper library for the HTML5 Filesystem API.
• DNS taking 48+ hours to propagate is a myth - If you're checking your newly-registered site in a browser you're doing it wrong.
• Vim for Rails Developers - Well, for Rails developers who like that sort of thing. $15 screencast from Thoughtbot.
• TouchDB-iOS - CouchDB-compatible embeddable database engine for mobile apps.
• Launching multiple Firefox profiles on OS X using applescript - Handy if you're doing things like testing extensions.
• jQuery-inlog - Console debugging extension for jQuery that shows function inputs, outputs, and context.
• Hackasaurus - Another place for kids to get started playing with the web. Check out their X-ray Goggles tool, which lets you alter web pages and easily publish the results.
• FUSE for Mac OS X - Open-source (and currently maintained) successor to MacFUSE.
• GEB - Subreddit that's planning a group read-through of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I wish I thought I had time for this.
• m - New Test::Unit runner that lets you select a test to run by line number. Ruby 1.9 only.
• wicked - Gem to coerce Rails controllers into running a wizard-style workflow, complete with conditional logic to choose steps to run.

Trying to get back to work post-holiday is always tough. But gotta pay for the holiday somehow.

• Kidsruby 1.0 - Major milestone for thie easy-to-install learning environment for budding rubyists.
• bootstrap-will_paginate - Seamless integration of the standard pagination gem with Twitter's Bootstrap templates.
• Blogcast 1.1 - Simple Rails 3 blogging engine, now upgraded to work with Rails 3.1.
• ff-html5notifications - I'd love for all the browsers to support "toast" notifications. But even with this sort of hackery, they're not there yet.
• Evaluating alternative Decorator implementations in Ruby - A chunk of the Ruby/Rails community appears to be going through a phase of patternizing things.
• tmpltr - Layout engine that uses data stored as JSON and bound to an HTML template. Spiffy home page allows you to edit things directly in the browser and then export your changes.

A few of you might remember I used to write a weekly wrap-up for the official Rails weblog. For one reason and another, that's not happening any more. But I'm starting to want to keep a closer eye on Rails again, and this is a good way for me to make myself do so. No guarantees that I'll keep this up, but let me know if it's useful.

If you want to know about every little detail, then you should be reading the commit logs yourself. I'm just going to pick out things that look especially significant or shiny to me. Your mileage may vary.

Week of 12/18-24/2011

• Of course there was some version change news this week. 9d6e52b55ec67d0573a0bb1900b13f38e18f7eba bumped master to 3.2RC1 - The highlights are in the Rails weblog. With that out of the way, Rails master has become 4.0.0.beta at 632fa15fa4ceec6dbb00bf26da249d3039749f50. Here's some notes from DHH about what to expect. The big news so far: only Ruby 1.9.3+ will be supported.
• Starting with 8cb7bc8b55e8054f66cd58840392e6cc63134a90 and continuing for the next few commits, ActiveRecord supports PostgreSQL hstore columns directly. That's the native KV store for PostgreSQL.
• validates_numericality_of gained an :other_than option (validates_numericality_of :approved, :other_than => 0) at 0fe311a7fcf1457b9a72f99f887f756a28a53db4.
• Whiny nils are finally gone in 4f6af26a886630c97865a2e5023a9560692e6aa4. One less thing to try to explain to Rails newcomers.
• Generating models and migrations from the command line got more flexible in 7a47f362c8246c20437f49111e5dcc0781d6d024. You can now specify that an attribute has an index (country:string:index) or a unique index (tracking_id:integer:uniq) and pass options to string (city:string:limit{32}) and decimal (price:decimal{7,2}) attributes.
• There's a new ActiveRecord::Model module that you can include as an alternative to inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base. Check out the full changelog message on this one at 00318e9bdfc346a57cab34b2ec3724f3e9605ac1.
• Rails Guides support for Kindle's .mobi format landed in 8eb359661745adc639d43cf7da9a92fc1f6c9539.
• Best commit message of the week: "This test is rubbish." 2d5f5c32e6a172863e08a1eecea39b69b1d23d14

• Foundation HTML5 Animation with JavaScript - Yet another open source ebook.
• New Developer Tools in Firefox 11 Aurora - The "Tilt" addon is integrated now, among other things.
• Ohai. The brand new Graylog2 is here! - Big release of this open source log management tool. It includes a swap of backends; here's a blog entry that will walk you through the upgrade.
• mate and rmate - Notes on TextMate 2's command-line tools.
• Build a Chrome Extension with CoffeeScript - Out of the major browsers, Chrome is the easiest to write extensions for. Here's an introduction.
• awestruct - Static site builder with lots of bells and whistles.
• Rack CORS Middleware - Support for cross-domain AJAX calls.
• Announcing Cheevos for Firefox - In-browser achievements as a way to learn more about the browser. Silly, but sometimes we need a little silly.
• Laser - Static code-analysis tool for ruby. Looks interesting, though maybe not under active development.
• Brakeman 1.1 Released - And while we're on the subject of code analysis, this tool has just been updated too.
• A few links for those interested in following Firefox developments:
  • Features/Release Tracking - Major chunks of work that are headed for the next few releases, together with their status. Good place to go for an overview of big-ticket features.
  • Releases - Upcoming and past releases. If you can't remember what the version number is for Aurora vs. Nightly, this is the place to go.
  • The Burning Edge - Blog that tries to pick the notable fixes out of the Mozilla source code.
• Just Enough Ruby - Introduction to the structure of ruby in a "top down" fashion, emphasizing its object-oriented structure, messaging, and modules right from the start.

Presents are all wrapped at last. On to the links!

• Mozilla Unleashes Faster, Smaller Firefox 9 - For me, FF9 was the version that started getting RAM usage under control. The nightly builds - aka Firefox 12 - are even better.
• Working with Unix Processes - Another eBook for the rubyist. Here's a review.
• Backbone.js Fundamentals - eBook in progress.
• Inbound Marketing 101 - Get a jump on one of the buzzwords you'll probably need in 2012.
• Evernote Clearly - Browser add-in sort of like Readability for Firefox and Chrome, with integration back to your Evernote account.
• Graylog2 0.9.6-beta - Lots of new stuff in this log collection tool this time around.
• Hogan.js - A compiler for the Mustache templating language, from Twitter.
• Tools of the Trade - A collection of links and bookmarklets for designers.