Off to the woods again for the weekend.

• google-js-test - New Javascript unit testing framework running on V8.
• AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure - All I know is they botched up the popular ruby feed, making the relaunched delicious.com useless to me.
• ruby-build - Scripts to install various versions of ruby if you're using rbenv instead of rvm.
• Try Ruby - The online learning site launched by _why has been buffed up a bit.

Some weeks are definitely shorter than others.

• Making Scout feel young again: our 4-part tonic - Remember, apps that have been around for a while need love too.
• JRuby GA on an Engine Yard Cloud Near You - Looks like the most turnkey implementation of JRuby for web apps yet.
• Modern Ruby Development - One developer's current set of tools for Rails development. Reminds me that I should update my list too.
• LESS Is More - Using Twitter's Bootstrap In The Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline - Just what it says on the tin.
• Hackerthings - Lots of toys here that I wouldn't mind seeing in my Christmas stocking.

There is no such amount as "enough RAM."

• Basho Technologies Announces Anticipated Release of Riak 1.0 - One of the NoSQL databases I'm most interested in at this point. The release candidate bits are here.
• What good Web Developers should know about sending E-mail - Some of the basics to deliverability, though any more I just recommend paying someone like SendGrid to take the headaches for you.
• GemStats.org - Project to collect and analyze Gemfiles. Not really clear what the data will be good for other than a popularity contest, though.

Obligatory parental announcement: if you're in need of some Boy Scout popcorn, let me know.

• Tutorial: OS X automation with MacRuby and the Scripting Bridge - I used to write a lot of batch files in the DOS days. Dunno why I got out of the habit, but maybe this will get me back in.
• A New Flavor…Still Delicious - Delicious.com has relaunched.
• Ruby-doc.org beta - Looking spiffy with new rdoc templates.
• magick-installer - Easy method of installing ImageMagick on OS/X is working again, with a few minor tweaks from yours truly.
• Versioning your APIs - An approach that uses headers to keep API URLs a bit cleaner.
• How to Rock an Algorithms Interview - I have my own approach: just walk out. I have zero patience for "can you solve this deliberately tricky abstract problem on the white board right now?" interviews. You want to know if I can code, check my GitHub account or projects I've worked on.

Words to ban: "brogrammer."

• What's Next - A teaser of news from TextMate: "There will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas, for registered users."
• USBtypewriter - Just what it says, typewriters with a USB interface, for those of us with more nostalgia than good sense.
• Firebug 1.9a3 - The bleeding edge of Firebug development (which has actually been working quite well for me lately).
• Firebug Lite 1.4 - More features for those trying to debug on systems other than Firefox.
• Simple Two-Factor SSH Authentication - using ruby plus Google Authenticator.
• JSONLint - Best online JSON validator/formatter I've found.
• Ruby Timeout Woes, Part 2 - Why you should not rescue Exception inside of a Timeout block.
• Rails is not MVC - Can we do vi vs. emacs next?
• MonoTable - "Zero-admin, no single-point-of-failure, scalable NoSQL Data-Store in Ruby." We'll see how those promises play out when it moves beyond early design and implementation.
• Formtastic 2.0 - Big new release aimed at Rails 3.1.

Geekdesk has arrived. There was some denting in the frame, but nothing a pair of pliers couldn't fix. Not too fond of self-tapping wood screws either. But overall, it's definitely high quality and worth the money.

• 4G Performance Silliness - Tim Bray says he'd rather have consistent and reliable wireless over super-fast. I tend to agree.
• JewelryBox - OS/X GUI for RVM.
• Meet Samurai: The Most Powerful Way to Accept Payments Online - New credit card gateway that includes the transparent redirect feature you need to minimize PCI hassles.

It's amazing how many annoying emails can arrive in one night.

• Ruby Pair - Fledgling directory of people who want to pair-program, locally or remotely, in ruby.
• Diaspora* means a brighter future for all of us - I'm amazed Diaspora is still going, but apparently it is. I'll be happy to add it to the list of social networks on which I do not spend time, though.
• pgwatch - Tool to give you pretty graphs showing PostgreSQL performance and issues.

Next time, I move to a part of the country with no chiggers.

• capistrano_colors Commit History - Oh, look. I wrote some code.
• The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough - Video tour by Peter Cooper of Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 with emphasis on changes from 1.8.7. $16 with a money back guarantee.
• Testing Doesn't Scale - "Eventually a once agile test suite will become massive enough to slow development." All too true.
• Git Reference - From the GitHub team, sort of a condensed cream of git documentation with links to the Pro Git book and man pages.

Colonoscopy day, what fun.

• join.me - "Ridiculously simple screen-sharing tool".
• Storm - Twitter's answer to the need for "Hadoop of realtime." Probably worth investigating if you're outgrowing resque.

The weekend was a whirlwind of camping and deployments. One of these things is more fun than the other.

• Improving Resque's memory efficiency - Assuming you're running the workers on JRuby, anyhow.
• capistrano_colors - Colorized output for Capistrano. There are some quirks, but it's way better than the default output.
• SSH timeouts and reset connections - If you're seeing "Connection reset by peer - recvfrom(2)" from Capistrano, the solution is to add teardown_connections_to(sessions.keys) at the end of the long-running process that's starving the SSH connections.
• Lighting fast, zero-downtime deployments with git, capistrano, nginx and Unicorn - This looks like a promising next step for the big cap process that's getting out of hand.

Back out with the Boy Scouts this weekend. See you Monday.

• Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto - Amen.
• Joyent Announces the New Joyent Cloud - Joyent is in the platform as a service biz, with an announcement of more integrated tools.
• OpenShift - Looks like Red Hat is getting into the cloud platform biz too.
• What's My DNS? - Free service that does DNS lookups from a selection of servers worldwide. Good for seeing whether DNS changes have propagated.
• DNS Traversal Checker - Thorough tool that will show what's going on with a DNS entry all the way from the root servers on down.
• Capistrano rsync_with_remote_cache deployment strategy - I've got a project that might end up needing this.
• Facebook and Heroku - Quick and easy way to build Facebook apps in the cloud. My personal ambition remains to stay off Facebook forever, though.

Who knew ten years ago that "cloud" would mean something other than a big wet cottony thing?

• Sitting and Standing at Work - Cornell University ergonomics folks say "Sit to do computer work." Though it appears the real take-home is "adjustable desks don't do much if you never adjust them."
• Slim - Used to be everyone wrote text editors. Now they apparently write templating engines. This one aims for minimal markup with some options to have more readable syntax.
• Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins - The title is a bit alarmist, but it does look like Windows 8 is going to start the process of consigning Flash and Silverlight to the dustbin of Windows.

Made my first commit to docrails in ages. Not that it was of any great significance, but at least I'm getting back in the game.

• Mounting Grape API inside rails application - How to use the Grape API micro-framework in either Rails 3 or Rails 2.3.
• ruby-style-guide - Rubyists are too ornery to have an official style guide, but this is a good starting point if you need to bang something together for your company.
• Optimizing Cache - Google's notes on the subject. Of particular interest to Rails devs is the fact that they recommend against putting cachebusters in the query string.

Coming back to work after a long weekend. Bleah.

• A few git tips you didn't know about - Well, I knew a few of them. But not most. Some useful nuggets here from Mislav.
• MongoDB 2.0 Released - Concurrency and performance are the main emphases here. I still haven't had to do any NoSQL work in anger, but I've got one project looking seriously at MongoDB.
• PostgreSQL 9.1 Released - And if you prefer more traditional relational databases, this one is my pick for all new work these days.

Thanks for all the welcomes back. Nice to know you didn't all forget about this place.

• GeekDesk Max - I finally stopped procrastinating and ordered one of these; my back isn't getting any younger. I'll let y'all know how it works out.
• asset_fingerprint - Rails plugin to tweak file names for better cacheability.
• Faker 1.0 released - I hadn't actually realized this gem for making sample data was pre-1.0. It's been a userul tool for ages.
• jquery-templ-rails - Gem to integrate jquery Templates with the Rails 3.11 asset pipeline.

This 'jack of all trades' stuff gets a wee bit challenging at times.

• RailsInstaller 2 for Windows Released - Nice work for Rails users on Windows: easy installation for Ruby 1.9.2 + Rails 3.1 + the SQL Server AR adapter, among other things.
• Rails 3.1 and asset pipeline problems with Apache - Found this while troubleshooting a new deployment. Not 100% convinced this was the entire answer, but I think it was a chunk of it.
• Setting up Ubuntu with Nginx, Unicorn, ree, rvm - I'm considering this for the next server but it may be a deeper swamp than I want to venture into.
• Mozilla Publishes Developer Guide on DNT; Releases DNT Adoption Numbers - Looks like around 5% activate the "Do Not Track" browser option. I've been one of them since well before the option existed (thank you AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript).

As you might have guessed, I've finally started playing with Rails 3.1 (alas, I haven't been able to stay too close to the cutting edge lately, due to large client projects on old versions in maintenance mode). One of the things you may have noticed is that Rails 3.1 has more moving parts than it used to. A simple 'gem install rails' brings down 30 gems. 30! What the heck is all this stuff? Well, I dug around a bit, and in case you want to know, here are the answers:

• actionmailer - High level support for templated emails.
• actionpack - The view and controller layers in MVC.
• activemodel - Low-level model utilities for anyone to tap into.
• activerecord - ORM for databases.
• activeresource - ORM for REST web services.
• activesupport - Collection of general utility classes and library extensions.
• arel - SQL AST manager.
• bcrypt-ruby - Hashing algorithm for secure passwords.
• builder - Generator for XML files.
• bundler - Gem dependency manager.
• erubis - Fast implementation of eRuby templates.
• hike - Utility to find files given a set of paths.
• i18n - Internationalization and localization support.
• mail - Pure Ruby mail library.
• mime-types - Figures out the likely MIME content type of arbitrary files.
• multi_json - General purpose swappable JSON backend library.
• polyglot - Support for registering arbitrary file types with Ruby loaders.
• rack - Modular interface to connect web frameworks to web servers.
• rack-cache - HTTP caching support for rack.
• rack-mount - Router for rack so it can support multiple applications in one (like Rails engines).
• rack-ssl - Support for forcing all requests to use SSL.
• rack-test - Testing API for rack applications.
• rails - Rails itself. Though really there's not much IN the rails gem.
• railties - Rails bootstrapping, command line, and generators core - the "glue" that holds everything else together.
• rdoc - Documentation generator.
• sprockets - Library for compiling and serving web assets.
• thor - Tool for building self-documenting command-line utilities.
• tilt - Generic interface for a variety of template engines.
• treetop - Parser generator and interpreter.
• tzinfo - Daylight-savings aware timezone support.

It's worth remembering that as soon as you install Rails, your application has all this stuff available. You wouldn't want to install something to just duplicate the functionality in polyglot, for example, if you need to handle new file types. As usual, time spent exploring Rails is likely to pay off in faster development in the long run.

Somehow I'm still hanging in and making my living writing Rails apps. Beats the heck out of the alternatives.

• Hire a Guard for Your Project - Useful automation tool to react to file changes, for everything from running tests to compiling CoffeeScript to whatever else you can think of.
• Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 8 - Yeah, I've been writing FF extensions (and ones for Safari, Chrome, and IE as well). The official add-ons blog is essential reading if you're chasing version compatibility for Firefox.
• Resque Mail Queue Gem - Simple asynchronous email sending on top of Resque. (Hi Scott! Always good to see another .NET refugee.)
• Navicat Premium 10.0 - My go-to database UI for OS X has added modeling now. It's pretty pricey, though, if you're not in databases all day every day.
• MarkdownNote - Markdown editor and preview utility for OS/X and IOS.
• QLMarkdown - QuickLook generator for Markdown files.
• QLStephen - QuickLook generator for plain text files with no extension. Great for README and the like.

Why yes, it is time to learn Rails 3.1.

• Read This Before Installing Rails 3.1 - Despite the name, this isn't an anti-Rails rant; it's the best set of instructions I've found so far for getting a set of versions of everything that work together.
• Rails 3.1 Overview - Based on beta from a few months back, but a good starting point from Ryan Bates.
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial - Michael Hartl has put together a whole online book for learning Rails, and it's getting updated to support 3.1.
• Asset Pipeline - Part of the Rails Guides series, which covers this and other new (and old) features.
• Deploying a Rails 3.1 application to production - I'm still trying to figure out all this asset pipeline stuff, but there are some clues here to making capistrano work with Rails 3.1.
• One Base Class to Rule Them All - An amusing little bit of Ruby trolling.
• Installing PostgreSQL 9.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 - Turns out there's a backports repo to make this simpler.

Every once in a while I get the urge to go back to blogging. This time I'm scratching it for a while.

• Sprouts - Ruby based development environment for ActionScript, Flex, and AIR development.
• Pry Everywhere - Replacing IRB with Pry, including Hirb integration.
• Hammerhead - Firebug extension that adds a tab for measuring the load time of web pages.
• Chef on Steroids - Or at least, hide error messages and run over SSL for secure environments.