Hey, I'm back. How about that?

• lll - I'm a dinosaur, I admit it. I still do lots of "printf debugging." This gem makes that just a little bit easier in a Ruby or Rails context.
• ievms - Shell script to automatically set up IE6, 7, 8, and 9 VMs using VirtualBox to ease your browser testing hassles.
• Multi-Firefox Fixer - Shell script that makes it easy to run multiple versions of Firefox at the same time.
• SequelPro 0.9.9.1 - New build of this nice little OS X MySQL database management utility. If you don't want to pay for one of the big guns, this is the best free (donation requested) one that I know.

Yes, it's true. After 700 postings, I'm calling an end to Double Shot. But don't despair: I'm still going to be collecting pointers to stuff I find useful, and commenting briefly on it. But these resource listings are moving over to the new Larkware site, where I'll be joined by Dana Jones, Mike Breen, and Russell Norris. Our hope is to bring you longer blog postings as well as the short bits, and to make the overall experience more useful. Please come join us there. Comments here will be shut down to keep the spammers away.

A nice round number again.

• Unit and Functional Tests are as Useful as 100% Code Coverage - I'm starting to agree with an emphasis on integration tests. I'm still not a fan of cucumber though.
• Steak - Plain Ruby alternative to cucumber for acceptance tests. Runs on top of RSpec.
• PayFacade - Looks like a new attempt to simplify interacting with credit card processors. Taking beta applications now.

Edging up on 700 of these, I see.

• Haml/Sass 3 Release Candidate 1 Released - Features are frozen now, so a fine time to jump in even if you generally avoid the bleeding edge.
• Cinch: The IRC Microframework - New code for building IRC bots in Ruby.
• pdfcrowd - Convert HTML to PDF, with both an interactive online version and an API.
• CritoTech - Transparent encryption for MySQL.
• markupslicer - Slice HTML markup into HAML or ERB dynamic templates.
• Casein - Yet another Rails CMS.
• Like it? Tweet it! - jQuery-powered widget to allow easily forwarding your own blog content as a tweet.
• Remove ow.ly toolbar - Greasemonkey script to get rid of one more of life's little annoyances.

And so another week creaks into existence.

• Rawr - Packaging and deployment tool for JRuby.
• Facebook is the Private Beta of the Semantic Web - Well, maybe. If so, I guess I'm getting off the bus before it gets to semanticland.

It's been something of a slow week around here.

• OAuth2 Gem: Just in Time For Facebook's Graph - Intridea provides some help if you want to start poking at the latest Facebook APIs.
• Tickle - Natural language parsing gem for recurring events, building on Chronic.

One day of spring was nice. Hopefully there will be more.

• GoogleSharing - If you dislike the amount of info Google collects on you, here's one thing you can do about it.
• DrX - Graphical object inspector for Ruby.

Tax forms are not a few of my favorite things.

• Introducing BrB, extremely fast interface for doing distributed ruby - With method calls via a communication tunnel.
• ColorTail Gem - Colorized log-tailing.
• RubyScope - Ruby syntax-aware code search tool.

Hopefully Tuesday will be less Monday than Monday was.

• jsPlumb - Moveable boxes and connecting lines in jQuery.
• state_machine 0.9.0: Locked and loaded - Fresh release for this plugin, with Rails 3 and a bunch of other integrations.
• Installing Rails 3.0 Beta 3 on Ubuntu using RVM - A walkthrough of getting a working set of bits into place.
• rpg - Ruby package management system to replace gems.

A collection of odds and ends to start the week.

• Saying Goodbye to Apple - I hope I don't get to this point. I rather fear that I will.
• 2 Steps to Becoming a Great Developer - Advice from Eric Davis.
• Sprinkle - A software provisioning tool for remote servers. Maxim Chernyak put together a cheat sheet for it.
• CanCan 1.1 - With a pile of new features for this Rails authorization solution.
• drift - Cocoa/MacRuby app for editing and creating gists. Think of it as a versioned cloud text editor.
• DbCharmer - Plugin that adds master-slave clustering, horizontal sharding, and vertical sharding to your Rails projects.

A burst of activity as the week draws to a close.

• Using gem to root a box - Nice. If you have access to gem, and can make files, you're root.
• Beetle - High-availability redundant AMQP queues.
• Draft Prawn 1.0 Spec - Just in case you want to know where this PDF generation tool is going, and perhaps offer some input.
• From Bundler to Open and Inclusive Software Communities - Steven Baker had a bad experience with the NIH attitude that pervades parts of current Ruby tools development, and has gone public with it.
• Isolate - A simple alternative for gem management.
• Non-blocking ActiveRecord and Rails - Possible with enough hackery.
• JRuby 1.5.0.RC1 Released - Seems like 1.0 was just yesterday.
• Grease Your Suite - "Tips and tricks for faster testing" (PgDn to advance slides).

It's getting to be time to radically simplify some parts of life again.

• Render 'Rails Style' Partials in Sinatra - Using Sinatra as a design tool for Rails views, interesting.
• Automated Heroku Backups - Get your data off to S3 for safekeeping.

I spotted a greenfield app in the wild yesterday. Whether I can hunt it down is another question.

• jQuery.popeye 2.0 - inline alternative to lightbox-style image display.
• IronRuby 1.0 - It's out.
• Rails 3.0: Third beta release - This is out too. Read the comments if you're upgrading from a previous beta.

Can I really be edging up on 700 of these?

• monkeyfly - Well-done multicolumn Greasemonkey script for Twitter.
• Flask - Micro web development framework for Python.

I'm not the only one who thinks Apple is going down the wrong path with their new restrictions on what tools you can use to code for the iPhone. A few other opinions around the web:

• The Absurdity of Apple’s New iPhone Restrictions - Larry O'Brien looks at the stupidity of this move from a coding and architectural standpoint.
• Apple’s kneecaps competitors and partners - Rafe Colburn is also worried about what this means for Apple in general.
• Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad - Hank Williams comes up with the killer quote: "If you need to 'originally' write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs fucking business."
• Apple Computer's Ultimate Fail - Sam Watkins ends with "You are making Microsoft look good by comparison."
• Steve Jobs Says, "Fuck You Ruby Fanbois" - And just for fun, Zed Shaw takes advantage of the angst to kick the deluded folks who think Ruby is the be-all and end-all of writing software.

I don't feel too much need to amplify these thoughts. I'll just say that the justification Steve Jobs produced about "intermediate layers" producing substandard code is the purest spinning bullshit. If that was the real reason, we'd be restricted to using assembler. Or hand-optimized machine code. The whole history of digital computing is the history of successively more powerful intermediate layers. And in other news...

• [ANN] Camping 2.0 - minature rails for stay-at-home moms - There's something to be said for a web framework that fits into the release announcement email.
• JavaScript Testing with Cucumber and Capybara - Some day I'll have time to look more seriously into this.
• jStorage - Wrapper to allow Prototype, MooTools, or jQuery store data on the browser side.
• capybara-envjs - More testing glue for web applications.

I quit developing for the Windows platform because of Microsoft's bluntly anti-competitive behavior. Fortunately for me, I never started developing for the OS/X or iWhatever platform, so Apple's bluntly anti-competitive behavior has less effect on me. Hopefully the web will remain a viable platform for at least a few more years. It is, however, getting less likely that my next computer will be a Mac, no matter how nice they are.

• Ultra-light jQuery calendar - Another take on a reasonably small date selector.
• Ruby on Rails - Proof positive that the time of the "automated encyclopedia" has not yet arrived.

More busy days loom. Can't complain too much, as the alternative is worse.

• Some handy rack-rewrite rules - So you can do reasonable redirects in between Apache and your app.
• ExceptionHub - Service for collecting javascript errors from your production applications.

New projects ramping up, oh joy.

• Addressing Concerns about Padrino - Somewhat of an introduction to the Padrino web framework.

It was a quiet day on the interwebs.

• Prototype 1.7 - The RC is out. Here's a quick look at what's new.
• Instant Blueprint - Build the initial framework for a web project with choice of doctypes and JavaScript libraries.

Time to get back to work.

• CannedCukes - Share your features! - Announcement of a new community site for sharing cucumber features.
• Testing RESTful response types - Adding an assert_response_is method.
• A rebase-based workflow - Another idea of how to work on a team with git.
• Capfire - Integrate Capistrano deployment notifications with Campfire.
• Peek-a-Boo - More graphical process viewer for OS X.
• delayed_job 2.0 - Now with support for MongoMapper and DataMapper.
• awesome_print - Nicely-formatted object printing in IRB and script/console.
• Introducing Phat, an Asynchronous Rails app - Using fibers on Ruby 1.9.