Double Shot #623

Remember, the next RailsBridge BugMash is this coming weekend. Join us to hammer on Rails 3 and maybe win a prize.
  • Stock Names - A lovely spoof.
  • State of the Stack - New Relic looks at what's being used for Rails applications based on their users. Ruby 1.9 penetration remains negligible.
  • Apycom - Nice-looking selection of jQuery menus, though they do charge a minor fee if you want unobfuscated code.
  • Hamster - Efficient, immutable, thread-safe collection classes for Ruby.
  • ResqueMailer - Asynchronous mail from ActionMailer via Resque.
  • Coda-Slider 2.0 - Nice jQuery plugin to swap pages of text in an animated fashion.
  • 14 Days of jQuery - And speaking of jQuery, looks like they have a bunch of stuff planned in conjunction with the 1.4 release.
  • WEBrick has an Escape Sequence Injection vulnerability - Security issue that affects all versions of Ruby from 1.8.6 onward. Thankfully it looks pretty obscure.
  • tracked_plugins - Manage your Rails plugins with extra metadata.

Double Shot #622

First week of the new year has turned out chaotically busy. Could be worse.

Double Shot #621

I'm not sure I can recommend insomnia as a business strategy, but it works for me.

Double Shot #620

Looks like the first snow of the winter is about to arrive. My kids are considerably more overjoyed with this than I am.

Double Shot #619

Looks like the next RailsBridge BugMash is going to focus on Rails 3, just before the beta. This could be interesting.
  • Lemon - Yet another ruby unit test framework, this one focused on making sure there's a test case for every method.
  • Reincarnate - How to make a ruby class inherit from itself.
  • Sphinx Monitoring Plugin - The latest nice touch from the Scout guys.
  • Cromwell - Wrapper for ruby signal handling to allow you to easily create unkillable scripts.
  • Stencil - Free-text (ie, not assuming HTML) templating system.
  • Rubinius 1.0.0-RC2 Released - Ruby in Ruby moves along.
  • Firebug 1.6a1 - The next branch of Firebug (for Firefox 3.6/3.7) has gone live.

Double Shot #618

Well, at least it's January.
  • Primer - Paste in HTML, get back a CSS stylesheet with all the classes and IDs listed.
  • jLinq - LINQ style querying in Javascript. This is getting out of hand.
  • Save MySQL! - You know, if the MySQL founders wanted to exercise so much control over its future, maybe they shouldn't have sold the company.
  • RSSOwl 2.0.2 - A new release of a desktop RSS reader. That's a rare occurence these days.
  • hanoi - Some glue for automated jQuery testing.
  • netrecorder - Record actual network traffic for later use with fakeweb.
  • A Month in the Life of Thinking Sphinx - Lots of nice changes to this gem lately.
  • phd - Push deployments for passenger.
  • ReMate - TextMate plugin to disable automatic project tree refresh, making TM more useful against remote shares.

Double Shot #617

Welcome to 2010. Let's hope it's better than 2009 all around.
  • The Hackety Manifesto - A plan to make programming accessible again, as it was in the days of the C64 (or antique 8-bit computer of your choice).

Double Shot #616

End of the year at last. If you've got a few spare dollars looking for a good cause (and a tax deduction), I'm still helping out the charity:water folks.
  • def ~; end - Well, just because you can redefine + doesn't mean you should redefine +.
  • Moodstream - Nothing directly to do with Rails, but nice little UI from Getty.
  • MailStyle: A HTML Email Plugin for Ruby on Rails - HTML Email is a pain in the butt. THis library aims to make it a bit less so.
  • Re - Tool to allow easier construction of complex regular expressions in ruby.

Double Shot #615

Last doctor's appointment of 2009. I hope.
  • Open Source Obligations - Best response I've seen to this week's tempest in a teapot (not that I've looked very hard). "What part of FREE don't you understand?"
  • serve - Wrapper for WEBrick that can also handle Haml, Sass, Textile, Markdown, and ERB as well as HTML.
  • The Master, The Expert, The Programmer - Zed Shaw ruminates on the difference between masters and experts and how this plays out in programming. The people who should take this to heart won't.

Double Shot #614

2009 is still determined to grind me down and spit me out.
  • AJAX Upload - Looks like a nifty javascript way to handle multiple uploads with styled UI.
  • jQuery Tools - Another UI library for jQuery, this one including tabs, tooltips, scrollable galleries, and other goodies.
  • CloudSplit - Cost monitoring for your cloud computing. Currently in private beta.
  • Story Card Faster Than The Speed Of Pivotal Tracker - Slurper exists to bulk upload stories to PT.
  • template_inliner - Works as advertised to cut down rendering time on Rails views that call a lot of partials.

Double Shot #613

Last week of the year. This one can't end soon enough for me.
  • Blueprints 0.4.0 - Another replacement for factories and fixtures with some nice syntactic sugar.
  • Ruby 1.8.7-p248 released - Can't really tell how significant this is because reading Ruby's own changelogs is a mystery to me.
  • holidays - Gem to extend the Ruby date class to make it holiday aware. Works well, once you figure out you have to require the individual holiday support for whatever region you're interested in.
  • CoffeeScript - Rubyish language that compiles down to JavaScript.
  • RMSforms - CSS styling framework especially for forms.
  • formtastic-sass - Sass mixins to style formtastic forms. If only I liked sass.
  • MySQL and Postgres command equivalents (mysql vs psql) - Handy if you switch back and forth.
  • email-spec - Matchers and steps for testing email with RSpec and Cucumber.
  • rspec-integration - A mind meld between regular Rails integration tests and RSpec. So far I like this much better than Cucumber.

Double Shot #612

Going from frequent releases to a year without anything stable enough to use is not a sign of success. Oh well. I'm taking tomorrow off. See you on Monday.

Double Shot #611

Know what day it is? Nope, not 2 days before Christmas: it's the 1-year anniversary of the announcement of the Rails and Merb merger! It's a good thing we don't need Rails 3 to build good web applications.

Double Shot #610

I know there's supposed to be a vacation around here somewhere.
  • APN on Rails Needs a Home - If you're keen for Rails and iPhone dev and want to be the maintainer of a gem, here's an opening.
  • JGate Cloud Computing Beta - Yet another free cloud alternative, this one offering server-side JavaScript hosting via AppJet.
  • has_messages - Reasonably functional plugin to integrate internal messaging to a Rails app, though I did have to fork it and fix a bug.

It's That Time of Year Again

The end of the year is fast approaching. That means mad dash to wrap up projects, end of the year tax planning, and the holiday season. It also means it's a good time to think about those less fortunate than most software developers. Well, it's always a good time for that, but at the moment I'm going to ask you to do something about it.

Last year, as some of you may recall, I got involved with helping @wellwishes raise money for charity:water - a group that uses 100% of donated funds to bring safe, clean drinking water to people who don't have it. Folks I know kicked a respectable amount of money into the kitty.

Well, the drive is on again for this year - and good news, instead of worrying about signing up for a Twitter account to send money, you can just hop over to the Developer Wellwishes page and use your credit card. I doubt you'll find a simpler way to directly save lives.

If you've got some spare funds, please donate. If you're wondering how much - well, would you subscribe to A Fresh Cup if it were a magazine? Have my links saved you time this year? What's that worth? Whatever it is, don't send it to me - send it to charity:water.

Thanks.

Double Shot #609

I've got no inside information at all, but there sure was a sudden spate of commit activity in Rails master branch yesterday.

Double Shot #607

Ugh, end of the year accounting is staring me in the face.

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