Today's question: can I lay down long enough to get an MRI done? That's the non-Ruby version of MRI.

• Snow Leopard Update for ScanSnap - For you ScanSnap owners, the FineReader bits are finally updated.
• Time zone warp - Code to help test time zone aware code in Rails.
• A few SunSpot Tips - How to get up and running with SunSpot as your FTS provider in a Rails application.
• reflection - Tool to use git to mirror production files down to your development machine.

Sometimes, my day starts at 2AM. It's not up to me.

• Coding Clean and Semantic Templates - Some tips on avoiding "div soup", useful if you don't write too much HTML from scratch.
• Growl 1.2 - Built as 64-bit for Snow Leopard, but not patched to work with 10.6.2's Mail.
• Human Textile Reference - Guide to Textile designed to be embedded in other projects.
• Request-log-analyzer 1.5.0 - Now including MySQL slow query log support.

It feels like there's a lot going on in the Rails world these days, even though Rails itself has not been shipping huge changes.

• CanCan - New authorization gem/plugin from Ryan Bates.
• Hobo 0.9.0 Released - This extension for Rails is in feature freeze for 1.0 now.
• 25 Tips for Intermediage Git Users - Some nice stuff here. I didn't know about 'git gui blame FILE' for example.
• EC2 Deployment with Rubber - Capistrano extension to provision and manage EC2 deployments.

Today's fine selection of orts:

• Ajax AutoComplete for jQuery - Looks like a useful little bit of kit.
• CodeSlam - "Your code editor in the cloud" now taking applications for beta invites.
• Jammit - Asset packaging and compression library for Rails that also supports JavaScript templates.

Drifting into another week...

• GrowlMail vs. 10.6.2 - This thread has a generic cure for Mail.app plugins refusing to load when you upgrade Snow Leopard.
• FCGI for Ruby 1.9 - Another gem that might help some folks with trouble upgrading.
• Ruby in a Nutshell - Cute illustration of the relative complexity of various languages.
• jQuery UI Multiselect - Nice sortable, searchable jQuery plugin.
• Rails-like console for any Rack based ruby web app - Sort of a script/console for any Rack framework.
• Sleeper - New app monitoring solution that promises scalability analyses. Currently in private beta, but they're taking beta requests.
• YARD 0.4.0 (The Whole Nine) Released Today - This RDoc alternative is coming along nicely.
• gh - bash utilities for GitHub.
• Pony Rides Again - This ruby mail gem is seeing a renewed surge in development.
• bootstrapper - Yet another plugin for Rails data initialization.

Last week Philip Hallstrom posted Ruby in a Nutshell... offering a quick visual comparison of four of O'Reilly's books and dramatically illustrating how much simpler Ruby is than Java. Inspired by this, I just spent a few minutes poking around the O'Reilly web site to construct what we might call the "Nutshell Index": how many pages it takes to cover the essentials of a language or technology. Without further ado:

 224 Ruby
 240 UML
 352 Rails
 384 PHP
 576 MySQL
 576 Cocoa
 592 SQL
 624 C
 720 XML
 742 Python
 768 Perl
 768 VB.NET
 816 C++
 832 Web design
 944 Linux
1046 C#
1264 Java

And yes, I know this has no statistical validity at all - likely it represents more the coverage depth decisions made by individual authors and editors more than anything else. Still fun.

Rails remains fun to work with, at least for me. How about you?

• Programming Contest! And the Challenge is…Measure Rails Momentum - Another rather silly content from Engine Yard.
• PlainView - DSL to add views to your Rails migrations.
• construct_sql - Little hack to use Rails' SQL building tool from within script/console.
• Hashie: The Hash Toolkit - Create objects that are more than a struct but lighter than an ActiveRecord instance.

Somehow I didn't surf across too much yesterday. Distracted, I guess.

• slideViewerPro - Nice looking jQuery plugin image gallery engine.
• Purchase additional storage - In case you have a lot of stuff hanging around and nowhere to put it, Google will sell you 16TB of storage for $4096 per year. I find this amusing.
• Ninja testing your Rails Plugins - Extended tutorial from Elad.
• Dead simple JavaScript Unit Testing in Rails - Tutorial/video from Dr. Nic.

I've had better weeks. But there's always fun code to look at:

• Time To Blog - Rails Developer John Lannon writes about being shot. If that doesn't make you feel lucky, nothing will.
• Consuming XMPP PubSub in Ruby - Worked example of some of the latest buzziness in action.
• rails_best_practices - Gem to provide some code-quality checking of Rails applications.
• NoSQL Ecosystem - Some guidance as to what's out there, and a useful introduction to how the various products differ from one another.
• RubyInstaller Release Candidate 1 - New alternative for getting Ruby 1.8 or 1.9 up on Windows.
UserTesting.com - Usability testing over the net at $29 per user on the panel.

Still slowly rearranging stuff around here. I think all the content is in the new system.

• Meet jQuery - The PeepCode screencast tackles jQuery. A good intro if you need to get the lay of the land and see how to use and extend jQuery.
• Jaml: beautiful HTML generation for JavaScript - You know, I'm not convinced that everything that can be done should be done, but this at least looks technically cool.
• Django vs Rails - One startup explains why they made the decision they did. Good high-level comparison.

Welcome to another week; I'd be pleased if it's an improvment from the last one.

• Recurly - Another API-based service to handle recurring subscription billings for your startup.
• styled_objects - Rails plugin that works in conjunction with Less CSS to break your stylesheets up into partial-sized chunks.
• Minimal and Modern Layout: PSD to XHTML/CSS Conversion - A rather detailed tutorial.
• Ruby on Sails - Google Wave provider implemented in Ruby.
• A 50 Lines-of-Code JavaScript Animation Framework: Say Hello to Émile - Along with a tutorial presentation on how it was implemented.
• Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 - Pretty straightforward, actually.
• Building a Twitter Filter With Sinatra, Redis, and TweetStream - Nice little alternative tool chain demonstration.
• The (Some) Fallacies of Test First Development - Personally, I'm happy to see someone else in the Ruby community willing to defend test-last development.
• liquid-editor - Embeddable highlighting editor for Liquid syntax.

If you're seeing this, you're visiting A Fresh Cup in its new home on Squarespace. Though I've been on WordPress's hosted system for several years, I draw the line at having my host insert affiliate javascript in my blog that screws up navigation shortcuts. So, off to a new host. The migration was pretty painless, and though I'm sure there will be teething pains for a bit, I hope you stick around while I get things tidied up. The content is what matters, right?

Up for my first manic burst of work for the day.

• DailyJS - A roundup of JavaScript stuff from Alex Young, Ric Roberts, and Justin Knowlden. It's off to a promising start.
• Fixtures without validation with Factory Girl - Nice idea for generating bad data in a concise and repeatable way.
• fast_fixture - Develop with MyISAM, test with InnoDB. Seems a bit iffy but should definitely speed up the tests.
• shoulda-addons - Test profiling and color-coded test names for Shoulda.

I'm starting to feel like a sleep deprivation experiment. Good thing other people are writing good software still.

• Devise: authentication for lazy programmers - Lots of activity in this project lately.


• Gity - New git client for OS X. Early days yet, free at the moment. Looks like the goal is to give us menu/keystroke replacements for much of the git command line.


• Integrity 0.2.0 - New release for this continuous integration server with (among other things) hooks to GitHub, Heroku, and Campfire.


• PagerDuty - Switchboard for all your email notifications, with multi-user duty shifts, phone and SMS notification, and more. Looks pretty useful if you're the one who has to scramble to respond to sites being down.


• Bluepill: a new process monitoring tool - Designed for simplicity and lack of memory leaks. If you're fed up with god and monit it looks worth a try.


• Help John recover - Rails dev John Lannon got shot in a robbery, and the community is collecting funds to help support him durign his recovery.

Today's challenge: Ziya Charts. If I'm not back tomorrow, I lost.

• Mockingbird: New Cappucino-based wireframing tool. iPlotz and MockFlow are two other tools in this space (was just looking into this for a client yesterday).


• First look at rails 3.0.pre - Dr. Nic dives into getting started and using generators.


• Introducing Resque - The GitHub guys have built a new redis-backed background job library. Given some of the recent experiences I've had with their background jobs, I'm not all that sure the kinks are out yet.


• Thinking_Sphinx - Easy Setup Tutorial - Quick start from Philip Ingram.

Thanks to everyone who commiserated about my pinched nerve issues. I think I'm still a fair way from death's door.

• jQuery Grid Rails Plugin - I keep meaning to look at the jQuery datagrid. Maybe this will encourage me.


• gdb.rb - gdb7 hooks for MRI. A fresh way to be nosy about running ruby code.

Busy weekend. Let's unload some of these browser tabs.

• Improving Code using Metric_fu - A concrete example of how metrics can drive better code.


• Eventbug (alpha) Released - New firebug extension to help in debugging event-related issues.


• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 - Probably about time for developers to think about upgrading. I've been running 3.7 alphas with no serious trouble myself.


• New in the Twitter gem: Lists! - Just in case you want to code against Twitter's new shiny.


• Limelight - Ruby/JRuby backed desktop cross-platform UI framework. Looks interesting.


• Ruby / Method aliasing and chaining - Good discussion of method chains and the dreaded alias_method_chain.


• FireQuery - Firebug extension for jQuery development.


• Really easy continuous integration with Signal - A Rails-backed CI server.


• trap_door - Rails plugin to send spambots off to a trap.

Been a very long week, but I'm happy with the way various projects are improving.

• Amazon RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service or MySQL in the Cloud for Ruby On Rails. - A quick How-To.


• yUMLmeRails - Rake tasks and Shoes app to create model diagrams for Rails. (via Under the Hat)

There is no apparent end of code that needs to be written.

• wysihat-engine-demo - Quick way to see the wysihat editing control in action.


• RailsBridge Bugmash VM Script - Script to build your own server to test the Rails source code from zero.


• bigrecord - ActiveRecord replacement to use distributed stores like HBase.


• Heroku Add-ons - Solr, New Relic, Amazon RDS, Cron, and more for Heroku's easy servers.


• Git Magic - Another free online book about git.


• Prag Pro Wri Mo - Pragmatic are encouraging people to spend 30 days in November figuring out if they really want to write a programming book.


• FOSS FAQ - StackOverflow-style site from the RedMonk guys, covering free and open source software issues.


• Underscore.js - Javascript utility library providing a bunch of functional stuff.


• Using BlackBird javascript console in Rails - Glue plugin from Elad Meidar.


• Installing Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL on Snow Leopard - Another guide for those who haven't upgraded yet.

Today I think I shall be a performance expert.

• Funding Thinking Sphinx - Pat Allen is looking for sponsorship to spend a month working on the Thinking Sphinx plugin. That's a good cause.


• Mu - Facebook Connect library written in JavaScript.


• Introducing Amazon RDS - The Amazon Relational Database Service - Essentially, canned MySQL servers in the Amazon cloud.


• nice_find - Find replacement for TextMate that uses grep or git_grep on your project.