I don't know about you, but I'm about ready for this month to be over.

• Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters - A long argument in favor of SASS, with the expected debate in the comments. I'm starting to get convinced.


• textorize: Pristine Font Rendering for the Web - Command-line tool to create web typography images.


• Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-20090928 released - And apparently with a good speed boost.


• penctl-ruby - Ruby wrapper for the pen load-balancers control tool.


• Testing Named Scopes - Some discussion from thoughtbot about how they tackle this annoying problem.


• WysihatEngine - Rails engine to help integrate the 37signals WyshiHat rich text editor to your application.

At the end of the day, you have to ship code. Or sleep.

• MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comparison - Reasonably fair, though it misses the fact that GUI tools for MySQL are generally better.


• Software patents should be abolished - Amen.


• script/nginx - Instructions for getting nginx + passenger running in your dev environment.


• RubyMine 2.0 Beta Overview - Some nice features coming in the next version of this IDE.


• Textmate Tip: Showing hidden files in the project viewer - Useful for editing .gitignore, among other things.


• Bumps - Project to extend Cucumber to work with Google Wave.

Congratulations to GitHub on a successful move.

• Generate gem.yml and .gems for Rails - Handy when deploying to Engine Yard or Heroku.


• SVN Server Admin Issue: Fix It! - The fact that naive Capistrano deploys can put excess and dangerous files on your server if you're using SVN has been discovered again.


• BugMash Cheat Sheet - Put together for the RailsBridge BugMash that happened over the weekend, but useful for anyone working on the Rails source.


• Why I work with a developer hotline - It's nice to have happy customers.


• convert_theme - Dr. Nic is working on code to suck HTML themes into Rails apps and properly set them up for dynamic bits. Looks worth keeping an eye on.


• jQuery Desktop - Some people can do amazing things with javascript.


• Construct - Yet another CI server for Rails, this one implemented as a Rails application.


• validatious-on-rails - Another bit of glue between Rails models and client-side validations.


• Review Board - Open source code review tool. This might bear looking into.

Kids these days...whatever happened to sleeping in late?

• jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet - Sadly, "Visual" means "static PDF" but if you want a 6-page reference to the jQuery API with short descriptions and a few code snippets, here it is.


• ExtJS on Rails - Or you could look at yet another alternative javascript library.

Not too much cooking this morning.

• Ruby on Rails Gravitar Plugin - Giving you gravitar_image_tag for your code.


• CouchLog - A plugin to store your Rails log files in CouchDB.


• Railings: A full featured Ruby on Rails template - Joel Moss's take on templating.

Are you ready for the BugMash this weekend?

• SecureRandom -- Stop writing your own random number and string generators - Just a reminder that Rails provides this amenity too.


• Ruby on Rails Event - A RailsBridge-inspired workshop for women coming up in Boston.


• Introducing Google Chrome Frame - Plugin that hosts Google Chrome inside the IE shell. I frankly don't expect to see huge uptake of this; seems like more grandstanding than anything else, and organizations set on IE6 will just block it.


• TweetStream: Ruby Access to the Twitter Streaming API - More Ruby goodness for those trying to write Twitter-backed services.


• ProPay CartLite - At $40/yr, this looks like it might be an easy alternative for sites that only need a tiny bit of ecommerce.


• Rackspace Move Scheduled for Sunday, September 27th at 5PM Pacific Time - The great GitHub relocation is on.

If small children are going to wake me up early, I might as well post links.

• Refinery - Another entry in the Rails CMS sweepstakes.


• Make your shoulda tests faster with fast_context - Pratik offers a technique for speeding up shoulda if your setups are bulky.


• CouchDB-Lucene, CouchDBX, and CouchRest - Not my cup of tea but perhaps yours.

I've had better mornings.

• Quicksilver Beta - Seems to work fine with Snow Leopard, though the web site is a mess.


• Flexible Continuous Testing - watchr is meant to replace autotest, adding more configurability.


• Using p4merge with Git - Just what the title says.


• friendly_id - Another take on a slug/permalink generator.


• jQuery Tools version 1.1.1 - Lots of good stuff here. Some day I really should spend the time to come up to speed on jQuery.


• Using Subversion Ruby Bindings - This got me pointed in the right direction, though I had to do a bit more symlinking to get it to work with rvm.


• Universal Subversion 1.6.5 Binaries for MAC OS X - All nicely precompiled and packaged, with various language bindings.

If you've got a project with multiple git remotes, and you'd like to update both of them with a single operation, there's an easy way to do it. Just edit your .git/config file to include a new target named "all":

[sourcecode language='ruby']
[remote "origin"]
url = git@github.com:ffmike/BigOldRailsTemplate.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = refs/heads/master
[remote "codaset"]
url = git@codaset.com:ffmike/bigoldrailstemplate.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/codaset/*
[remote "all"]
url = git@github.com:ffmike/BigOldRailsTemplate.git
url = git@codaset.com:ffmike/bigoldrailstemplate.git
[/sourcecode]

With this setup, pushes and pulls on my local master branch go to GitHub by default. But if I execute 'git push all' it updates both the GitHub repository and the Codaset repository. The one little annoyance is that master then thinks it's ahead of the remote, but that's easily remedied by executing a 'git pull' on it.

I've been using this in cases where I'm backing up a repo to a private Gitosis server as well as spreading public repos between multiple cloud services for easy backup.

Not much happening today.

• Full Text Search Using Sphinx for Rails Apps - A basic introduction to hooking up the pieces.

Another quiet morning in the code farm.

• ActiveRecord Attribute Normalization - Plugin to do defensive data munging on the way into the database.


• HTTP Scoop - Nicely done (not free) HTTP sniffer for OS X. Yeah, there's free stuff you can wrestle with, but this one just worked.


• Gource - Visualization software for git repositories.


• Announcing the Devver API (alpha version 0.1) - Among other things, integration between GitHub and Devver.


• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - I really ought to find time to read this.

I can only imagine how much work I could get done without four kids to ferry around.

• Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs - If you don't have the luxury of telling IE6 users to take a hike, this is a great collection of ways to deal with the problem.


• GitHub is Moving to Rackspace! - And those of us who are paying customers hope that this improves things.


• There's No Such Thing As A Good Client - Giles Bowkett nails some of the essential truths of consulting.

All work and no surf makes for a short post.

• Postview - A blog engine written in Ruby using Sinatra and Markdown.


• The Data Liberation Front - Reference site for getting data into and out of Google services.

Busy weekend, busier week coming. Hopefully this means I'm headed back towards the "feast" part of consulting.

• Static: a super simple Rails CMS for Heroku - Just about as simple as simple can be. Looks like the next step up from something like Staticmatic for brochure sites.


• Engine Yard And GitHub Transition - Let's hope this doesn't turn into a messy divorce.


• Tracking Down Slow-Running Examples in RSpec - I didn't know RSpec had a built-in profiler. Until now.


• Top 10+ Things .NET Developers Should Know About Ruby - Slide show from Jeff Cohen.


• New Features of Test Unit 2.x - I think it's worth upgrading, but there can be issues. This gist in a Rails project will make it work whether you have 2.0 on the testing machine or not (which is useful when you share the code with other developers).


• coulda - New take on BDD, inspired by Cucumber but with good old methods instead of fancy regex matching.


• Using Facebooker to make a Rails site with Facebook Connect - Best quick intro I've found, though there's plenty of other info out there.


• Find where to index your tables on a Rails app - Elad Meidar is working on solving this via static codel analysis.


• Statsample - Statistical library for Ruby.


• foreigner - Pretty slick schema and migration support for foreign keys in Rails.


• testicles - Yet another testing framework for Ruby.

This would be a good day to ship some code, wouldn't it?

• Testing with IE6, IE7 and IE8 on VirtualBox - If you must pollute your dev box with IE images here's one way to do it.


• gold - Workflow script for git with a notion of review.


• AutomateIt - Another alternative for ruby-based server configuration.


• CodePlex Foundation - Microsoft has launched an open source foundation to do...something. Some of the people involved are good folks, but I must admit I still view this effort with nothing but suspicion. Yeah, they kicked in a million bucks, but so what? That's like me donating the change from my couch.

Small child is back on early waking cycle, so you get an early cup.

• Increase Firefox 3.* Performance by Optimizing the SQLite Databases [Windows, Linux and Mac OSX] - Probably of marginal use unless you're a really heavy user.


• auth_helpers - Extra code modules for authlogic to save you from writing the common bits like password resets yourself.


• websolr - Private beta, but you can guess from the name what it does.


• Reddit on Digg's move to Cassandra - Proof that the wisdom of crowds isn't.

Just a few links to get you through this midweek day.

• How to avoid the dog-pile effect on your Rails app - How to make your cache use a bit smarter on heavily-trafficked apps.


• Cheezburger API Overview - How come none of my clients ever want APIs like this implemented?


• plog - Another analyzer for your Rails production logs.

The last couple of days have been a lesson in why I don't like doing Enterprisey XML stuff.

• swfupload_fu - Plugin for easy integration of swfupload with Rails.


• Swirrl - New online service for storing any sort of freeform data.


• GitX 0.7 - New release of this OS X git GUI.

I pulled the trigger and upgraded my main dev box to Snow Leopard. Took about 12 hours including some false starts, but all appears to be well.

• Growl 1.2b2 - With Snow Leopard compatibility for GrowlMail.


• Capistrano: Make sure there is something to deploy - Tip passed on by Matt Darby.


• openid_engine - Rails engine wrapper around the ruby-openid gem.


• A Lesson In Timing Attacks (or, Don't use MessageDigest.isEquals) - Some background for folks who don't understand the latest Rails security patch.


• Rails Magazine #4 - Free PDF now available.


• Make rvm and TextMate play nice - Patch from Peter Cooper.


• MailTags for Snow Leopard - Compatibility release, though major new features planned for some time this fall are still a mystery.


• prepend_engine_views - Code to add Rails engine views ahead of those in the app, from Eric Davis.


• Snow Leopard Ruby Development Environment Checklist / Gotchas - Notes from Ric Roberts.


• The Ultimate OS X Snow Leopard Stack For Rails Development - x86_64, MacPorts, Ruby 1.8/1.9, SQL Server, SQLite3, MySQL & More - Another install guide, this one MacPorts-centric.

Time to update Rails in your production applications. (Update: Looks like Rails 2.3.4 may not be compatible with Ruby 1.9. Proceed with caution).

• iStatMenus 2.0 - I was happy to see this come out, since it's one of the few things I missed after my Snow Leopard update killed the old version.


• Ruby on Rails 2.3.4: Security Fixes - New version is out, as well as patches for 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2. Go forth and upgrade.


• How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn't store important data on 37signals' applications - Some background on the Rails vulnerability fixed yesterday.


• Livin’ on the edge: Ruby, Rails, and Snow Leopard - Fast install notes if you don't have a bunch of rebuilding to do.


• That’s Not a Memory Leak, It’s Bloat - Engine Yard offers some advice on taming Active Record.