Checked in another contribution to the DocRails project yesterday - A Guide to Active Record Associations.

• Analytics with Capistrano - Interesting idea, though much is left as an exercise for the reader.


• SQL Injetion issue in :limit and :offset parameter - A Rails security issue worth paying a bit of attention to.

I pushed out some more improvements to both finder_filter and user_event_logger over the weekend.

• Rails 2.1.1 - A bugfix release.


• Get a Free License for Today! - Today is a little Mac menubar app that helps track your tasks & calendar. It's not bad, and if you're a blogger you can get it for free.


• Map Rails Kit - Geocoding and Google Maps plotting in one abstract API, for $199. I've done this work myself, and I'm pretty sure I charged my client more than $199 for it.


• Ruby on Struts - A contrarian view about RESTful routes in Rails.


• ActsAsOrderedTree - Coming in handy on a project for me currently. Seems to fit my brain better than BetterNestedSet.


• acts_as_ferret tutorial - A good introduction.


• Asset Versioning in Rails - Understanding why Rails tacks that querystring on to your images.


• Inspect My SQL - Another tool for performance-tuning in Rails.


• DB Fixtures Replacement Step by Step - How to move to factory_girl for testing. I'm starting to feel this itch myself.

OK, now I have enough work for the month. Time to buckle down and get it done.

• DDL Transactions - Now supported in edge Rails for much safer migrations. Best reason I've seen yet to switch away from MySQL (where they are not supported).


• Django 1.0 Released - The official announcement. And here's a handy cheat sheet.


• Keeping a git fork in synch with the forked repo - I've had to hunt this down too many times. Time to blog it.


• railsdoc - My first experiment with building a Ubiquity command.

Things appear to be settling out on the "underemployed" side.

• Hobo 0.8 Released - Still moving on towards a 1.0 release.


• Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails - Forthcoming from Pragmatic Press.


• Building the Never Blocking Rails, Making Rails 12x Faster - At least, for some database-bounded operations.


• Changeset 8961 - The tag for Django 1.0 Final. Congratulations to the Django team.

Looks like I'm either going to be overly busy this month or underemployed. Should find out in the next day or two which it will be. Fingers crossed.

• Kete - Rails-based community/KM/CMS application. Version 1.1 just released.


• RazorSQL - I'm looking into this for sqlite management. I wish the Navicat guys did a sqlite version.


• Rak - Ruby-based replacement for grep with extra bells and whistles.


• Web 2.0 Bingo! - This is my life writing for WWD.

September is starting out real slowly for me.

• Unobtrusive Prototype.js - Another PeepCode screencast, this one on a topic I've really been meaning to learn about.

Spent part of the weekend hacking around in Rails documentation. Made my first core-ish commit as part of the docrails project.

• Capistrano 2.5.0 - With additional task-management goodness.


• GetBundle - TextMate bundle to get other TextMate bundles. Why didn't I install this ages ago?


• RailsWheels - An attempt to build a licensing and commercial sales infrastructure for Rails plugins.


• Configatron 1.0.0 Released - General-purpose manager for configuration variables in Ruby applications. (via RubyFlow)


• AsciiDoc - The markup system being used for core Rails documentation.


• Source-Highlight - You'll need this to get good output from AsciiDoc. Fortunately there's a port, but the port is a bit broken. On OS X 10.5, I had to install the boost port first (sudo port -v install boost) and then install the source-highlight port (sudo port install source-highlight) to get it to work. Do use the -v switch on boost; it takes for-bloody-ever to build and that's the only way you'll be reassured that it hasn't rolled over and died.


• AsciiDoc TextMate Bundle - Still in its early days.


• Rails Guides HackFest - I was actually writing before this was announced. Good timing for me, though.

It's hard to be witty when your throat is on fire. Kids = colds.

• IE Death March - Another doomed attempt to kill off IE6. Heck, I've got clients who still need to support IE5 in some vertical markets.


• Why we bill by the hour - Doesn't everyone work this way by now?


• Rails 2.x Configuration Cheat Sheet - Collected notes on a bunch of stuff that RDoc doesn't pick up.


• Radiant CMS Sprint Weekend - A chance to spend a weekend hacking on open source code. October 25.


• Mysqlplus a new thread aware MySQL driver - Designed to make Active Record faster.


• MerbCamp - Merb is grown up enough to have a conference now. October 11-12 in San Diego.

I started tweaking a couple of other plugins to meet my needs. Repos on github: finder_filter and from_param. Neither is ready to merge changes back upstream yet.

• SQLite-Ruby 1.2.3 - Minor maintenance release of this glue bit.


• Mercurial binary packages for Windows and OS X - I needed to look at some code in a Mercurial repo and wondered how easy it was to install. The answer proved to be "very."


• Distributed revision control with Mercurial - Now I need to find time to read this.

It looks like the universe may be poised to fill in another hole in my work schedule. Thanks, universe.

• Format CSS Online - Tool for applying a variety of formatting rules to CSS files, to make up for your sloppiness during development.


• Envy Casts - The latest addition to the paid Rails screencasts ecosystem.


• Cap 1.4.1? Go 1.4.2. Now. - An upgrade reminder for users of older versions of Capistrano. Fortunately for me, I finally managed to pull all of my own projects up to the Cap 2.x series.


• The awesomest filter and sort ever - Courtenay is playing with named scopes and searching on multiple conditions in edge Rails. It's looking useful.

This is probably a good time to mention that I've done a bunch more cleanup on the google_analytics plugin.

• Zero to Production in 15 Minutes - Step by step guide to deploying a Rails application on JRuby.


• Comparing PHP to Ruby on Rails - A relatively even-handed look from the Less Accounting guys.


• daemon_controller: a library for robust daemon management - Another tool from the team behind Phusion Passenger, aimed at better coordinating daemon process management for production.


• Firebug 1.2 Released - The announcement, with a good summary of what's new.


• What's Hot on GitHub - A roundup from Ruby Inside.


• Mack 0.7.0 - Another of the Ruby web frameworks marches along.


• GenerateData.com - Tool for quickly building reasonable test data. 200 rows for free, after that you can clone the site or pay for an account.


• MySQL Tasks - Plugin to backup, restore, and more as Rake tasks.

Thanks to the FiveRuns folks for featuring me in their TakeFive interview series, and welcome to new readers.

• Persistent Django on Amazon EC2 and EBS - The Easy Way - Detailed instructions. With EBS, AWS is reaching some sort of tipping point.


• How to Fix your Rails Helpers - Some suggestions on refactoring.


• WICE Assignment Lists - Multi-select listbox interface for HABTM relations in Rails.


• Scout Checks in on Passenger - I've been looking for a Passenger-aware Rails monitoring solution. Not sure I'm ready to pay for Scout, though. (via RubyFlow)


• rspec_validations_expectations gem released - Check that your models contain the validations you want, without hitting the database to test Rails-generated code.


• DoS Vulnerability in REXML - Time to patch your Rails applications.


• Ruby Amazon E-Commerce REST Service API   (amazon-ecs) - I used this to hook up some book stuff on my slowly-rebuilding personal site. It worked well.


• Maatkit - A batch of low-level MySQL tools.


• Everyday git With 20 Commands or So - The basics, though you don't even need to memorize this much to get started.


• ZiYa - Spiffy SWF-based charting gem. Now at version 2.

I think it's about time that I started tracking the changes in Edge Rails, even though I don't understand a bunch of the code. Pushing myself is good for technical growth.

• Amazon EBS - Persistent storage that you can attach to an EC2 instance. Amazon pretty well defines cloud computing, despite everyone else sniffing around.


• Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store - And here are some instructions for putting that storage to good use.


• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know - Darn, why didn't I ever think of having my readers write my books?


• Developer Compensation: The New Reality? - A VC arguing that you don't need to give startup developers stock options and such because developers are now a complete commodity. I don't think things have quite reached that point, but it's a reminder to continually look for areas where you can stand out.


• LessProjects - Project-tracking software from the LessEverything guys.


• Ruby Inside Gets Redesigned - And it looks good.

This post is a followup to one that I did a while ago on My Tools of the Trade.  I typically have a lot of browser tabs open - as in, 50 to 100 simultaneously. But there are some that tend to stick open for most of the time, as I use them to manage, look things up, or otherwise run my business. Here are a few of those web tools that I find useful.

• Grand Central - Grand Central manages all of my incoming phone calls, directing them to my office line, my cell phone, and sometimes even Skype for me, as well as taking messages. I like the convenience of having just a single phone number. Unfortunately, I don't like that Grand Central under Google's ownership has become moribund, and I may well switch to one of their competitors that charges just to get better service and something that's under active development.


• Cashboard - This is the tool we're using around here for time-tracking and invoicing. It works fine, and I appreciate having an OS X Dashboard widget for time tracking. But if I ever find a good, networked, affordable client-side tool, I'll probably switch; I don't like shuffling financials off to the web.


• Nagios - Not strictly a web tool, as our Nagios server is running on an old laptop behind my desk. But since I monitor it via browser, it's going on this list. Nagios is our server monitor, tracking uptime and ping times and free disk and memory and like that across a bunch of client sites. It's a bit of a pain to get set up the first time, but after you learn how it works it's fairly easy to spin up monitors for a new site.


• HopToad - I'm in the process of migrating our Rails sites from using ExceptionNotifier to using this free online service. Errors are just more manageable in a web UI than in an email interface.


• APIdock - There are a metric boatload of sites out there that offer browseable versions of the Rails and/or Ruby APIs. This is the one I'm using these days; the formatting is nice, the search is fast, and the user comments are getting useful.


• Working With Rails - I wander through here fairly frequently to see whether anyone in the Rails community has had good things to say about me. Hope springs eternal.


• github - I've got a few repositories hosted here (though our client-based work is on a private git server). I may still have a SourceForge account as well, but I don't use it any more.


• Google Analytics - I've seen better analytics, but Google's are pretty good, and the price is right. Plus, it ties into the work I've done on the google_analytics plugin.


• No Kahuna - Task tracking that's simple enough to use with any client, even ones who would be overwhelmed by a traditional issue-tracking application.


• Hiveminder - We're using this for shared task and assignment management for Web Worker Daily. It fills the need, though I think there's room for a better tool.

I've now reached the point where setting up a new Rails server at RimuHosting is almost routine. I may know a thing or two about sysadmin after all.

• JustHackIt - Folks looking for other folks to hack code with, for fun or profit. Proof that having an idea is not the hardest part.


• RSpec: It Should Behave Like - RSpec pattern advice from Robby Russell.

Shipped off a major piece of work last night - now waiting to see if the client is happy. Always fun.

• EnglishLikeQueries - A DSL for Rails for people who don't think in SQL.


• Coquette - New set of free, rounded, shadowed, hi-res icons. I expect we'll see quite a bit of them. (via WebAppers)

Having a wonderful time metaprogramming. Wish you were here.

• Ylastic - Web-based tools for managing Amazon Web Services. $50 per month.


• BOSSman - Gem for hooking up to Yahoo's open search services.

Shaping up to be another busy week; fortunately the weekend was good for catching up this time.

• iCHM - Nice-looking CHM reader for OS X. Unfortunately I'm not finding that its search works as well as that in Chamonix.


• REST, I Just Don't Get It - Heretical musings from Damien Katz. The comments are well worth reading. Also worth reading is Dare Obasanjo's Explaining REST to Damien Katz.


• Use MacVim and rails.vim plugin to edit your Rails work - An alternative if you don't want to drink the TextMate koolaid.


• GitHub RubyGems - It really is dead simple to publish a gem via github.


• GemPlugins: A Brief Introduction to the Future of Rails Plugins - And it's easy to convert an existing plugin to a gem, too.


• App Update - Dashboard widget to track software freshness on your Mac.

I woke up today having dreamed some Ruby code. Even scarier, when I added it to the project, it actually worked.

• The Complete Guide for You to Become an Almighty jQuery Developer - Fat list of links.


• 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers - Pretty basic, but worth a quick skim.


• Build Better Pages with Firebug - A basic tutorial.

More and more in Rails I can say "Yeah, I did something like that on another project." This makes life easier.

• References2 - Yet another Rails and such API lookup site, this one featuring AJAXy search for speed.


• Some improvements to Fluid Campfire scripts - For those of you using Campfire in a SSB.


• Editra - Free cross-platform programmer's editor.