Double Shot #189
Today it's back to the CSS mines for me. Seem to be lots of folks wanting work in that area lately.
- Freezing Rails with Git - Using git submodules. I'm probably going to have to learn this sooner rather than later.
- MacUpdate Parallels Bundle - Interesting to me not because I want Parallels (so far both my Macs are 100% Microsoft-free, and I intend to keep them that way), but for some of the other packages.
- Introducing Mingle 2.0 - Major rev of the commercial agile management tool from Thoughtworks.
Double Shot #188
Today I need to sort out deployment issues on a couple of sites, I think.
- Boxcar Conductor - Rails Deployment Made Easy - This stuff makes me wish I could afford to host sites at Boxcar.
- TDD With Rails - Slides from a recent talk.
Double Shot #187
Rolled out big new features on two jobs last night. I wonder what the chance is of the clients not finding any major changes they want made?
- Storage Space, the Final Frontier - Amazon is getting ready to add persistent storage volumes to S3. I think they're still safely ahead of Google AppEngine as far as being a useful cloud computing platform goes.
- Open Source Rails - Budding gallery for, well, open source Rails applications.
- Grep in Project Command for TextMate - I need to take a look at this; I'm getting fed up with the sloth of TextMate's built-in full-project search.
Double Shot #186
Well, I know a good deal more about cron than I did yesterday. Which isn't actually saying much.
- textmate-missingdrawer - UI tweak for TextMate. Doesn't float my boat, but some folks will like it.
- LearningRails - A Rails course in the form of free podcasts and screencasts for beginners.
- Phusion Passenger - a.k.a. mod_rails for Apache. Now available in beta form.
- Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview - Good info on what's coming down the pike. (via Riding Rails)
- Mack Framework - Yes, it's yetanother Ruby web framework. (via Ruby Inside)
- Crappy Graphs - An online generator, just in case you need one.
- Psystar OpenMac - White box Mac clone & a lawsuit waiting to happen (via Gadgetopia)
- Living on the Edge of Rails #16 (Github edition) - The latest from Edge Rails development.
Double Shot #185
Making code while the sun shines.
- RDoc 2.0.0 - It's out.
- Avoid Variable Collisions in Rails Controllers - Just a reminder that using some magic words for instance variables can cause you grief.
- Rails or Merb, What's Best for You? - Discussion, with some quick benchmarks.
- Absolute Moron's Guide to Forms in Rails, Part 5 - In this installment, listboxes.
Double Shot #184
Next up on the learning curve: ActiveMerchant.
- ShellShadow - Collaborative terminal client based on Putty that works with their web site to allow two people to share a shell session. Windows-only client, though.
- AppEngine World - "One-stop resource for Google AppEngine".
- Ruby's Not Ready - Another Ruby/Rails vs. Python/Pylons comparison. Ruby loses. Expect rebuttals to continue this endless cycle.
Double Shot #183
Another day, another site deployed.
- Setting up CruiseControl.rb with/for Git Based Projects - The git mania continues to wash over the Rails world.
- Pastie Packer - Tool to transmit entire groups of files via Pasties.
- Git for RubyForge Accounts - Dr. Nic explores.
- Merb Tips II - More pointers from Matt Aimonetti.
Double Shot #182
Looks like I am solely a Rails developer now; I've reached the point with SL's continued problems that I no longer want to invest time there. Makes me antsy to have all my eggs in one basket, so I'll have to think about what's next.
- Absolute Moron's Guide to Forms in Rails, Part 3 and Part 4 - More info from the Softies on Rails guys.
- How to Build ohcount on Leopard - Fun tool for coming up with loc counts. Not that they mean much.
- Welcome to the New hobocentral.net - Relaunch (or at least facelift) for the Hobo project.
- Morph eXchange - New approach to SAAS deployment for Rails developers.
- RailsConf 2008 Schedule - Some fun-looking sessions, but I won't be there. Can't justify the time or cost this year.
Double Shot #181
After writing about it most of the weekend, I may actually understand how Liquid templates work now.
- Fleximage - Another rails image uploading and management plugin.
- RailsBrain - AJAXified version of the Rails help, including Edge Rails. You can download a prebuilt Fluid app to use it on your Mac from Rails Jedi.
- Merb Tips I - A medley.
- Rails Diagramming Stencil for Omnigraffle - In case you'd like to draw your own pretty ERDs.
- Living on the Edge (of Rails) #14 and #15 - More news from the front.
Double Shot #180
A word to the wise: getaddrinfo failures during rake db:migrate do not necessarily indicate trouble with mysql. In my case, it was caused by a missing SMTP server.
- Git TextMate Bundle - A batch of Rails developers will be wanting this soon.
- The Web Development Clients' 10 Commandments - Amusing.
- Branchable migrations - A new take at handling migrations when multiple developers are on a Rails project.
- BannerZest - Tool for making Flash navigation banners for web sites. Looks useful. (via MacApper)
- Custom Forms Validation Without ActiveRecord - Using the validatable plugin.
Double Shot #179
Still mired in HTML/CSS design across multiple sites. But still billable, so I don't mind learning new tricks.
- Acts as ASP.NET (a Ruby on Rails Plugin) - I missed this yesterday, but it's still amusing.
- Static Pages for the Enterprise - There's been some discussion lately of how to best serve those little mostly-static pages that any Rails site needs.
- Scalr - Scaleable Web Sites with EC2 - It's getting ever-easier to set up a server farm using Amazon as your backend, complete with load-balancing and automatic launching of new instances.
- IBM to Host Private Second Life Regions - This may explain in part why Linden Lab doesn't seem to care much about keeping regular customers happy lately. Other fish to fry.
- Rails is Moving from SVN to Git - The URL for the git repo actually leaked yesterday, but it's not actually active yet. Soon, though.
- Git Magic - This looks like a useful tutorial.
Double Shot #178
Setting up a Rails server hasn't gotten any easier since the last time I did it. Bah.
- Data Visualization with Ruby and RMagick - Where Are Those Bikes ? - Nice little mashup including the Google Maps static API.
- Seed - a seed data/fuzzing plugin - Generate random but realistic data to bulk out your Rails app database for testing or demos.
- Absolute Moron's Guide to Forms in Rails, Part 2 - More tutorial from the Softies on Rails.
- Cobol on Cogs - I think this was the only thing I actually laughed at yesterday.
Double Shot #177
Had the great fun of setting up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, since my sweetie is in the process of joining me in Rails-land.
- Github Pricing - Looks like they plan to begin charging for private repos on a sliding scale.
- gibak 0.3.0 (backup tool using Git): OSX support, extended attributes, bugfixes - Yup, you can use git to keep backups of your stuff.
- Moving on from centralised-decentralised development, or: what’s after github and gitorious? - Some folks are starting to worry that we're repeating centralized version control in the Ruby community using a theoretically decentralized tool
- Wireshark 1.0 Released - An actual mature open source project. Amazing.(It's a pretty decent network protocol analyzer, in case you didn't already know).
- Top 100 Rails Sites - As measured by Alexa data, so take the list with a grain of salt.
Double Shot #176
I find that I'm not in any particular hurry to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.
- Deploying Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard - Another article from the Apple Developer Connection.
- MySQL Workbench - Visual database design tool for MySQL, including the ability to reverse-engineer a schema to a diagram. Alas, Windows/.NET only at the moment.
- StrokeDB - Embeddable distributable document database written in Ruby.
- Exciting Times in Rails Land - A rundown on what's coming in 2.1.
- Rails CHM Documentation - Another version of the docs for 2.0.2 in downloadable form.
Double Shot #175
And now I get to become an instant Liquid expert. I've got the greatest clients.
- Managing Required Gems on Rails Projects - Check out the comments, too. Turns out there are a whole bunch of solutions. I must investigate.
- Cyndicate 1.2 - The web site isn't updated yet, but version 1.2 is out. This continues to be my newsreader of choice for the Mac.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #13 - Git script/plugin install, has_one :through - And other changes to edge Rails.
- markItUp! Universal markup editor - jQuery plugin to convert any texarea to a markup editor, in a variety of formats.
- Rapid Rails part 1: Command-line Mastery - A variety of tips to make your more productive in Rails-land.
- ADS Mantis Hosting - New alternative for managed Rails hosting.
Double Shot #174
Three major projects in the air at one time is close to my limit. Doing a lot of juggling these days. But it's fun!
- Is Windows a First-Class Platform for Ruby?- Peter Cooper asks the question. The answers bring out the best and worst of the Ruby community.
- Introducing Whistler - Whitelist markup filter that works in merb (or elsewhere).
- Become an Xcoder, Leopard Edition - Free ebook I could have used a while ago.
- Managing SEO-Friendly HTML Titles with Rails - A small discussion of the ways to do this.
- Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails for Apache) Preview - Rails deployment on Apache will become a good deal easier when this ships. Right now you can watch a demo movie.
Double Shot #173
Deployment day today...I'd better get back to this CSS.
- Things (in the Rails World) You Don't Yet Understand - Interesting exercise: what do you know you could comprehend, want to learn more about, but haven't found time for yet? Mine would include the ins and outs of deployment and server stacks (even though I've done it), Test/Unit (I skipped right to RSpec, which is hurting me on a project right now), and ActiveMerchant (which I need to implement real soon).
- The Language Question - Jay Fields considers some of the reasons (other than technical superiority) why devs pick a particular language to specialize in. In my case, the move to Ruby was, of course, driven by my desire to abandon Microsoft and my perception of where the markets were.
Double Shot #172
This week I appear to be finally getting enough CSS into my brain to use it without thrashing. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.
- DRY(a): Year After Year- Tiny Rails plugin to handle updating the current year in views.
- Rails Migrations in git Branches - Tool to handle renumbering and merging.
Double Shot #171
It's shaping up to be another busy week. Can't complain about that.
- Safari 3.1 Breaks Your App - Apparently the new Safari doesn't play nice with Prototype. Here's a workaround.
- DownThemAll! - Firefox add-on that came in very handy the other day when I needed to grab all the images from a page redesign. If you use Images, View Image Information from the Web Dev toolbar you can build a page that has URLs for everything including CSS background images.
- Absolute Moron's Guide to Forms in Rails, Part I - From the Softies on Rails guys.
- RailsMan - Rails application management utility for OS X, aiming to replace the now-discontinued Locomotive.
Double Shot #170
If there's a really good crosstab query solution for Rails, I wasn't able to find it yesterday.
- Customizing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard - Another bit of evangelism from Apple.
- How to Export Data as CSV - From Rails, that is. Proves to be trivially easy.
- Living on the edge (of Rails) #12 - More incremental progress is coming our way.
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