Having twice as much RAM means working for twice as long before Firefox memory leaks get out of hand.

• Commit, Recover & Transactions in Ruby - A quick look at Transaction::Simple.


• BleakHouse - Library for finding memory leaks in Rails and other Ruby applications.


• Ruby OAuth Gem - Now up to version 0.2.0, probably worth keeping an eye on.

Well, I was charging along on implementing the next feature, and then discovered that I may need to patch ActiveRecord. More fun looms.

• Merbful Authentication Update - More Merb activity to keep an eye on.


• Datebalks: a slimmer datebocks - JavaScript/DHTML code for nice date entry.

As I ease into the weekend I'm contemplating whether I can cram in a bit more work each day. I think not, but there is just so much new stuff to learn...

• Skitch - Fun little graphics and photo-sharing app for the Mac that's just gone into public beta.


•  Navicat 7.1.0 - My tool of choice for MySQL on OS X has just had another little version bump.

Having clients on the far side of the Atlantic means occasionally having to get up early to deal with an emergency. Ah well, that's why I make the big bucks, right?

• Howto: Write a plugin - Brief outline for the aspiring Rails developer.


• vlad version 1.2.0 has been released! - Less-complex alternative to Capistrano for application deployment.

Yesterday one client sent the "final" list of items for a lookup table. This morning I woke up to find the "final and definitive" list in my email. I wonder what's next?

• BuildingWebApps - New information portal largely focused on Rails development, with links from all over.


• On the Road to Merb 1.0 - Notes on the plans for a full release of Merb, with refactoring and documentation and stuff. More details here.


• 10 Alternative Ruby Web Frameworks - Rob Bazinert rounds up the suspects. Rails is not the only game in town.

There's a fine line between doing what the client wants and explaining to them what you think they should want.

• Jungle Disk 1.50a - This is the release version with the "Jungle Disk Plus" functionality. I'm using Jungle Disk for my daily offsite backups and loving it.


• Instant Rails 2.0 Update, Instant Rails 2.0 Lite Coming… - A smaller footprint version is in the works for those with limited space.


• Starling - Twitter's lightweight persistent queue server, now released as a gem. (via Marston Online)


• RubyStack 1.0 released, Catz and Matz rejoice! - The BitNami folks are now out with a wizard-driven Ruby/Rails/etc. installer for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Good to see; the BitNami installers I've used so far have been excellent.


• pgAdmin - This looks like the de facto standard PostgreSQL admin tool.


• PostgreSQL for Mac - I'm gearing up for some potential PostgreSQL-backed development, and this proved to be the easiest way to get it up and running on the Mac (I looked at MacPorts as well, but that was a pain in the butt). See also the notes here.


• Ultrasphinx Updates - Notes and links related to the Sphinx text search engine.

Whew, long weeks are good for billables but they make me ready for weekends. Oh, wait, I'm planning some work this weekend too.

• RSpec User Stories - The latest PeepCode screencast. I think I need to watch this one too.


• Run BASIC - On the other hand, I could just get back to my roots with this implementation of simple Liberty Basic as a web language.

Yesterday's fun included fixing bugs on the fly on a live server. I'm ready for a quieter day today.

• Merb-0.5.0 is out. - And high on the list of things I need to take a look at soon - probably as soon as I get a paying project using it.


• List open ports on your machine (Mac OS X) - I've needed this more than once so it's time to set a marker to it.


• Bento - There was a time I'd have snapped this up immediately; now I seem to be subsisting on the Mac quite well without a desktop database. Anyhow, it's shipped.

Had a great deal of fun the last couple of days figuring out how to deploy a Rails site to a client's client's xserve.

• Testing in Rails: Part 7 - ActiveRecord Relationships - More from Null is Love.


• SiteUptime - Yet another online website monitoring service. There are too many of these darned things.


• Auto-populate socket value in rails database.yml using TextMate snippet - Dang, how much time did I waste trying to figure out which socket various mysql instances were running on before I found this?

I've managed to go through and update tags on all the past content on this site. Still haven't gotten a handle on moving old comments over. Perhaps I never will.

• The Jolt Finalists - Always some fun stuff to be found in this list, though they cover so much breadth that I find I use very few of their nominees.


• Ruby In Steel Text Edition - Overview - Fresh $49 text editing/IDE solution for Ruby/Rails developers on Windows.


• Trace Modeler - If I was doing anything with UML, this cross-platform sequence diagram editor would be pretty neat. Fortunately for me, I'm not doing anything with UML.

As I expected, I'm really enjoying getting back several hours a day that I used to spend keeping up on .NET news.

• Skynet - Ruby implementation of Google's Map/Reduce framework for distributing work across multiple computers. (via Anthony Eden)


• Thin - A new, and apparently faster, alternative to Mongrel for serving web sites. (via Ruby Inside)


• A Guide to Deploying Rails Applications - Setting up a Rails server isn't really easy, but guides like this one are making it easier.


• Migrating from Test::Unit to RSpec - How to go from TDD to BDD in a few easy steps.


• Monitority - Another online web monitoring site.

I spent far too much of yesterday figuring out how to build ruby-filemagic on Leopard. Stuff like that is the dark side of open source.

• Monitority - One more online web-site uptime monitoring service


• TM Themes - All the TextMate themes you can shake a stick at. (via TUAW)

Not so much to report this morning; I think I had more, but a Firefox 3 crash ate a bunch of open tabs when I wasn't looking. Such is the life of beta software.

• Living on the Edge (of Rails) - the pilot - Chu Yeow provides a summary of what's changed in Edge Rails lately. This will be useful.

I don't know whether anyone else is trying to do this, but I just wasted four hours of a perfectly good day getting this tiny piece to work right. To save you the time, here's what (finally) worked for me:

1. Install MacPorts


2. sudo port install file


3. Download  ruby-filemagic-0.1.1.tar.gz


4. Open a shell and unpack it somewhere reasonable.


5. sudo - (This prompts for your password rather than the root password)


6. cd to the ruby-filemagic-0.1.1 folder


7. ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" ruby extconf.rb --with-magic-dir=/opt/local


8. make


9. make install

Welcome to those of you who wandered over from the Daily Grind in the last few days...as always, the links here are to things I'm currently interested in. I'm not necessarily proselytizing.

• Mercurial - Yet another open source distributed source code management system. They're sprouting.


• Java is becoming the new Cobol - If this InfoWorld headline were actually accurate, this would be a great time to learn Java. The folks left who can actually maintain large Cobol systems are pretty much guaranteed employment-for-life at the moment. What they really mean is "Java Isn't Sexy Any More."


• Rails is a Ghetto - Essay from Zed Shaw, probably best known to many as the author of Mongrel. He no doubt has some valid points here, but the presentation is so full of trash talk that it's hard to take seriously. And yeah, Zed, you probably could wipe the floor with me in a fair fight. So what?


• Changes - Commercial visual diff-and-merge tool for OS X, now in beta. (via TUAW)


• Say hello to acts_as_family_tree - Like acts_as_tree, but with multiple parents per item.


• faker - This fake data generation ruby class now does Lorem Ipsum text.

My Matias Tactile Pro 2.0 keyboard arrived and it rocks. I may never use the high-speed USB port or the special symbols on the keycaps but the key action is great.

• Instant Rails 2.0 Released on RubyForge - The latest bits for easy test-driving on Windows. Think of this as sort of a "Live CD" for Rails.


• Installing Postgres 8.2 on Leopard (includes system account!) - Creating a system account on Leopard is absurdly difficult.


• ProFTPD - Looks like I'm going to spend some quality time learning ProFTPD configuration, since it can do extremely loose coupling (via shared database table) authentication with other applications.


• Lingon - Nice little GUI for managing Leopard launchd files. Yeah, if I was a real developer I'd use some primitive command-line text editor for this.


• Wondering if Subversion is Good Enough - Larry O'Brien is ready to stop recommending Subversion due to its quirks and annoyances. I get annoyed too, but on the other side, I have to weigh the SVN ecosystem; it's integrated with a bunch of other things I'm using right now. So far nothing is compelling enough to switch.


• Rolling with Rails 2.0 - The First Full Tutorial - An update of the classic weblog tutorial to show off the new Rails 2.0 features.

I just put the finishing touches on The Daily Grind #1305, which is scheduled to be published tomorrow morning. That disposes of my last .NET-related work, and means I've successfully carried out the plan I hatched a bit over a  year ago of weaning myself from Microsoft.  I still have a Windows machine sitting on my desk (running Windows Server 2003; I see no reason why I'll ever install Vista anywhere), but at this point it is getting used for next-to-nothing (primarily the loose ends of my 2007 bookkeeping; starting 1/1/2008 that's moving to one of the Macs as well).

So, at this point, my income is split between open-source programming (primarily Rails, though there's some hint of work in Merb on the horizon), writing for Web Worker Daily, and a tiny bit of Second Life income (with some potential for more there as well). 2007's income was good enough to do my share of keeping us alive, but that included a big chunk of advertising income from the Larkware site, which from here on out will generate precisely $0. But I feel reasonably confident that I'll continue to find work that meets my ethical standards, and that pays well enough to keep the wolf away from the door.

Oh, and - I'm enjoying coding now much more than I was a year ago when I was writing C# code with Visual Studio. I still have plenty to learn, but I'm happy to be learning, instead of feeling like I'm constantly buried under a stream of half-baked releases. So that's a plus too.

All in all, it's been a very rewarding transition year.

Yesterday's lesson: mystery site errors may just mean that ferret has gone off into never-never land.

• AWS Scratch Pads - Turns out Amazon has built simple online forms to let you play with their various public web services. You'll need an AWS developer key to mess around here.


• Testing for ruby 1.8 and 1.9 using multiruby - How to have your code and eat it too. Multiruby lets you simultaneously run test suites on two side-by-side versions of ruby.

Spent a chunk of yesterday setting up monit to restart bloated mongrels. Gad, that sounds nearly pornographic.

• Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide - Still in beta, this Pragmatic Press book gave me a good start on getting monit set up despite a few typos.


• monit - The official site for this monitoring and management utility.


• Bowtie - Apache and monit configuration generator.


• god - Alternative to monit that I stumbled over too late to seriously consider for the current project.


• Big Medium - This looks like a nice midrange CMS for sites that don't need to be completely custom.

We had a fine Christmas here, though as I spent a few minutes of it restarting stuck mongrel instances I think I need to move forward on getting monit in place today.

• Ruby 1.9.0 is Released - The official announcement. Sheesh, I'm not done learning 1.8.x yet!


• Ruby 1.9.0 has been released - Chu Yeow's coverage of what this means for Rails (summary: it's not time to switch yet).


• Ruby 1.9—Right for You? - Dave Thomas points out that this is not a production release, and discusses how he's set up side-by-side installations with Ruby 1.8.x.


• Ruport 1.4 - New release of this business reporting toolset for Ruby.


• Paginatin' Christmas - A pile of resources around the will_paginate plugin.


• EC2 Firefox Extension is now Open Source - Looks useful for those who are managing their infrastructure via Amazon Web Services.


• Jungle Disk - I've been using Mozy for online backups, but for some reason that's been getting increasingly unreliable for me. Now that Jungle Disk can do automatic backups, I'm probably going to switch. The one thing I don't know is whether it's smart about only backing up changed files.


• Triple Christmas Present - Hobo 0.7.1 with some new documentation.


• REST In Place - AJAX in-place editor plugin designed to work with Rails RESTful controllers.