Although I'm aiming for daily updates here, I do plan to take tomorrow off. Merry Christmas!

• Tactile Pro 2.0 - Have I ever mentioned how much I detest membrane keyboards? The Mac Pro keyboard is better than most, but it still stinks. It turns out that Matias makes a mechanical switch keyboard for Mac; I've got one on order, and I'll let you know if it's as good as the Unicomp PC keyboards when it arrives.


• BetterZip - An actual GUI archive application for OS X. Not entirely sure this is worth paying for, though I do get annoyed at the lack of fine control over zip options that the OS gives by default.


• BitNami WordPress stack - This is what I used to install WordPress, and it was pretty painless. I did have to muck around in the Apache configuration files, though; by default it puts the install on port 8080 in the /wordpress folder.


• Installing ffmpeg on Mac OS X - Needed this for a client the other day; here's the easiest install instructions I could find.


• Acts_as_ferret Tutorial - Another chunk of software I'm needing to come up to speed on; this is helpful.

If you're sharp-eyed (and your DNS server has picked up the new address for A Fresh Cup, which it must have, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) you may have noticed some changes around here. The root cause is simple: I've decided to abandon the Rails-based Mephisto and move to a locally-hosted copy of WordPress instead. There were just too many little things about Mephisto nagging at me and I just wasn't finding time to fix them.

I considered putting time in to customize Mephisto, or to move forward to edge Mephisto, or to switch to one of the other Rails systems like Type or SimpleLog. But ultimately, I came to the conclusion that tweaking blog software isn't really something I want to spend time on. There are good, mature, open-source systems available, so I might as well run one of them and get on with the rest of my life and business.

The change is not, alas, completely painless. WordPress does not understand how to import from Mephisto, so I hacked together a bridge for the past content via RSS. But I didn't move tags or comments (and I doubt I will ever find the time to do so). And the URLs for individual articles have changed (bad blogger, no biscuit). But moving forward, I hope, things should be stable.

There are days I actually feel like I understand what I'm doing with this Rails stuff. Yesterday was one of them.

• RubyGems 1.0.1 - The gem system for installing Ruby software actually hit release 1.0.0 and then in quick succession 1.0.1. Nothing too earthshaking but nice to see an official non-zero version.


• Better Nested Set - Successor to acts_as_tree and acts_as_nested_set. I used it in a project yesterday and it's doing fine, though I couldn't get the select helper for a view to do what I wanted and had to roll my own.


• Installing RMagick Gem On OS X 10.5 - I did a ports/gem based install of RMagick this time around and it was easier than building from source. I did have to sudo port install ghostscript in addition to the steps listed here to get it to work.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday wishing that someone had already written an RSpec book. I've got the general idea, and the PeepCode screencasts are great, but I find I really benefit from paper I can flip through when learning a new tech. Maybe there's a nice RDoc-to-pdf bridge out there somewhere.

• GrowlMail in Leopard - I'm surprised at how useful I find Growl notifications. I've been living - unhappily - without Growl notifications from Mail since upgrading to Leopard. Here's news of a new beta of GrowlMail that fixes the problem. I installed it, and it's working fine for me.

Yesterday was one of those days for tracing through code for two hours and then writing five characters to fix a bug. They were the right five characters, though.

• Stacks Overlays - I got sick of the stupid default appearance of OS X stacks and installed this fix.


• Firefox 3 Beta 2 - I've been using Firefox 3 as my default browser since beta 1 came out. It's been quite stable for me.


• GemInstaller - Automated management tool for Ruby gems, designed to avoid the "but it works on my machine" syndrome when moving to production (among other issues).


• Amazon DevPay - Limited Beta - Yet another new service from the Amazon Web Services team: billing and account management.

I spent much of yesterday doing an archive & install on OS X 10.5 on my main dev box, then reinstalling all the gems I use. Took a while to get everything set up, but it was worth it to not have two installs of ruby and two battling sets of gems. I think.

• Rails 2.0.2: Some new defaults and a few fixes - Here's the official announcement of yesterday's minor Rails release.


• Rails 2.0.2 released, so what’s new? - Another take on the new features.


• Sqliteman - With Sqlite3 being suddenly the default Rails database (as of Rails 2.0.2), I spent some time looking around for Sqllite GUIs that work under OS X. (Yeah, I'm a wimp that way). This one has the advantage of being free, though it's not real well-organized and has that Qt look to it.


• RazorSQL - Commercial database query tool that claims Sqlite compatibility via JDBC. Haven't tried it.


• SQLite Manager 0.2.11 - Sqlite database tool implemented as a Firefox add-on. Actually not bad.


• What’s Coming in Instant Rails 2.0 and Beyond - The Road Map - Plans from the new project maintainer.


• Installing ruby mysql gem in OSX 10.5 - I decided I could do without building everything from source this time around. MySQL was the trickiest to get cooking from a download & gem install.


• Ruport 1.4 Preview Release - If you're using Ruport for reporting you probably want to have a look at this.


• RSpec Textmate Bundle errors - I had a good deal of trouble getting RSpec to work correctly within TextMate. This thread describes the symptom, but the fixes there did not work for me. Ultimately I had to checkout the RSpec trunk svn, build that, and symlink the resulting TextMate bundle in to make sure everything was synched.


• Setting up autotest to use Growl - A nice little extra if you're doing continuous testing.


• Bazaar - Distributed version control system with an easy migration path from subversion.

I spent most of yesterday learning about RSpec. Fun stuff, even if I can't get the TextMate integration to work yet.

• A Meme I’d Like To Crush - Greg Wilson, who actually knows a thing or two on the subject, discusses the current swooning over Erlang 'cause it's so parallelizable.


• Merb 0.4.2 released. - Just as I get interested, they push out a new version. The difference between open source software and a red queen's race would be? (That's a trick question.)


• RSpec 1.1 - A significant release of the latest piece of software that I'm trying to spend quality time with.


• Campfire Notifier for Cruise Control - I'm not actually using either Campfire or Cruise Control anywhere at the moment, but if I was, this would be cool.


• Using Git with SVN - All of a sudden I'm seeing a lot of references to using git for source code control instead of svn. Looks like it's reasonably possible to bridge the two.


• Updating RubyGems and Rails in Leopard - I wonder if this would cure some of the versionitis I'm having on one of my dev boxes. Probably not, because I think I compiled everything from source on that box in the first place.


• GoogleCharts - I figured someone would wrap up the new Google Charting API in a nice gem for Ruby & Rails. I wasn't disappointed.


• Using SSH Agent With Mac OS X Leopard - Came in handy for me as I switched over to letting Leopard be my ssh agent.


• Google Maps API Icon Shadowmaker - This is going to come in handy on the site where I'm using Google Maps for a client.


• BitNami - Pre-packaged install stacks for a lot of open source apps across a variety of operating systems. They have a Ruby and Rails package that provides an alternative to Instant Rails. (via Anthony Eden)


• jrubyhub.com - More JRuby resources than you can shake a stick at.

I got Merb and DataMapper installed from their respective SVN repositories yesterday and immediately hit a roadblock. I suspect this Mac is suffering a small case of versionitis at this point. I wonder if I know enough to solve it yet.

• Amazon SimpleDB- Limited Beta - Another pay-as-you-go web service API from Amazon.


• Programming Ruby 3: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, 3rd Edition - The next pickaxe is coming, with discounts for buyers of the 2nd edition. More details on the revision plans here


• better rails caching - A new caching plugin to make automatic use of memcached.

No doubt there is some tool to make the data cleanup I spent yesterday afternoon doing easier, but if it's the sort of thing that only needs doing once in a while, straight SQL queries are as easy as anything else. At some point it's not worth learning one more tool for occasional use.

• Instant Rails - Drop-in and run install for Windows with Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL. Looked like it was taking a dirt nap but a new project admin is in place and it's moving again.


• BackgroundFu - Another way to run Rails-launched tasks in the background.


• Fluid - Wrap up web applications as faux desktop apps for OS X Leopard.

I spent a bit of time yesterday poking around for alternatives to looking at RDoc-generated documentation with the stock RDoc templates in a web browser, which I find terribly ugly and unintuitively organized.

• The RDoc Dashboard Widget - This would be exactly what I'm looking for, except that it's a dashboard widget. I find the enforced context switching of OS X dashboard widgets terribly offputting.


• Allison - An alternative HTML template for RDoc. At least it's prettier than that stock abomination.

I sent out pretty much the last round of advertising invoices for the Larkware site yesterday. That site is winding down fast.

• Heroku - Create a Rails site online, edit it in the browser, in fact go through the whole development cycle without touching anything other than a browser. In limited beta. Looks interesting.


• BackgrounDRb - Ruby job server and scheduler, intended for running long-running tasks in Rails without bollixing up your application's responsiveness. Now at the 1.0-pre-release stage.


• Merb - Bookmarking the Merb framework site for my own use, since it looks like I may end up involved in a Merb-backed project soon enough.


• DataMapper - Ruby-based ORM which, among other things, works with Merb.


• Engines Plugin - Now updated for Rails 2.0.


• Safari AdBlock - Simple new ad-blocker for Safari. I looked at switching from Firefox to Safari on my Mac the other day, but for the number of tabs I run with (typically 40-50) Safari gobbles up just as much RAM, takes nearly as much CPU, and loses out completely on customizability. So poo on it.


• Rails 2.0 - a feature a day - Chu Yeow promises to dig into some of the more obscure changes in the new version.


• Free Online Ruby Programming Course - Online, instructor-led course starting in January. If you're new to Ruby and learn better with company, this looks like a good bet.

Wow, 100 of these. I guess that's some indication that I'm sticking with this non-Microsoft universe. In fact, I'll be completely shutting down my .NET-oriented blog at the end of the year, as I've transitioned all of my work life over to other things.

• Pulse - Configuration manager for Eclipse-based products, now available for the Mac.


• Dynamic System Modeling in Second Life - Jeff Barr used Second Life to build a 3D animated representation of a complex Amazon Web Services system. I think there's a lot of promise to this approach for architectural discussions.


• Testing in Rails: Part 5 - Unit Testing ActiveRecord Models - Part of the ongoing series from Null is Love.


• Installing RMagick on Leopard - I just had a good long wrestle with this, complicated by a stale MacPorts install of ImageMagick. This is the article that finally sorted out all the bits for me.


• Advanced Rails Recipes Now in Beta - Now that Rails 2.0 is out, here's some good reading to go with it.


• Rails 2.0 Final Released! - Summary of Features - Ryan links to a whole mess of articles he's written about the new stuff.

Now that I'm back to writing Rails code daily, it's all starting to make sense to me. Well, almost. Just in time for a new version!

• Rails 2.0 - it’s landed - Looks like a release announcement is imminent.


• Redirecting nginx to Tomcat. - Somehow I hope never to have to do this. Most of the Rails deployment stack is still a black art to me, even though I've managed to set it up successfully a few times. A failing, I know.


• MacSanta - A dangerous site to watch if you have a relatively new Mac and like utilities. 20% discounts on different vendors' software every day until Christmas. They have an RSS feed too.


• SVNMate - Subversion integration directly in the TextMate file tree. (via Softies on Rails)

Always nice to wake up to email from a client saying "by the way, we're demoing the site tomorrow, here's a sudden list of changes we'd like made."

• ZigVersion - Subversion UI for Mac. Haven't tried it but saw some Twitter-friends say good things about it.

I ended up spending most of yesterday writing what turned out to be about 6 lines of controller and 20 lines of view. I'm not sure whether to be proud of my skills at condensing things down or appalled that it took me so long to find the reasonably elegant Rails way of doing things. But I met the customer's deadline.

• Setting up a new Rails app with Git and Setting up a new remote git repository - Toolman Tim shows how to use the sexy new alternative source code control system with Rails.


• The Fully Upturned Bin - whytheluckystiff from a few years ago on Ruby memory management and garbage collection, a subject I'm starting to dig into a bit.


• ActsAsTaggableOn Released - An even more flexible version of ActsAsTaggableOnSteroids (which I've been using in a couple of projects).

It's too early in the morning to attempt to say anything really meaningful here, so I'll just pass on a few links instead.

• TextAreaWithStatus 1.0 released - Automagically add those "you have x characters remaining" messages to textareas in Rails. I actually have an application cooking right now that can benefit from this, so this saves me scouting out the small amount of Javascript involved.


• iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2 - I don't personally have the slightest interest in owning an iPhone, but Rails 2 magic makes this pretty easy.


• Rails 2 Upgrade Notes - Courtesy of Slash Dot Dash. If your code is in good shape, upgrading an existing application may not be too hard. If your code is in bad shape, well, who's to blame?


• Faker - Ruby library for generating fake but plausible names, addresses, phone numbers, and so on. (via Ruby Inside)


• Hobo 0.7 released - Another round of this rapid design extension to Rails.


• WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License - A sort of reduction ad absurdum for the endless open source licensing debates.


• Really Simple History 0.6 goes public - Javascript library to take care of bookmarking and the back button in Ajaxy applications. Another one for the "I should investigate this some day" list.

I'm starting to have flashes of occasionally thinking in Ruby, which is good. At least I can tell when there's a better way to do things, even if I can't always figure it out before I give up and resort to brute force in order to get things done for the client.

• Perl On Rails; everything on Rails? - Phil Crissman lists and links to a batch of Rails-like frameworks floating around these days.


• A Quick Jaunt Through Merb's Framework Code - Tutorial for folks who want to poke at the internals of Merb. One of these days I need to at least look at its public face.

The end of the month is always such a nice time for consultants. I get to send out monthly bills.

• Webrat - Ruby Acceptance Testing for Web applications - version 0.1.0 released! : Testing via the DOM. Looks interesting & useful.


• 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer - Well, the author of this post certainly wouldn't hire me - and I don't think I'd want to work for him. But then, I never could answer most of those "100 essential trivia questions your next .NET developer must know the answer to" and that never seemed to hurt my success in that field either. Actually having experience and being able to make clients happy is worth more than arbitrary sets of requirements, in my non-humble opinion.


• Testing in Rails: Part 4 - Unit Testing in Rails - Next part of an ongoing beginners' series from Null is Love.

Trying to write some LSL after writing only Rails (well, Rails and nothing at all) for a couple of months was...difficult. Apparently my brain doesn't like to hold more than one programming language in reserve at one time.

• Rails 2.0: Release Candidate 2 - Which should put us within a week or two of Rails 2.0 final.


• sanitize_params - Whitelist-style plugin to make sure ill-mannered users do not inject junk into the parameters of your Rails views on their way back.

Now that I'm getting settled in, working in the suburbs is much the same as working in the boondocks - except I can actually see when the mail gets delivered.

• Thomas Fuchs consulting - The mind behind script.aculo.us is available for hire. His new personal site will give you some previews of what's coming in the next version of script.aculo.us, too.


• Better Rails Migrations: Retroactive Migrations - Allows management of merged migrations from multiple developers, as well as dropping or reloading individual migrations without unwinding the entire migration stack.