I managed to figure out how to hook into the SLBoutique e-commerce system last night. I don't expect my couple of test items to actually generate revenue, but it's a step forward on my actual plans. Meanwhile, there are a few other things cooking in the realer world:

• Ruby on Rails ibm_db_adapter Release 0.4.0 - IBM isn't ignoring RoR; if you want to hook into DB2 databases, it looks like they're striving to provide first-class support. There was a while about ten years back that I actually had an AS400 parked next to my bedroom. Fortunately, those days are over.


• RedHat, Inc: The Next Microsoft? - Yes, Microsoft is not the only software giant making boneheaded intellectual property moves.

Spent a chunk of last night trying to figure out the major e-commerce systems in Second Life. It really is a whole different world in there.

• A peek in the rear-view mirror - I try not to be gratuitously snarky about Microsoft here, but you know, sometimes it's just too tasty to avoid.


• Apollo - Adobe's new whiz-bang Web/desktop development language, now in alpha. In a year, maybe I'll kick myself for not getting out in front of the parade on this one, but you know, I've never yet met an Adobe development environment I actually liked to work with.


• Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial - Part 2 - More in-depth advice from the Rails Envy folks.


• No code left untested - Extension to Rails' controller generator to make it generate test files for helpers.

It was an interesting weekend, watching the Twitterverse and blogging and Second Life all sort of melt together. Not sure where the business case is yet but all this energy must mean something.

• SLeek - A non-graphical Second Life client, a rather bizarre spinoff of the fact that Linden Labs has open-sourced the viewer code.


• Rails don't know testing and Battle Royale - Testing - The folks over at GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS are taking a long hard look at Rails testing, and coming up with some ideas to add both sophistication and streamlining to the usual practices.


• Haml 1.5 - New release of this terse replacement for other templating languages (like rhtml) in Rails applications. I don't think my brain is quite ready for another layer of abstraction yet, no matter how powerful it is.

I seem to have wandered into a twisty little maze of functions all starting with "lsl."

• Hobo 0.5 and more… - New version of the Hobo application framework, a set of extensions that sets on top of Rails. Actually I see that 0.5.1 shipped in the couple of days since I bookmarked this.


• CruiseControl.rb Growl Notifier Plugin- Two great tastes that, well, you know the rest. (via dzone)

Now that SXSW is over, the Twitter traffic is trailing off a bit.

• Amazing Rails - A Micro-ISV founder sings the praises of Rails in giving competitive advantage to a small shop.


• ActiveScaffold RC1 Released - A spiffy plugin replacement for the standard Rails scaffolding.

Observant readers will have noted that I've been digging into LSL lately, along with Rails. LSL is the scripting language for Second Life , the virtual world created by Linden Research and its residents. There doesn't seem to be much "official" documentation for LSL, but it's reasonably well described in the LSL wiki . It's a vaguely C-like scripting language with some interesting quirks (for instance, there's no reasonable way to store persistent data). It does, however, have the ability to make both HTTP and XMLRPC calls to servers outside of SL, which means that it's perfectly possible to create objects in SL that talk to a Rails application out in "First Life" - which is what I've been pursuing.

The interesting thing about Second Life is that it has a whole shadow economy going on, with a currency of lindens that are reasonably liquid and that do exchange with US dollars (one way in which Linden Labs makes their money is by taking a substantial rake off of such exchanges between players - if I sell you lindens for dollars, the house gets a cut). Some people have famously made enough lindens that their full-time job is now working in Second Life. I strongly suspect there is a steep, steep power law at work here, with the few poster children making good money, more making walking-around money, and many more making essentially nothing at all.

Still, playing with this stuff (and it is on some crazy boundary between work and play) does give me the chance to work with some more Rails code, and it does offer at least the potential that I could end up on the right portion of that power curve. I've got some ideas for goods and services that I don't see being well-executed within the Second Life economy yet. So, who knows - it's worth spending at least a few hours looking into this as a part of the next career.

Had to figure out how to rework my Rails login stuff to work with MD5 instead of SHA last night, as MD5 is pretty much the only hashing that LSL supports. Fortunately, this was a simple change despite the alphabet soupness of it all.

• CruiseControl.rb - Continuous integration for Ruby. When my Rails code gets a bit more mature, I must look into this. (via Toolman Tim)


• Describe it with RSpec - The RSpec behavior definition framework is another piece that I really should dig into some day.


• How To Install Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) On Ubuntu - For a few brief moments I thought about this, but I really don't need a collaboration server right at the moment. Maybe when I manage to wean the rest of the users on my network off of Exchange this will come in handy.

Just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why the c: drive on my Windows box filled up overnight. I'm beginning to get crabbier and crabbier about Windows, while trying to remember that the Mac just hasn't had time to get old and crufty yet.

• RadRails moves to Aptana - Looks like this IDE has a plan to move forward. More info from the original RadRails team here .


• ActiveWarehouse ETL 0.6.0 Released - This project is moving along at a rapid pace. In a past life, I wrote half a book on OLAP in Microsoft-land. It's another of those enterprisey areas I'd just as soon not get back into, though.

Not much to say this morning, but I'm at the point where I'm already feeling the itch to post consistently. This is the curse of my online life.

• Gem-based Deployment and Delivery: Part 1 - When Capistrano Is Not Enough - I rather hope that I don't have any Rails apps grow to the point where this is necessary. Still, it's nice to see some folks thinking about big Rails apps, if only to have a data point to throw back at the critics.


• LSL Wiki - Best source of information I've found for the odd little muddle that is Linden Scripting Language. At least it doesn't take long to learn. There are some rather elegant hacks buried in here if you dig.

I can't decide whether posting to Twitter from within Second Life is a brilliant hack or a sign that the universe is about to vanish up its own navel.

• The Host with the Most - Geoffrey Grosenbach evaluates a batch of Rails hosting sites that he's used. Make sure you read through the comments from other folks as well. Makes me happy that I'm doing my own hosting - and I expect I'll end up on a dedicated host when and if I have a Rails site that looks set to draw substantial traffic.


• RadRails Future - Or lack thereof. A look at the current state of development for this Eclipse-based Rails IDE.


• JRuby In Steel - Java-based Ruby programming inside the Visual Studio IDE. It's a programming language mashup!

If you like challenges, I can recommend LSL. It's certainly one of the more hack-inducing, infuriating languages I've ever tried to work in.

• tumblr - Tumblelog software that can automatically import RSS feeds, and thus becomes another tool for lifestreaming. They're coming out of the woodwork now.


• Capistrano security fun - Turns out there's an information leak in the default use of Capistrano. Not a real high pri issue for most sites, but a bit sloppy. (via Ruby Inside)


• Customize Your Rake Files - To make rcov behave the way you want it to.

I actually managed to make a Second Life object add a row to a database via a Rails application. This is either progress or madness, I'm not sure which.

• ActiveWarehouse Road Map - Some notes on where the ActiveWarehouse plugin is headed.


• Find Resource - Plugin to make RESTful Rails projects more DRY.


• Plugins - Acts As Enterprisey - Is part of grokking a new language knowing when something is a joke? (via Steve Eichert)


• Ruby on Rails Security - New blog devoted to, you guessed it, Rails security. (via Ruby Inside)


• Feed Digest - Another online tool for lifestreaming. Unfortunately, packrat that I am, what I really want is a client-side tool that slurps everything down into some datastore on my end, where I can archive it forever, search it, run statistics on it, will it to my kids...


• Mindquarry - Potentially interesting open source collaboration server. (via James Governor)

...it's sheer genius.

Dylan Hears a Who

Two months into the year. That's 1/6 of the time I have allotted myself for throwing out the old career and bringing in the new. Time to take stock again.

I continue to get more comfortable working in Rails, and have put up several sites using this framework, though nothing too spectacular and all works in progress (links over in the sidebar). But given that the best way to learn a new language is to write code, and I'm writing code every night, I'm happy with that. I'm also doing lots of reading. I'm sure there are plenty more "aha!" moments ahead of me, and I would hardly claim to be fluent in Rails yet, but the pieces are fitting together for me, and with books at my side I can usually make it do what I want with some research time.

I need to somehow find more reading time; there are several books that I want to finish (including Programming Ruby and Mac OS X: The Missing Manual that I just haven't had time for. Part of the problem is that these books are too darned big to read in the bath.

This blog has doubled in pageviews over the last month (which is good) despite the continued problem with doubles in the feed (which is bad). The latter, I think, is down to me making the domain available both with and without www, but I've not yet figured out how to solve the problem, even though I've made several abortive attempts to do so with both the Mephisto code and with Apache. I've noticed the same problem with some other Mephisto blogs in my own feed list. I haven't given up yet. Anyhow, I'll be happy if readership keeps going up at this rate; hopefully other people are finding the linky-posts useful.

As I've mentioned before, I'm going to RailsConf in May. My interim goal at this point is to feel confident enough of my Rails code by then that I can actually sniff around for some project involvement without feeling like an utter imposter.

Days like today - marked by tedious conference calls and fighting with broken Windows software - make me dream about being in a different business.

• Enhanced Rails Migrations v1.1.0 - A tweak to Rails migrations to make them work better in multi-developer teams.


• Apache 2.2, mod_proxy_balancer, & Mongrel on Ubuntu 6.06 - If I had remembered this article yesterday, I could have avoided having to reinstall Apache today. Just remember to check the Apache site and pick your closest mirror for the download.


• Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial - Yummy good info on page caching from the Rails Envy guys. I need to soak in this for a while.

Well, I'm working on deploying another little Rails app, but I've hit an unexpected snag. I fired up a fresh Ubuntu server for this one, brought in all the latest bits, and now Capistrano is not playing nicely with it. I'm hitting the exact symptoms described in this message but as no one has posted an answer knowing that the symptoms are not unique doesn't do me a whole boatload of good.

I could perhaps shove it on to the same server I'm using for other things, but there's a limit to how many mongrel instances I want to spin up on a single server when I have tons of unused computing capacity sitting around. Two differences between the servers may be salient - the working server is Ubuntu server and Capistrano , while the one that is being crabby is Ubuntu desktop and Capistrano 1.4.1. I suspect it's the Capistrano version that's making the difference 1.4.0, but what do I know? Not much.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

My head is all full of business ideas. My to-do list is all full of routine crud. Bah.

• Mugshot - Another online lifestreaming aggregator.


• Looking for feed addicts; trawlr.com reloaded! - Online RSS feed aggregator using RESTful Rails techniques as its backbone.


• Ruby In Steel PE (free edition) 1.0 Released - The free version of this Rails IDE for Windows has reached the 1.0 release milestone.


• VMware attacks Microsoft virtualization strategy - Virtualization appears to be the latest frontier for Microsoft underhanded shenanigans.

Sorry about all the RSS goofiness. I managed to complete bork the site and had to redo a batch of things, which didn't do the feeds any good. Not that I've had much luck tracking down the original issue.

• Rails vs. Django - There's a link here to a Django screencast that I probably should find the time to watch, though overall it confirms my suspicion that the two frameworks are largely equivalent in terms of productivity.


• Softies on Rails Interviews: Menuism - It's certainly nice for me to read at this point stories of people who walked away from Microsoft to do Rails development.


• File Upload Fu - Mike Clark discusses handling image file uploads in a Rails app.


• Lighthouse - Rails issue tracking app from the Mephisto creators, coming soon.


• TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac - Book from Pragmatic Bookshelf, now released. If I did want to become a TextMate expert, this would probably be a good investment.


• Capistrano 1.4.1 - A minor update to the deployment utility that goes along with Rails.


• Our ActiveRecord book ...and YOU! - There's a book all about ActiveRecord coming. You can go make suggestions about what you'd like to see covered.

A few final links to round out the week:

• acts_as_solr: Another Advanced Search Option For Ruby - If you want, you can shell out and actually run Lucene, rather than a port of Lucene, for your full-text searching needs. (via dzone)


• WhatAList - Sorta whacky social list-making and -sharing and -editing site coded in Rails.

Yeah, I know some readers are showing these twice. I'm working on it.

• Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows - Another programmer's editor becomes Ruby-aware.


• ActiveMerchant - This Rails plug-in for access to various payment gateways has hit version 1.0.0 (actually 1.0.1 but who's counting?).