Another day, another Scout meeting.

• Ruby on Rails for Developers - General Assembly's course on GitHub.
• HipsterStruct - a new way for creating objects in Rails - With metaprogramming comes great danger.

Brain just wants to shut down and hibernate. Happy winter.

• The Leprechauns of Software Engineering - New ebook that tries to figure out where some of the myths we believe in come from. 10x productivity anyone?
• Rails::Observers - Extracted to a gem in preparation for Rails 4.
• Ruby 2.0 Release Schedule - It's coming.

Weeks of November 19 -December 2, 2012

Most of the work in Rails in the past couple of weeks has been fit-and-finish: speeding up a test here, rewording a comment there, fixing an uncommon edge case. Though there's been no announcement, it's really starting to seem like Rails 4 is close to release.

• ccecab3b removes observers and sweepers completely from core Rails. If your application depends on them, you can install the new https://github.com/rails/rails-observers gem.

• BlueGriffon - There's a web editor based on the Gecko rendering engine from Firefox. Who knew?
• GitHub needs to take open source seriously - In any project full of gems, you're probably unknowingly violating some copyrights.
• Event tracking with Ruby on Rails - Using the event_tracker gem for a clean interface to KISSMetrics or Mixpanel.
• PhantomCSS - Visual regression testing via automated image diffing.
• Kodama - MySQL replication listener in Ruby.
• Rails 4 Countdown to 2013 - The folks at Remarkable Labs are doing a daily series of notes on upgrading your Rails apps.
• The 12 Gems of Christmas - And Mike Perham is doing a series on rubygems that are worth knowing about.
• Krypt - the Next Level of Ruby Cryptography - An ambitious attempt to replace OpenSSL in the ruby standard library.

Ready to roll this week up and put it in the closet.

• dmca - GitHub's archive of DMCA takedown notices.
• Announcing HashiCorp - Commercial support for Vagrant.
• Refinements and nested methods - The more this addition to Ruby 2.0 gets discussed, the more it strikes me as a Bad Idea. It's complicated, it has edge cases even the designers don't understand, and it appears to be trying to fix a problem that doesn't really bother most rubyists.
• Why Django and Rails CMS Are So Rare - Well, they're not, really. (See the list I compiled a few years back). But they sure don't have a lot of impact. An industry veteran thinks about why this is.

Local chilling this morning wins over global warming.

• Airplay - Ruby gem to provide clients for Apple's streaming media protocol.
• vert.x - "Effortless asynchronous application development for the modern web and enterprise" with mix and match languages and an event bus that extends to client-side JavaScript.

The links go marching two by two...

• Meet UpShot, Screenshot Sharing via Dropbox on OS X - Evernote certainly encouraged a lot of activity in this area when they screwed up Skitch.
• Bug Triage - How exposed are you? - And for that matter, do you even bother to triage your bugs?
• Listango - Tool for organizing your own bookmarks online. It's refreshing to find one that's explicitly non-social.
• ActionArgs - Modify Rails controllers so you don't need to touch the params hash, but can use meaningful action argument names instead.
• Cloud66 - Online tool offering Rails provisioning to cloud servers or your own servers.
• Upgrading to Rails 4 - Beta ebook from Andy Lindeman. There's also a companion gem.
• html-pipeline: Chainable Content Filters - New gem from GitHub.
• Testacular - Test runner for JavaScript with built in Mocha and Jasmine support, among other things.
• The Silver Searcher - "An attempt to make something better than ack, which itself is better than grep."

Feels like Monday all over again. Not good.

• X-editable - In-place and popup editing for Bootstrap or jquery-ui.
• speakers.io - Coming app to connect speakers and tech conferences. Read about it here.
• The Split is Not Enough: Unicode Whitespace Shenanigans for Rubyists - Coincidentally, I had my own run in over the weekend with non-breaking spaces in stored strings. A somewhat more surgical regex than the one Peter proposes is value = value.gsub(/\u00A0/, " ").

• The PLT Games - Monthly competition (starting December 1) to design programming languages that fit in with a given theme.
• SlowTestReporter - Yah, I'm still mucking around with open source when I get the chance.
• Falcon performance patch for ruby 1.9.3-p327 - For those of you who want to live past the bleeding edge.
• Try Redis - Interactive redis tutorial.
• Hayaku - Sublime Text 2 plugin for quick CSS creation.
• Introducing Miner - Fork of grit that proposes to be more responsive to pull requests and issues.
• ElasticSearch Pre-Flight Checklist - Lots of good info here to help you avoid pitfalls when setting up ElasticSearch.
• Poinard - Experimental dependency-injection based alternative to Rails controllers.

Happy Black Friday. Please join me in staying home today.

• JimFlow - Run your kanban system with physical cards and a camera interfaced back to your computer.
• Introducing the Rails API Project - A new attempt to build a stripped-down Rails for serving in an API context.
• Making your ruby fly - Adding compile flags to rvm to boost performance.
• Taking Sass to the Next Level with SMURF and @extend - More on structuring CSS for maintainability in big projects.
• Why I Have Given Up on Coding Standards - Because smart developers should not be put in a box.

And a happy Thanksgiving to you as well.

• Colour Schemes - A whole pile of 'em for Sublime Text 2 or TextMate.
• Zuck - Gem to use Facebook's ads API.
• Cramp - Asynchronous Ruby web application framework built on top of EventMachine.
• Skitch and Evernote: A Letter from Keith Lang - Looks like they're actually listening to user feedback. Amazing.

My Black Friday shopping recommendation: stay home, and off the Internet.

• boom - Command line text snippet manager with a potty mouth.
• CoffeeScript Ristretto - Ebook that teaches functional programming using CoffeeScript.
• Mixture - Front-end development tool using liquid templates.
• US patent chief to software patent critics: "Give it a rest already" - Software patent critics to US patent chief: "Why don't you get a job you actually understand?"
• CSS Ratiocinator - An attempt to automatically refactor messy CSS down to something more elegant.

If it's Tuesday, it must be Cub Scouts.

• Join Us In The Fight Against Patent Trolls - Rackspace, with patent litigation being its fastest-growing expense, is now spending money to document prior art in the industry. Good on them.
• Refining Ruby - Charles Nutter discusses refinements from the standpoint of a language implementer. (My own take: yet another complex part of Ruby that I'll never use).
• My Thoughts on Refinements - Zach Moazeni offers some observations on the current debates over refinements, and how the community got here.
• The Cost of Ruby 1.9.3's GC::Profiler - In a word, high.
• Daybreak - Simple KV store for Ruby.

Week of November 12 - November 18, 2012

• With 57b333e2 and c940aa6e Rails is finally using trunk mocha without monkey patches.
• A batch of work merged at ef8b845d enables an EncryptedCookieJar store for Rails to use encrypted cookies.

• git-whatchanged - Just how many git commands ARE there? A lot, apparently.
• Torch - Commerical support for Graylog2, coming soon.
• Sprintly - Another entry in the software project management space. Lots of features for $9 per user per month.
• metherd-missing - Make your Ruby code work even if you typo the method names.
• The Web Engineer's online toolbox - A useful list of tools for fiddling with HTTP and friends.
• Kanban? No, it can't - Entertaining rant for a Monday morning.
• Simple tricks to clean up your Capybara tests - Building your own useful helper methods.
• Deploying Ruby Applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Git - Get easy built-in autoscaling from the AWS infrastructure.
• CSS Architecture - Some thoughts on cleaning up the mess.

Oh look, we survived another week.

• Unheap: "A tidy collection of jQuery plugins" with lots of nifty stuff to peer at.
• benzo - Library to simplify building complex command lines for execution with Cocaine.
• POP - "Prototyping on Paper," demonstrate an iPhone UI by sketching it by hand and then taking photos and linking them together.
• MetaInspector - Gem to scrape web pages and return links, images, and more.
• Rails 4 Quick Look: Strong Parameters - Changes coming in mass assignment protection.

Another week is just flying by.

• A Healthy Bundle - Coming up with a versioning strategy for your application and bundler.
• uQuery - App store search engine.
• Hammer - OS/X web development tool for easily building static sites.
• jQuery 1.8.3 Released - As long as you're upgrading everything else in your application, might as well throw this in too.
• Write Faster Rails Tests - New email newsletter.

Another round of poison ivy? Ack.

• Capybara 2.0.0 - Out now, with some breaking changes.
• rspec-rails and capybara 2.0: what you need to know - Here's how to make rspec catch up with the changes.
• tablecloth - jQuery plugin for table formatting, with good Bootstrap compatibility.
• rvm install patched ruby for faster rails startup - Worth noting that rvm makes using the falcon patches simple.
• Monitoring processes with mon - A lightweight replacement for monit.
• has-many-with-set - An alternative to traditional join tables for cases where you need M-M relationships among many rows.
• ruby-lint - New (alpha) linter for Ruby 1.9.3 code.

Seriously? A thousand of these? I must be nuts.

• Rake 10.0 Released - And leaps multiple versions in a mighty bound.
• Convert Syck to Psych YAML format - Automating away some of the pain of upgrading.
• Rails 3.2.9 has been released! - Time for another round of version upgrades.
• Being for the Benefit of Future Developer - Things you can do in your project to make life easier down the road.
• Comment your damn code - I'm firmly in agreement with this one.
• Tent Roadmap - Where the Tent protocol is going. I'm following this with interest.
• Running - Helpers for finding out which version of Ruby is running the current code.
• pathod - "A pathological HTTP daemon for testing and torturing client software."
• Wingman - Desktop app that translates git and GitHub into things like features, bugs, and releases.
• The Death Star Design Pattern - I've seen this one in action.
• Skate - Search for Tent posts.

Week of November 5 - November 11, 2012

• 710e3710 adds an option for custom naming of counter caches on has many associations.