I'm sure there's something clever to be said about Thursdays, but I've no idea what it is.

• Subtle Patterns - Tilable background textures for use in whatever.
• Unholy Rails: External Scripts, jQuery Plugins, and Page-Specific JavaScript - A rundown on the various ways to organize js in Rails projects.
• Turbolinks - Faster page loads (by automatically doing partial loads) coming as a default to Rails 4.0.

Sometimes the excrement just won't stay away from the rotating blades.

• Mojito - JavaScript MVC framework from Yahoo!.
• JRuby 1.7.0.RC1 Released - Closing in on Ruby 1.9.3 compatibility.
• Please stop embedding Bootstrap classes in your HTML! - A warning that we're on the way to the same problems that table-based layout gave us. I'm not convinced that most Bootstrap sites will live long enough to want to change CSS, though.
• Pendaxes - Automatically send reminder emails to developers with TODOs stuck in the code.
• NoPassword - Skip the passwords and just identify users by persistent tokens emailed to their computers.
• Jetstrap - Visual UI builder for Bootstrap.
• Does everyone hate MongoDB? - The debate continues.
• 5 Reasons Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It - Arguing, among other things, that mobile devices generally do a good job with desktop web content.

End of the month is coming. Time to figure out which cloud services to cancel.

• Crashlytics - Crash reporting for iOS and Android. Well, "Android soon."
• Dead Man's Snitch - Monitor your periodic tasks to make sure they're actually running.
• Faceted - Syntactic sugar for building APIs on top of Active Record.
• Adobe Edge Web Fonts - Free library served via TypeKit.

Week of September 17 - September 23, 2012

Along with changes to the code itself, the Rails Guides have now been converted from Textile to Markdown. As someone who had to work with the Textile version in the past I'm quite happy with this.

• The new ruby template handler extension has changed from .rb to .ruby as of de1060f4, to avoid conflicts with mustache views.
• As of c49d959e the code from strong_parameters is integrated directly into Rails. All Action Controller parameters must now be explicitly permitted before they can be used in Active Model mass assignments.
• As of 392eeecc Rails allows specifying the transaction isolation level in Active Record (if your database supports it).
• It's an early draft, but the Rails 4.0 Release Notes are now on the Edge Guides site.

Still slaving away in the bit mines.

• Oh My Gems! - Simpler way to manage gems for multiple projects.
• thumbkit - Thumbnail generator for multiple file types that works with carrierwave. Alas, it doesn't handle PDF, which is what I need at the moment.
• capybara-screenshot - Automatically save HTML and screenshots when a capybara-using test fails.
• The Declaration of Twitter Independence - Pretty sure this will have roughly the same effect as bacteria declaring independence from my hands.
• jQuery 1.8.2 Released - A bug fix release.
• Limiter - Rate-limiter for rack with blacklist and whitelist support.

Might be about time for another Twitter vacation.

• Barman - Backup and recovery manager for PostgreSQL.
• 10gen Education - 10gen is now offering free online MongoDB training for developers and DBAs.
• Ruby Security Reviewer's Guide - A very odd document from Google. Written for people reviewing ruby code for security issues, but it doesn't assume they know basics like classes and blocks.
• Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac - Silly symbols meet unix and mayhem results.
• Enyo Tutorial: Part 1 - A good choice for building mobile JavaScript applications.
• slavery - Slave read library for Active Record.

There are never enough hours.

• Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use Linux Laptop Now - Pretty much sums up how I feel after playing with the Project Sputnik laptop myself.
• Rails 4.0 Sneak Peek: PostgreSQL array support - In general Rails 4 is shaping up to expose quite a few pg features.
• Resizing images before upload using HTML5 canvas - Interesting idea, though an awful lot of moving parts.
• Yell - 1.0 release of this logging library with good extensibility.
• Stubb - API testing tool that organizes response stubs in your file system.
• Announcing Heroku Enterprise for Java - Looks like a nice set of tools, though if they're going all enterprisey I'm glad that I don't depend on Heroku at the moment.
• desi - Tool to set up a local Elastic Search installation for development.
• Kube - "CSS-framework for progressional developers", especially ones who want an alternative to Bootstrap.

Writing software means never having to say "I'm finished."

• Pjson - Colorful command-line JSON formatter.
• Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay! - Rackspace is being sued by some bullshit patent troll. I've come around to a simple point of view on this: all software patents should be abolished, immediately and retroactively, before this nonsense destroys my profession. (Hackernews discussion of this particular lawsuit is here.)
• Application Server Showdown: Passenger vs. Unicorn - Engine Yard recommends Unicorn.
• Rspec-api-documentation - Generate API docs as a side effect of running your RSpec tests.
• Wat Programming Language - "An ultra-lightweight, advanced, and practical Lisp for JavaScript." I'll pass.
• Kickstarter vaporware of the day, Lifx edition - If you're deciding where to invest your money based on a combination of Kickstarter and the tech blogosphere, just burn it instead.
• CoffeeScript Style Guide - Just what it says.

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

• Say Hello to Realtime Collaboration - CSSDeck adds Etherpad-like shared editing to their HTML/CSS/JS sandbox.
• Introducing the Command Bar - GitHub turbocharges their search box.
• xgem - Supplement to rubygems to improve load times via caching.
• IonMonkey in Firefox 18 - New JavaScript JIT compiler for Firefox nightlies.
• Legit Teams - "Private git repository hosting tailored for small teams."

Week of September 10 - September 16, 2012

• ab7ae689e9727781ef39b01a836a746ac75352fc introduces a .rb template handler, allowing you to render the output of arbitrary ruby code.
• 3da275c4396d7fad250d2b786027ba4f14344bd4 neatens up the Active Record query interface a bit by letting you write Post.where(:author => Author.first) in place of Post.where(:author_id => Author.first)

And now I can lead campouts the Girl Scout way.

• FuzzBert - A random/fuzzing test framework for Ruby.
• Vienna 3 Beta with Google Reader Synch - If you're still using a desktop RSS reader, this is the one I like for consuming a lot of feeds.
• Backbone.js and Rails (Part 1 of 2) - Step by step to a working app.
• Source maps for coffeescript in rails - A definitely experimental bit of hackery.
• Servus for Mac - Formerly Droplings, this app build presentation pages for your DropBox files.
• Code Archaeology With Git - Tools and techniques to track down the history of obsure code.
• bashttpd - HTTP server as a bash shell script. One of those projects that only exists to demonstrate that with software all things are possible.
• Bootsnipp - Gallery of free HTML code snippets that integrate with Bootstrap.
• Big Favicons - Guidance on designing favicons that work well with all devices.
• Rails in Realtime, Part 2 - How to build an application that updates things quickly based on user actions.
• The ACE Editor Hits v1.0 - Embeddable code editor written in JavaScript.

Surveying a landscape of too many things to do and not enough time to do them in. Business as usual.

• Unicon, SASSified - Use SASS and a bunch of JavaScript to serve HD images with fallback to PNG, given a folder full of SVG files.
• Zeus - Rails app preloader for faster use of server and console, among other things.
• Pogoapp - New app hosting service (now in beta) with buildpack compatibility.
• Registration Dates & Competition Details - For the upcoming Rails Rumble.
• rubysh - Ruby subprocesses designed to make it easy to do tasks like piping output around.
• Interview Zen - Online app that tries to automate the process of making job applicants solve toy programming problems.

JavaScript performance work looms. Ugh.

• Passbook on Rails Example - Web service implemented in Rails to speak to iOS 6.
• Hobo 2.0.0.pre1 released - Lots of changes in this Rails extension layer.
• Passenger 3.0.17 and NGINX 1.2.3 packages for Ubuntu - From the folks at Brightbox.
• There is something magical about Firefox OS - A look at the project to use web technologies as the basis for an operating system.
• Knight.io - Curated list of "Github's finest repos" of gems.
• Fresco - jQuery lightbox for responsive designs.
• easystats - Gem with simple extensions to Array including median, mode, variance, and standard deviation.
• Unlock - "The independent publication for professional iOS designers & developers," taking reservations for a physical copy.
• Xiki - Wiki-like replacement for your terminal shell.

I just spent an hour using the Project Sputnik laptop with a Verizon 4G MiFi while my daughter was at her tumbling class. A few random observations:

• As far as speed goes, it's fine. My fears about 4GB not being enough RAM are so far overblown (of course, I don't run nearly as much on it as I do on my desktop). But for the development I was doing - editing in Sublime Text 2, running tests from terminal, examining the site in Firefox, working on a Rails app with MySQL running - it was plenty fast enough.
• The keyboard is acceptable for coding work. It doesn't have as much tactile feedback as I prefer, but these days my arthritis is forcing me away from the more tactile keyboards anyhow. I couldn't overtype it, didn't get doubled characters, it didn't feel mushy.
• The trackpad on the other hand…meh. I get random jumps from my palm brushing it despite the driver doing its best to ignore the trackpad while typing, and I can't find a sensitivity setting I like. I've tried, but I'm sure I'm going to give up and just toss a cheap external mouse on.
• After 1 hour of use, the battery meter said I had 2:01 left. So either the meter is wildly inaccurate or I'm not getting nearly the battery time that it promises.
• The screen is nice. No complaints, except that I'd like more pixels. Then again, I'd always like more pixels.

Overall, the XPS13 is a machine I can kick back with for a coding session when I'm away from my desk. The next question is whether it'll end up being one where the bits don't rot, thanks to developer profiles.

Missing out on a day in the woods. C'est la vie.

• Configster - Configuration management utility that stores things in an external YAML file for easy end-user editing.
• S3itch - If you don't like Skitch's switch to Evernote storage, you can use this to move your files to S3 instead.
• PLine - Line-oriented profiler for Ruby 1.9.2/1.9.3.
• A guide to the basics of jQuery - Online fundamentals course with examples you can play with.
• Application Craft - "100% cloud-based mobile development platform."
• Rocket Pants! - Modularized API builder for Rails 3 applications.

Just muddling through, one bug at a time.

• Scripting Chocolat with Node.js - First time I've seen an editor driven by JavaScript.
• PostgreSQL 9.2 released - Get it while it's hot.
• Skeu It! - A gallery of gratuitous user interface decisions.
• Yeoman - Web app toolkit based on Node and plenty of other stuff, including a port of the Rails generator system.

Week of September 3 - September 9, 2012

• Routing concerns have been enhanced in 05136e5c to let you move logic entirely out of the routing file into your models or elsewhere.
• 3b516b5b adds support for the PostgreSQL 9.2 native JSON data type.

A new week dawns, hooray.

• Bower - New package manager for web projects from Twitter.
• CoffeeScript Source Maps - How to debug CoffeeScript in Chrome.
• NestedSet - An implementation of the nested set pattern for storing trees in Rails 3.
• ActiveRecord inheritance and contexts - A pattern for sorting out subclassed models in your controllers.

This week just…disappeared. Getting old, I guess.

• Writing Beautiful RSpec Matchers - How to extend the DSL.
• PgPower - Active Record extension to tap some of the features of PostgreSQL.
• Testing Your Factories First - Smoke tests for your testing infrastructure.
• What's My User Agent? - Useful little tool for wringing troubleshooting info out of non-developers.
• Rack::Insight - Souped-up descendant of Rack::Bug.
• transaction_retry - Automatic retries of locked transactions for Active Record.

New XPS 13 now happily running the main client app I work on.

• Labrador - Web-based database client for Rails designed to integrate easily with Pow.
• How we keep GitHub fast - A peek at the tools behind the curtain.
• gitx - A new fork of this git client that's trying to remove legacy command line usage.
• chainsaw - Tool to parse a log file and show lines within a specific time span.
• transaction_isolation - ActiveRecord extension that allows setting transaction isolation level in a database-agnostic way.