An actual empty day on my calendar. Amazing.

• normalize.css - Modernized CSS reset for HTML5.
• The Gang of Four is wrong and you don't understand delegation - Yeah well. I can't say I really give a hoot as long as my code works. Personal failing, I'm sure.
• ForwardMachine - dynamic port forwarding - Ruby daemon for forwarding incoming TCP traffic.
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree - What if all the stuff about software development improvement was driven by the Hawthorne Effect and friends? What indeed.

Sometimes things just get too busy.

• Ephemeral - ORM-like functionality for non-persisted objects, so you can do things like apply scopes to JSON responses.
• Introducing GreenOnion - Your New Favorite UI Testing Tool - Compare views with previous snapshots on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
• Formotion - Views and model synching for iOS via RubyMotion. Now at version 1.0.
• Announcing Git Integration with TFS - Um. No thanks.

Week of August 6 - August 12, 2012

Not a hugely busy week, though there's plenty of tinkering going on inside things like routing and associations still.

• DHH stepped in at fb883318 to revert the generation of humans.txt when making new applications. He may not make a lot of commits these days but his opinions are still important.
• 2a290f7f introduces a default_headers config option, making it easy to apply HTTP headers to every response your application generates.

Another week, another few links.

• Average App Store Review Times - Just in case you want to know how long the darned things are taking. This is the worst part of iOS development.
• Debunking the Node.js Gish Gallop - Someone intimately familiar with ruby web servers and frameworks takes on the more extreme claims of the Node.js community.
• thin 2.0 - Out in alpha. Use at your own risk.
• Firebug Tip: Log DOM Events - The easy way to avoid sprinkling your code with console.log().
• Consuela - Log reader for the iPad.

Time for a bit of work, and then off to the Boy Scout camp for the weekend. NRA Handgun Instructor training this time.

• Lua-Quick-TryOut - Windows/Linux IDE for dabbling with Lua.
• TextMate 2 at GitHub - With a GPL3 license. Hard to view this as anything other than a death rattle.
• jQuery 1.8 Released - And just like that I'm behind again. Looks like lots of solid improvement.
• Rails 3.2.8 has been released! - With a trio of important security fixes. Time to turn the upgrade crank again.
• Guide to the Rails Apps Composer Gem - Rails application templating on steroids.
• Testing shell scripts with Testing Framework - Yes, there's a test framework for everything.
• Remote Debugging on Firefox for Android - Use your desktop box to figure out what's wrong on your phone.

Back to the grindstone. Actually, I think it's following me around.

• ToS;DR: An attempt to reduce various Terms of Service to simple terms with icons and ratings. I'd be astounded if it led to any actual change on the rated sites.
• Bypass Mass-Assignment Protection in Rake db:seed - A quick little Rails tip.
• API Design - An opinionated set opf rules for OS X and iOS components.
• Riak 1.2 Is Official! - Basho marches on.
• W3CLove - Validator that crawls your entire site and gives you a report on its HTML.
• Adaptor, a jQuery 3D content slider - Slide shows with some nifty special effects. Demo page is here.

Watching a nuclear-powered robot land via sky crane on Mars does make a lot of this stuff seem less important.

• MacBacon - RSpec clone designed to work with MacRuby/Objective-C.
• The Origin of Master Space and Time With JavaScript - Noel Rappin explains why he wrote another book.

Week of July 30 - August 5, 2012

The most sweeping change this week was actually on the 3.2 branch, where a bunch of deprecations were undone, in line with a new policy of not deprecating APIs in point releases.

• The column updating saga continues. 4ac81de5 removes the deprecation of update_column, so both it and update_columns will be supported in 4.0.
• 92641ef reverses the behavior of multiple calls to .order(). Now .order("first_name ASC").order("last_name ASC") will generate ORDER BY last_name ASC, first_name ASC.
• 7db0b073 makes the inflector locale-aware and multilingual. Now you can define separate pluralization rules for separate locales.
• 437851e adds Relation#load to force eager loading of records.
• Documentation for the new association API is available in 6fe11965.

• Testing Chef Cookbooks - Lots going on here if your infrastructure is mature & complex enough to need it.
• ransack - Gem to make it easier to hook up search forms to your Rails application's models.
• Context.io - API (as a service) to connect user email to your application for analysis.
• Ruby Refinements landed in trunk - More syntax to learn, yay.
• RepoManager - Tool to run git commands in parallel across multiple repositories.
• Rebuilding Rails - Beta ebook ($34.99) that works you through building your own Ruby web framework so as to better understand Rails internals. You can get two sample chapters for free.
• Storenvy API - Create, populate and manage online stores all through a REST/JSON API.
• Why Rails 4 Live Streaming is a big deal - From the Passenger team, this one (and its comments) get into heavy discussion of multithreaded application servers quickly. Stuff I need to learn sooner or later…
• Mandrill - "Mailchimp for APPS", a transactional API from the Mailchimp guys.
• Rails 3.2.8.rc2 has been released! - With final planned for this week.
• CircleCI - Another continuous integration service, currently in public beta.
• Ember 1.0 Prerelease - Another JavaScript library moving along nicely.
• Sublime Text 2 tips: Distraction-free mode, ColorPicker, and Placeholders and Some things beginners might not know about Sublime Text - A few hints and tips and packages you might like.
• TwitterCLDR: Improving Internationalization Support in Ruby - Dates, times, formats, sorting, and more.
• Cocoa Controls - A clearinghouse for custom UI controls for iOS and OS X.
• SPDY on Rails - How to get yourself hooked up if you're using nginx + Passenger.

And that's another week in the box. Hand me the nails.

• Trident: a high-level abstraction for realtime computing - Trident is to Twitter Storm as Pig is to Hadoop.
• Legit - "Git Workflow for Humans", some aliases for common git operations.
• Testing with CoffeeScript - Free ebook.
• Divshot - "Interface Builder for Web Apps". Drag and drop page design, then export to HTML/CSS. Taking signups.
• Fix ActiveSupport Integration with Mocha - Not really all that significant, but how could I not link to my first Rails commit in ages?
• Parellize assets:precompile - Monkeypatch for Sprockets' compiler.

First Cub Scout meeting of the new school year tonight, yay.

• Rails 3.2.8.rc1 has been released! - With a critical fix for RSpec users, and announcing a new policy deprecating deprecations on point releases.
• My New Book: Developing, Deploying and Debugging Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithms - Looks interesting. I'd like it to be published already.
• Phusion Passenger Enterprise released - You can finally pay for support on this key part of many infrastructures.
• Thinking Sphinx 3 - So far not ready to use, but it's looking interesting.

Midweek again. Just gotta keep trudgin' on.

• pianoman - Dump file analyzer for redis .rdb files.
• capybara-mechanize - Work towards making capybara useful for remote testing.
• Mind-Bending Factories - I'm not convinced that creating a factory to generate "example.com" is worthwhile, but it's an amusing exercise.
• Brakeman 1.7.0 Released - With more style and security checks for your Rails code.

It's amazing how quickly a calendar can fill up.

• Cheddar for iOS is Now Open Source - Just in case you'd like to see some real-world sample code, and perhaps fix a few bugs.
• Prism - New lightweight code highlighter in JavaScript with a plugin architecture.
• And then the music stopped - Ruminations on the current "this time it's different" nonsense. Get a real job if you don't have one already. With, you know, a company that has a sustainable revenue stream.
• SideTap - Framework for platform independent mobile web interfaces.
• Master Space and Time with JavaScript FAQ - Noel Rappin taks about his new ebook, which works with jQuery and Backbone (and others) in a test-first manner.
• Is It Live? - In-depth look at the streaming functionality that just landed in Rails 4.0.

Week of July 23 - July 29, 2012

Biggest change this week is probably the introduction of ActionController::Live, but there are lots of little advances as well.

• 449039a8 swaps out ActionDispatch::Head in favor of Rack::Head.
• Don't get too used to update_column, which is the 3.2.x replacement for update_attribute. In 87ffc366 it gets replaced by update_columns.
• With 6a81ccd6 ActiveRecord::Base.all returns a Relation instead of an Array. Finally.
• 99ea1a87 changes the behavior of Object#try to return nil if the receiving object doesn't implement the method. You can use Object#try! if you want the old behavior.
• ActionController::Live allows any method to stream data to the client live. 0899be57 has the changelog entry.

Had a fine couple of days off. Now back to the ones and zeros.

• Testing With Frank - iOS application testing with Cucumber.
• Backbone.js explained in CoffeeScript - An interactive learning eBook.
• How to add Notification Center support to your website or app - A simple guide that walks through what the user has to do as well.
• Whoops - Self-hosted tool for logging whatever you like.
• ActiveRecord Deep Dive - A series of video tutorials.
• Ruby Hoedown 2012 - The free ruby conference in Nashville is back September 21-22.
• Cuckoo Sandbox - Standalone environment for analyzing malware and figuring out what it does.

Time to wrap this week up and get on with life.

• Rails version 3.2.7 has been released! - Mainly a security fix, but not super-critical unless you're using digest authentication.
• Roadmap Preview 2: live IRB console, deployment error resistance, new website - More on the upcoming version of Phusion Passenger. The live debugging looks pretty slick.
• Backbone.js: Hacker's Guide Part 2 - More internals for your fun and profit.
• The Mac App Store's future of irrelevance - Could it be that the App Store will fail, because apps bought that way are significantly disadvantaged? I think it more likely that a future version of OS X will just refuse to install software from any other source.
• Just When You Thought You Were Out… - 2012 Rails Rumble is coming October 12 through 14.
• Live Carbon Ranking - Carbon dioxide emissions per hour for cloud computing in various locations.
• Backburner - beanstalkd-powered background job queue.
• Seedbank - Enhanced version of the Rails db/seeds functionality.

Having my schedule disrupted makes me grumpy. A personal failing, I'm sure.

• csv_shaper - DSL for creating CSV output in Rails, including support for CSV views.
• Hiss - OS X app to forward Growl notifications to Mountain Lion's Notification Center. In beta.
• terminal-notifier - Command-line tool to send OS X notifications.
• http - Easy http requests in Ruby via chaining modifiers.
• RubygemsLeader - Whose gems have been downloaded the most? Not mine, that's for sure.
• shin - Package manager for dotfiles and shell code snippets.
• Create.js - In page HTML5 content editor.
• Roadmap Preview 1 – Phusion Passenger 4.0 and Phusion Passenger Enterprise - A paid version of Passenger is coming, including rolling process restarts.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to Riding a Mountain Lion - Getting Ruby and Homebrew working again after an OS X upgrade.

Elder daughter wants to learn paleontology next. This should be interesting.

• php.js - Run PHP code in JavaScript. Errrrr….
• PostgresExt - ActiveRecord support for missing PostgreSQL data types, without having to move to Rails 4.
• Betakit - Boilerplate code to run a beta release with invitation codes, referral tracking, admin UI and more.
• Rack::CoreData - Automate the creation of a REST API from Core Data models.
• Markupwand - "Magically convert your photoshop files to HTML & CSS."
• Droplings - Turn any file on your computer into a branded download page hosted on Dropbox.

Week of July 16 - July 22, 2012

Big changes to associations internals landed this week, along with various other odds and ends.

• There's now a migrator specifically for join tables, keyed on the migration name: rails g migration create_clients_join_table doctors patients., as of 211d88b7.
• More tidying on the JavaScript front: fb8a830a removes :confirm in favor of :data => { :confirm => 'Are you sure?' } in various tag helpers.
• e1cfa6e0 shows off the new association macro syntax, with declarations like has_many :popular_grouped_posts, -> { includes(:comments).group("type").having("SUM(comments_count) > 1").select("type") }, :class_name => "Post"
• 3803fcce drops support for the :finder_sql, :counter_sql, :insert_sql, and :delete_sql in declaring associations.

A pool full of swimming Cub Scouts is loud.

• Toward a Bundler plugin system - People are treating Bundler as a platform these days.
• Mouth - Monitoring and graphing package that runs on ruby plus Mongo.
• mongodb-macosx-prefpane - OS X preference pane for Mongo instances installed via homebrew.
• Introducing Graphene - Ruby gem for transforming object collections into graphs.
• Redis Sentinel - Distributed monitoring and automatic failover for redis.
• Step by step from jQuery to Backbone - This does not make me want to write Backbone code.