It's only Tuesday?

• Cinderblock - Stripped down template with jQuery for new HTML projects.
• Brackets - Adobe's open-source code editor built with web technologies has been released in a beta version. Here's the blog entry announcing it.
• Wepawet and JSDetox - A pair of online tools for deobfuscating and analyzing potentially dangerous JavaScript.
• httpie - A human-friendly alternative to curl with colorized output.
• Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment - Tool from Netflix to publish complex sites to AWS.
• Formotion - Form builder for RubyMotion.
• Introducing Prose: A Content Editor for GitHub - Using GitHub Pages and Jekyll gets ever-simpler.
• It's playtime - The experimental Kickstarter-funded Light Table editor is starting to release early code.
• Unicode String Generator - Create input to make your web applications cry.

Week of June 18 -June 24, 2012

Seeing a few more Rails 4.0 articles lately, like Brian Cardarella's Rails 4.0 Sneak Peek: Queueing.

• 052e415f dials the default PostgreSQL log level back to warning, to get rid of some excess log noise.
• The ActiveRecord composed_of feature gets dropped in 14fc8b34. The commit message shows you what you can replace it with.
• ActiveRecord::Relation#pluck can now handle multiple columns. The work is merged in d59b2ab5c1dfc0e90d0c735a06c4607e7db07e65.

Back at my desk to find another flurry of open browser tabs.

• Site44 - Websites hosted in Dropbox. Doesn't look like anything you can't do by sharing a Dropbox folder, but they offer prettier names and custom domain support.
• Project Sputnik - The corporate page for Dell's new "ultimate developer laptop" is now live. This is looking like it might be my next computer.
• Functional JavaScript with LiveScript, Mocha, and ExpectThat - There's no escape from functional programming.
• r18n - Internationalization tool for ruby code with Rails compatibility and features not found in the Rails translation layer.
• Librarian - A generalization of Bundler for dependency resolution, shipped with a tool to handle dependency resolution on Chef cookbooks.
• Roundsman - Integrate Chef recipes into Capistrano recipes.
• jQuery 1.8 Beta 1: See What's Coming (and Going!) - Update on the API in the next version.
• knife-github-cookbooks - Knife plugin for installing and updating individual Chef cookbooks.
• Asset Pipeline Tips - A few notes from the field.
• Twitter Bootstrap Components - A symbol library for use with the Balsamiq mockup tool.
• Announcing Vault: safer passwords for the web - Via an online tool or a node application that you can run for yourself.

This week has been long enough.

• Announcing Opa 1.0 - A milestone for this JavaScript web application framework.
• ApiTaster - Browser-based manual testing for your Rails application's API.
• deliver - Deployment tool written as bash scripts.
• Sublime Text 2 for Ruby - Some tips to get you started productively.
• Test Studio - iOS mobile testing solution.
• Factory Girl Tips and Tricks - Some ways to increase your productivity with Factory Girl.
• /reFiddle+/ - Shared online Regex tester.

Continuing the march to #1000...

• About the composed_of removal - Some insight into the Rails development process.
• action.io - Rails development environment in the browser. Now taking beta signups.
• Ubuntu 12.04 Ruby on Rails Development Environment - Zero to all the bells and whistles.
• happy 0.1.0 - "The happy web application toolkit," another framework for Rack-based web applications.
• QA/Desktop Firefox/GetInvolved/Tasks - Roadmap to getting involved with helping out Firefox development.
• Clockwork - Ruby process designed to replace cron for web applications.

The worst thing about software is when your tools break. Yak shaving, here I come.

• sinatra-asset-pipeline - Sample app showing how to integrate sinatra with sprockets.
• portalign - Ruby gem to help manage Amazon EC2 security groups.
• chaves.js - jQuery plugin to integrate keyboard shortcuts into Web applications.
• A Turing Machine built using LEGO - And much simpler than you might expect.
• RailsThemes.com - These folks have launched their first theme (called Envy), and theres a lot more here than just colors and icons - they integrate with popular UI gems, supply a command-line installer, and generally seem to have thought the theming process through.
• Talks - Gem to make command-line tools give you spoken status.
• System Metrics - Rails 3 engine to do performance monitoring via ActiveSupport::Notification.
• Ruby OpenSource Challenge - Win prizes by contributing to open source software.

Settling down into a steady rhythm of work for the week. But first, links.

• Backbone UI - Represent Backbone models and collections as UI components with data binding.
• A better git log - Tip to make it more colorful and perhaps more useful.
• Jam - A package manager for JavaScript libraries.
• Removing config.threadsafe! - An argument that this option should go in Rails 4.0. Personally, my brain isn't big enough to manage multiple threads; I prefer throwing faster hardware at safe code rather than worrying about it.
• MemSQL - Memory based data store that's wire-compatible with MySQL.
• Mozilla Thimble - On screen web page creation with a split-screen editor with preview and instant publishing.
• Heroku San - Extra rake tasks for your Heroku projects.
• New Gitorious Stack - From Bitnami.

Week of June 11 -June 17, 2012

This week saw the first commits designed to handle Ruby 2.0 compatability - a rather scary thought.

• 02b2335 modifies the connection pool to make sure that the thread that has been waiting the longest gets the next available connection.
• a7f4b0a1 is one of those changes that's going to affect every application I've ever written: it removes update_attribute in favor of update_column.
• PostgreSQL's native uuid data type is supported with 12e9a75f.
• 75714082 merges a bunch of changes to get logic out of the various rake db tasks, and encapsulated into classes and objects.

Back with a pile of stuff after spending much time with Cub Scouts and BB guns.

• module-cluster - I think with support for methods like class_include_or_extend_prepends_includes_and_extends this might be the end game of Ruby metaprogramming.
• Nitron - "An opinionated, loosely-coupled set of RubyMotion components designed to accelerate iOS development."
• Rails version 3.2.6 has been released! - With some pretty important security fixes, so get on it if you haven't already. Here's the changelog for 3.2.5 to 3.2.6. There are also new 3.1.6 and 3.0.4 releases.
• node-prompter - Interactive tool for building JSON files via templates with embedded expressions.
• Amazon S3 - The First Trillion Objects - Yow.
MemShrink's 1st Birthday - The project to slim down Firefox RAM usage has not only had some great results but also makes for fascinating technical reading.
• spice - RubyGem that provides support for the Chef API.
• grocer - Ruby support for Apple push notifications.
• hisrc-rails - Use the asset pipeline to provide responsive images to Retina (and other) displays. Works with the HiSRC jQuery plugin.
• RailStrap - Rails 3.2 + Bootstrap + HTML5 Boilerplate + authentication.
• RedisLive - Spiffy-looking monitor for Redis.
• Linode Birthday Giveaway! - If you're in the market for a new VPS Linode has some deals running tomorrow.
• Scalable and Maintainable CSS Approaches - An evaluation of some of the work in this field.
• Dressed - "Premium Rails Themes based on Bootstrap."
• Rails 2 Asset pipeline - I don't like the pipeline enough to want to retrofit it to my remaining Rails 2 apps, but apparently some people do.

And this morning, I am feeling no urge whatsoever to buy a new laptop. Must be a sign of increasing age.

• Slides "Rails & Security" from Devconf, Moscow - By Egor Homakov, who gained some notoriety by messing with GitHub and Rails.
• Icenium - "Cross-Platform Mobile Development." Sort of like PhoneGap in the cloud.
• Mina - An alternative to Capistrano or Vlad for deployment and server automation that claims serious speed gains.
• RubyFiddle - An online IRB session that lets you save and share your code snippets.
• Domino - Abstraction layer on top of the DOM for use in your integration tests, with Capybara integration.
• StatiCloud - Drag a zipped folder to the page, get a static site hosted on AWS.
• contracts.ruby - Contracts for defining your ruby method interfaces.
• How to build firebug extensions - Part 1 (Getting Started) - Just in case building browser extensions wasn't tricky enough for you.
• overlay_me - Check your implementation of a designer's work by overlaying their image with your live HTML.
• ruby-mass - Introspection for the ruby heap.

Week of June 4 -June 10, 2012

Not a very busy week.

• The work merged at b4fb80cb starts reducing the number of strings that Rails creates; in the long run, this should have a good effect on memory/GC issues.
• 4faaa811 adds ActiveRecord::Base#destroy! which raises an exception if the record cannot be destroyed.
• 96f19f6c raises an error in dev mode if there are pending migrations, rather than waiting for your code to fail because the database is out of sync with the code.

It's going to be another spotty week here, but I'll update as I can.

• xip.io - Public DNS server that will resolve nonroutable machines on your local network to their proper IP. This is designed to work well with the latest release of Pow.
• zucchini - "A visual iOS testing framework."
• virtus - Attributes for plain old ruby objects, with plenty of sugar.
• Zeroing in on Zero Downtime - For a Rails application, this includes hacking at capistrano to perform rolling restarts.
• cap_git_tools - Functionality for tagging and inspecting in a reasonably complex workflow.
• Prospectus for Silicon Valley's Next Hot Tech IPO, Where Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong - Amen.
• The Password Rant - Don't be like LinkedIn.
• Run a gist! - Heroku app to serve up requests from files in a gist.
• CVE-2012-2122: A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL - Looks like people will be losing sleep over this one for a while.
• PouchDB - JavaScript/JSON database that can sync with an online CouchDB installation.
• Proxino - Monitoring and logging for client-side JavaScript.

If I could catch up to just being amazingly behind it'd be an improvement.

• Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts, 2nd Edition
• - Updated to Rails 3.2/Ruby 1.9, and 20% off for most of this month.
• EC2 is basically one big rip-off - Well, yeah, if all you want it raw computing power EC2 offers bad bang for the buck.
• Firefox update refreshes new tab and start pages, adds SPDY support - And in my experience, the newly-released FF13 gets the memory mess under control too.

Might be about time for another Twitter vacation.

• jQuery++ - Low-level helpers for jQuery, dealing with things like CSS animations, cookies, event pausing, resize events, and so on.
• jQuery Transit - Another approach to CSS3 animations for jQuery.
• display-case - Implements the exhibit pattern in Rails.
• Building a MongoDB Clone in Postgres: Part 1 - Hopefully they'll only clone the good parts.

Week of May 28 -June 3, 2012

It was a fairly quiet week on the Rails front. Well, if you don't count multiple non-edge dot releases for security fixes.

• f9cb645d lets you use a block with Active Record counts: Person.where("age > 26").count { |person| gender == 'female' }.
• 5db367a7 changes the default Gemfile template to use 1.9 hash syntax, which I think is ugly as sin in this case. gem 'capistrano', group: :development. I hate the stuttering colons.
• rake stats reports on code lines in Javascript and CoffeeScript files with a48b3f1a.
• 806d023b adds Rails 4.0 release notes to the tree - a sign that things are moving along, I suspect.

Hopefully this will post itself while I'm off in the woods.

• Regression in v3.2.5: precompiled assets aren't correctly found when using assets that have more than one extension - This one bit me on a production app; it'll bit you too if you have things like "require foo.min" inside a file that sprockets will process. The fix is to add the js extension, or apply this patch.
• docopt - A command line option parser that works by parsing your usage message rather than making you write boilerplate code.
• SimpleForm 2.0 and Twitter Bootstrap sample application - From the folks at Platformatec.
• CoffeeScript II - Thanks to Kickstarter, a new CoffeeScript compiler is on the way.
• gmaps.js - JavaScript API for Google Maps.
• sidekiq 2.0 - Now including scheduled jobs.
• The Cloud Is Not for You - Or at least it's not magic pixie dust that solves all problems
.

Putting on my Girl Scout hat today, but there are still a few minutes to collect these stray links.

• Ruby and the myth of developer productivity - What? It's not a magic bullet? I want my money back.
• Rote - Template system for non-dynamic web sites that appears to be coming back into active development.
• Rails 3.0.13 has been released! And the same for 3.1.5, 3.2.4, and 3.2.5 - The first three are security fixes, and the last one is "oops, we screwed up some internals on 3.2.4."
• The nuts and bolts of our Ruby-based realtime charts solution - How Scout manages to push out realtime charts with mostly off the shelf components.
• Blocky - A visual programming language from Google. I'd be more impressed if I thought programming was harder than jigsaw puzzles.

Ticks. The Bane of summer.

• New BitNami Stack: Node.js - In case you want an easy way to experiment with that newfangled node stuff.
• Forgotten Rails features: HTTP Streaming - I should take a look at this for one of the apps I'm working on.
• Rack::Worker - Implement the worker pattern for non-blocking long-running GET requests.

Stress, thy name is source code.

• Next step in the Chrome OS journey - Does anyone actually use a Chromebook, now joined by a desktop version? Why has Google not given up on this yet?
• Clippy.js - JavaScript implementation of Microsoft's Clippy for any web site. Grab it fast if you want it; I can't believe MS's IP lawyers will leave this standing for long.

Another jackpot number.

• [ANN] Rails 3.0.13.rc1, 3.1.5.rc1, 3.2.4.rc1 have been released! - Why yes, they have.
• rubymotion_cookbook - Project to rewrite the examples from the O'Reilly iOS5 Programming Cookbook into ruby.
• Media Queries in Sass - A gist of useful code.
• Plain Record - Data persistence layer that uses human readable text for storage.
• Abstraction Creep - An argument that you should fix shaky abstractions, rather than build another abstraction on top. Sounds sensible, but I think of the Rails-Merb merger and think it's not that simple.
• Redactor - jQuery-based WYSIWYG editor.