A Fresh Cup

I know, the stuttering RSS feed is incredibly annoying. It annoys me too. But my todo list is a mile long…excuses, excuses…

• PHP Semantics in Rails—Use Blank? – Just a reminder that Rails defines the handy ?blank on everything. Bad enough that I don’t have many of the Ruby core methods memorized yet, there’s all the Rails extensions to remember too. Oh well, this is why I’m continually reading books and documentation and source. At some point bits and pieces sink in (and next year I’ll be embarrassed to read the code I’m writing this year, too).
• OpenProj – Cross-platform, open-source, free replacement for Microsoft Project. I had a little play with this, since I do occasionally like to track things with Gantt charts (yes, I know they’re not ideally suited for everything, but I’ve got an industrial engineering degree, OK?). On the plus side, it does seem to work fine, and opens Microsoft Project files without a problem. On the minus side, it’s a Java app, which means that the UI is equally nonstandard and annoying on all platforms.
• Bug in @flash deprecation? – I’ve been getting annoying warnings about using @flash in one of my Rails projects even though it’s nowhere in sight. It looks like the simple answer for now is “don’t use a partial named _flash”. Fixed in Edge

Ran across a few more things worth passing along:

• VMware Fusion – This one officially released yesterday. Given my history with VMware (I’ve been using their Windows products since 1.0) one of the reasons I went with a powerful Mac was so that I could run Fusion and virtualize Windows as a backup plan in case I got stuck trying to transition something away from Microsoft. Now, I expect to never actually install this.
• Cyndicate – New commercial 3-pane RSS reader for the Mac that so far is working quite well for me. I would stick with the free Vienna, except Vienna freezes for me fetching the news now that I’ve got 200+ feeds loaded in it. And before you offer other alternatives, you should know that I detest online readers, and I think 2-pane newsreader UI sucks crap through a soda straw when you’re trying to scan and organize a huge number of feeds.
• PdfWriter and RailsPdf – Relatively elegant way to get PDF output from Rails – something I hope frankly to never need to do, but there you are.

Whoops, I’m a bit late with my report after 7 months of transition away from Microsoft and on to freer pastures. Life, as they say, has been getting in the way.

• At this point, I pretty much do not touch the Windows box except to put together the Daily Grind and to keep up my business bookkeeping in QuickBooks. My accountant is pretty well tied to the latter. We’re planning a physical move across the country later this year, if all goes well, which will probably provide an opportunity for switching accountants and accounting packages.
• I haven’t written a line of code in anything other than Ruby (and more specifically RoR) in the last month. The two active Rails projects I have are moving along fine. I’m getting in good amounts of billable hours at a decent rate, both clients are happy, and I’m on track to complete the work on time and under budget.
• The “on time and under budget” part is a two-edged sword: it’s getting to the point where I ought to be scratching for more work again, though I also need to follow up with the existing customers to see whether they want to extend the engagements.
• More and more I know what I’m doing in RoR without having to look it up, though I still am far from true expertise in the environment. I still need to really be pounding out more code every day to get to that point. I’ve always learned computer languages by immersion with reference materials handy, though, so I’m satisfied with this state of affairs.
• We recently purchased our second island in Second Life, and rentals are starting to throw off some profit at a decent ROI. So while SL doesn’t look as likely to turn into a full-time job as it did a couple of months ago, it may yet become a reasonably profitable hobby.

There’s plenty going on in the Rails community (and other corners of non-Microsoft software development). Here are a few more shiny things that have caught my eye lately.

• Rails performance tip – using YSlow – Worth a look if you need to speed up page load times.
• Mingle is live – ThoughtWorks has their agile project management tool ready to go.
• acts_as_taggable_on_steroids – A plugin that adds tag clouds and other goodies to the standard acts_as_taggable.

I fear I let things pile up a bit last week. Time to clear out some of these open browser windows and hope that the news isn’t too stale.

• A ‘DHH Approved’ Logo? – There’s been a fair amount of discussion the last week over the fact that DHH wants to keep the Rails logo locked down as far as book cover usage goes. While I understand the trademark law argument, there’s some clash with open source principles here. And handing out a copy of the logo in every generated Rails app may have already fatally weakened the protection anyhow – though IANAL.
• Editing Multiple Models in One Form – I needed UI to edit all the records in a model on one web form in Rails; this proved to be easy to set up once I knew how, and hard to figure out. This tutorial pointed me in the right direction.
• Apache Lucene – Query Parser Syntax – Since Solr builds on Lucene, trying to figure out how to write queries for acts_as_solr will eventually lead to this page.
• redMine – Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application – Review of another competitor to Trac/BaseCamp/et al. Looks worth digging into.
• OpenID Sample Application Updated – Ben Curtis has revved his OpenID reference app for Rails.
• GeoKit – Rails plugin for geocoding. I’m gonna need this soon.

The bookmarks have piled up a bit again. Time to clean them out to start the week.

• Capistrano 2.0 – The release of a significant new version. I guess I finally have to stop putting off learning about the new features and changes now.
• In-Place Editing: The Summer 2007 Rewrite – And speaking of new features, there’s been a significant bit of code thrash over at script.aculo.us.
• pure class – Discussion of the best way to define a user.reviews.good (or analogous) method, something that I need to do soon for the current app I’m working on.

Posting is going to be irregular for a while, I expect: here’s why

• pure class – I’m going to need to use one of these techniques for tracking down things through ActiveRecord extensions soon, I think.
• Twitter4R 0.2.0: Twitter API for Ruby – There are now two different Ruby libraries for accessing the Twitter API. Some people would say that is two too many.
• Connector and Slingshot Open-sourced and Free – The Joyent guys are giving away a big ol’ gob of code.

We’re trying to prep our house to put it on the market. This sucks down a great deal of time, and explains why posting may be spottier than usual for a little bit.

• How to Create Many to Many Relationships in Ruby on Rails – One of the basic skills, but it does point out creating the join table, which is easy to miss the first time you set up such a relationship. (via dzone)
• Haml 1.7 has been released! – Alternative markup language for Rails views. Lots of perf work in the last few releases, so it’s becoming a more viable alternative, at that.
• Using Omnigraffle to visualise Rails model associations – I could have used this about a week before I found it, since I spent a big chunk of that week drawing ERDs to understand a pile of existing Rails models. This one uses code to reflect over the models and build ERDs automatically.
• Warehouse Subversion Browser Released! – This is the SVN browser in Rails from the ActiveReload folks. Now available for a one-time $30 fee.
• Replacing Ant With Rake – Here’s how you can call all your ant tasks as if they were rake tasks, and so switch to rake for ongoing maintenance of your ant files.

A few random links for the Fourth of July.

• Information Card Ruby – Yes, you can now make InfoCard play with Rails, if you must. This will be a good thing for those trying to smuggle Rails into Microsoft shops.
• Mingle is Now Available – That would be the new agile project management tool from ThoughtWorks, now in an Early Access release.
• Comatose – Micro-CMS implemented as a Rails plugin, to handle editing of those few semi-static pages that pile up in every application.

Here I am, half a year into my experiment with cutting loose from Microsoft, and I think I can pronounce it a success:

• I now have two Rails consulting jobs running, and I’m as busy on that front as I want to be from now until about the end of August, which is about as far out as my consulting time has ever been assured. This doesn’t mean that I’m not looking for more, but it means that I’m feeling a comfortable cushion, and a confidence that I’ll find more work to keep the pipeline full. My Rails rate is nowhere near what my top C# rate was (or for that matter, what my top Netware rate was many years ago), but that’s OK.
• I’ve got a couple of leads on actual US-dollar paying Second Life work, which I am actively pursuing.
• I still don’t feel like I’ve reached the “expert” level with Rails yet, but at least I can get it to mostly do what I want with minimal fuss. The times when I go off the clock to research something are getting fewer and taking less time.
• My .NET skills are rapidly deteriorating; I haven’t written a line of C# or VB code in months.
• I’m moved almost entirely to the Mac for my day-to-day work, with the exception of maintaining the Larkware site.

I’m getting to the point where I’m finding more interesting links for my new blog than for my old one. This is a good sign of transition, I think.

• Condition Builder 1.1 – Helper to easily generate SQL WHERE conditions for Rails. (via Same Shirt Every Day)
• UserEngine – Roles and permissions for Rails. Bookmarked ‘cause I’ve got a customer who wants to use this. Only they don’t want to use an engine. Hmm.
• Capistrano 2.0 Preview 4 – One more iteration of the next Capistrano release.

Time to repost another few links for my own reference and yours.

• I’m on Rails: Coding Statistics. – I ended up swiping pieces of this to do outbound link tracking in an application I’m working on.
• rails plugin list – More plugins than you can shake a stick at, along with where to grab them from. You have to guess their use from their names, though.
• Installing Xen on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn – the complete newbie’s guide – I hope not to have to tackle this any time soon, but if I do, this looks like a good unified guide.

There are always about a million little fiddly bits to do to get an application out the door, aren’t there?

• Backing Up Your Mac – Recently-revised article from MacZealots listing some easy alternatives. Doesn’t answer all of my questions but it’s a good starting point.
• mirRoR Placement – A pure Rails job shop. It’s another sign of the rapid growth of the Rails ecosystem that we’re seeing firms like this pop up.
• Announcing Multisite Plugin for Rails – Serve multiple domains from a single Rails application by giving each a distinct set of views.

Woo, starting another consulting job today, without a speck of MS stuff in sight. I feel all vindicated and stuff.

• iStat Menus – There are about a million different Mac system monitors out there. This one is free and doesn’t take up screen real estate when you don’t want it to.
• VSS to SVN: Part 3 – This tutorial for source code control switchers continues.
• Ruby on Rails EC2 ‘Appliance’ – Practically turnkey Rails deployment to the Amazon server cloud. (via Ruby Insie)
• Sake Bomb – Sake is system-wide Rake. Looks like it still has some warts, but is already useful

With a second Rails contract about to be signed, I guess I really am a Rails consultant now. How about that?

• file_column plugin and Capistrano – By default the file_column plugin saves under /public, which doesn’t play well with Capistrano. Fortunately the fix is simple.
• Rails Hackfests – The Hackfests, recognizing contributions to the Rails source code, have gone monthly.
• Installing Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL on OS X, Second Edition – Revision to a popular and useful how-to article.