A Fresh Cup

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.

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

It’s Monday, it’s time for some new links

• Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew – Some pointers for getting started. (via dzone)
• Versions – Subversion GUI for OS X, now going into private beta.
• Capistrano 2.0 Preview 3 – Apparently getting close to release.

In case it hasn’t been blindingly obvious, I’m ready to start talking to folks about Rails contracting. If you’ve got work on the web that needs doing, let’s chat.

• Sneak Peek: What We Built While You Were At RailsConf – The folks behind Lighthouse and Mephisto are working on a Rails-backed web-based Subversion browser.
• Komodo IDE 4.1 -This half-price promo is marked as being for RailsConf attendees, but they don’t seem to be verifying and the promo code is hanging right out on the web page. $147.50 instead of $295 for this Rails IDE.
• The Rails Documentation Project – Site tracking the big community-funded overhaul of the Rails API docs and associated projects.
• A Guide to Testing the Rails – Big tutorial on Rails testing, if you’re still not Doing The Right Thing.
• “Backhoe” – Large-scale Second Life terraforming tool. Only useful if you’re investing crazy amounts of money.
• Generate Google sitemap with Rails and RXML – Especially useful if you’re serving pages in frames.

Why “Double Shot”? Why not? My daily links column over at Larkware is called “Daily Grind,” so somehow that just seems to fit. Well, at least as much as anything fits.

• Shiny new Subversion and Trac cluster – The Rails team has just gotten a server upgrade, and having checked out a new Edge tree last night, I can confirm that it’s a whole lot faster. There’s also a change of URL for the Rails Subversion repository, though the old URL will continue to work. Here’s some info on switching an existing checkout to point to the new URL.
• Streamlined 0.0.7.1 – I blinked and missed the announcement a few days ago, but the plugin version of this tool for building spiffy Rails views is out now.
• Show database migration versions with Rake – A simple Rake task to pull the current version out of the database. I imagine this could be useful in a busy shop with multiple devs writing migrations.
• Site5 Deployment Problems with Capistrano > 1.2 – A fix to some mystery Capistrano permissions problems. I think it’s a feature, but this could still be pretty helpful if you hit the same situation.
• Getting Started with Subversion on OS X – Ben Wong has some basic information.

Found this one via Mike Clark’s article on Piston. Subtlety takes the URL of a public Subversion repository and creates an RSS feed of changes for you, so you can monitor what’s going on with that project. A sweet way to have one less place on the net that you have to visit, and one more piece of information in your own hands whenever you want it.