A Fresh Cup

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program of linkage.

• LiquiBase – Open source database refactoring tool that can handle MySQL and PostgreSQL among others.
• Four Words for Microsoft – Tim Bray weighs in on Microsoft’s most recent FUD salvo with reasonable eloquence.
• CodeGear Unveils First IDE for Agile Ruby on Rails Web 2.0 Development – The former Borland IDE team gets into the act by announcing a new cross-platform IDE due to ship the second half of this year. I predict that some people will see this as the beginning of the end for Rails (“Oh no! The barbarians are coming!”)
• ActiveWarehouse 0.3.0 Released – Looks like this OLAP framework for Rails is moving right along.
• Swiftiply – New clustering proxy for Web applications that includes Mongrel support. (via Ruby Inside)
• an introduction to RSpec – Part I – Along with an introduction to BDD in general.
• How to deploy a self contained Rails application on Tomcat, painlessly! – I hope this never happens to me, but if you’re sneaking Rails into the enterprise it may be your only hope. (via Ruby Inside)
• Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails – Lovely little takeoff on those Mac vs. PC ads.

Early morning children are good for early morning Web updates, at the very least.

• Microsoft takes on the free world – Fortune reports on Microsoft’s claim to have 235 patents that are infringed by free and open source software, though they won’t reveal any of the details. Until we actually see a list, I’m going to have a hard time not hearing echoes of Tailgunner Joe’s list of communists in the State Department.
• The Soup – New Rails community site that wants to match open projects to participants on the basis of lists of needs and skills.
• PeepCode Press Manifesto – Boutique publishing for the Rails market. I hope to keep an eye on this as a reader. Maybe some day I’ll even be an author in Rails-land, but not yet.

After 18 months of drawing a paycheck, I’m having to learn anew how to self-motivate. Which is to say that I had a very lazy Easter weekend.

• Microsoft is Dead – You know, being a good developer and making a bunch of money with a startup in the right place at the right time does not qualify you to be an insightful commentator. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but it’s absurd to say that Microsoft is dead or to imply that the era of desktop applications is over. And ending the essay by implying that those who disagree with you are old and therefore stupid is just offensive. Graham should realize that his public posturing reflects on the companies that Y Combinator funds.
• Schools should use Openoffice.org – I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, NeoOffice (which is essentially OO for Mac) is handling all of my personal Office needs quite well these days, and that’s after having been a heavy Microsoft Office user from versions 2.0 through 2003. On the other, those students are going to end up in a world where they’re required to use Microsoft Office. It’s a quandry.
• ActiveWarehouse ETL 0.7.0 Released – One of the more ambitious Rails-related projects that I know about continues to march along.
• The Absolute Moron’s Guide to Capistrano – Baby steps and a helpful explanation of the conceptual framework. Useful if Capistrano is still a mysterious black box to you.

Spent a chunk of last night trying to figure out the major e-commerce systems in Second Life. It really is a whole different world in there.

• A peek in the rear-view mirror – I try not to be gratuitously snarky about Microsoft here, but you know, sometimes it’s just too tasty to avoid.
• Apollo – Adobe’s new whiz-bang Web/desktop development language, now in alpha. In a year, maybe I’ll kick myself for not getting out in front of the parade on this one, but you know, I’ve never yet met an Adobe development environment I actually liked to work with.
• Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial – Part 2 – More in-depth advice from the Rails Envy folks.
• No code left untested – Extension to Rails’ controller generator to make it generate test files for helpers.

If just installing Vista isn’t enough for you, you can buy the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition, a limited numbered edition signed by Bill Gates. Didn’t this sort of thing go out of fashion with Joseph Stalin?

Peter Gutman (who is a rather well-known and respected security researcher) recently published A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection looking at some of the costs and changes being forced on hardware vendors by Microsoft’s design of Windows Vista. Sadly, these costs are going to affect all of us, whether we use Vista or not. But this sort of nonsense is why I’m ready to ditch Microsoft – and certainly won’t be “upgrading” any of my computers to Vista.

The folks over at Explorer Destroyer want you to encourage people to switch from IE to Firefox. They’ll help you code a special notice or splash page that only nags IE users, or even blocks IE users from your site entirely. I’m not ready to go that far, but I give them points for dedication.