A Fresh Cup

Where did all these browser tabs come from? Rabbits, I say, rabbits…

• Ruby on Rails vs Django – Commercial #7 – Who says Rails developers don’t like any other frameworks?
• Railsify – A new repository for Rails plugins. (via Ruby Inside)
• DRAFT: Rails Code Review PDF – Peepcode is branching out from screencasts to minibooks. This one looks like an excellent start.
• ActiveState Announced Open Komodo Project: Open Source, Open Web, and Open Dev Tools – ActiveState is launching an open-source client side web development tool integrated with FireFox and based on their own Komodo IDE.

8 months in to retooling my career, and things are still going well, if a trifle hectic:

• Both of the clients I’ve been doing Rails work for have extended their initial contracts with additional work, which strikes me as a pretty good vote of confidence.
• I’ve started building out another Rails application that we’ll be using as a springboard for a new business as my better half transitions careers herself.
• The prospect of work in Second Life remains live, though on the back burner as the prospective client is still getting corporate funding in place. I had another promising chat the other day though, and continue to hone my skills (and have fun) on that platform.
• Daily postings at Web Worker Daily are keeping me in practice as a short-order writer, as well as bringing in a bit of side income.
• Life is more chaotic than usual, with our impending move to Evansville, Indiana being set for about a month from now.

It may be Labor Day in the States, but I’m in front of a computer with too many browser tabs open anyhow.

• Aptana Milestone 9 – Plenty of active development going on in this Web IDE.
• Capistrano 2.1 Preview #1 – Capistrano development is just charging along.
• Rails Plugin: Acts_As_Indexed – Boolean-queried full-text indexing with no dependencies on an external indexing engine.
• Integrating the PayPal API with Ruby on Rails – Twelve bucks, but something I’m going to need to do soon, and I’m contemplating buying a copy to short-circuit the learning curve.

Moving is such a huge pain in the arse. Let’s wallow in links for a few minutes to avoid thinking about it.

• Webistrano – Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments, including complex scenarios, with tracking and history.
• Why not ASP.Net? – Another Microsoft refugee sums up reasons for not using the ASP.NET platform.
• RM-Install – New Rails stack installer (Mac/Linux at the moment) from FiveRuns and BitRock that looks like it covers just about everything you need to get cooking.
• The Rails Edge: Quotes and Notes – A batch of amusing conference one-liners.
• scplugin – Finder-integrated Subversion for the Mac. Haven’t tried it yet.

The complete refactoring of life continues: we’re accepting an offer on our house today. Meanwhile, a few more links…

• Seesaw – High-Availability Mongrel Packs – Folks are still working on the best way to set up high-availability, high-traffic Rails sites. I do wish there wasn’t quite so much black magic in this. But this looks like a potentially useful tool. (via Ruby Inside)
• Rails vs .NET – Ruby on Rails Commercial #5 and Ruby on Rails vs. PHP – Ruby on Rails Commercial #6 – A couple more bits of satire from the Rails Envy guys.
• Streamlined 0.9 Release Candidate – New version of this fancy replacement for the boring default Rails scaffolding.

I had a wisdom tooth out yesterday, but the show must go on…

• Generating ZIP file archives via Ruby on Rails – This pointed me in the right direction to satisfy another client requirement. Always nice when that happens.
• Luke – Lucene Index Toolbox – Handy to have around if you’re working with acts_as_solr, as I am.
• Rake task to (re)index models for acts_as_solr – Also good to have around, especially during the development cycle.
• Go get it – Hobo 0.6, which provides fast web app building tools for Rails, is out.
• Net::SSH 2.0 preview #1 – A complete rewrite for the adventurous.

It’s Monday. Must be, all of a sudden my e-mail is full again. If you need distractions, here are a few potential ones:

• Code Spaces – New free project hosting (at least, seems to be free while in beta) with project management, issue tracking, and Subversion source code repository.
• Free Ruler – Found myself needing to count pixels on the Mac screen. This utility had the virtue of the right price.
• A taxonomy of Rails plugins – Hints on how to write one, rather than a zoo. (via Ruby Inside)
• Deploying Rails Applications is Released as a Beta! – A new book hits the virtual shelves.

Fortunately, blazing heat in this office does not prevent me from finding things that I want to bookmark.

• Review: RailsSpace hits the Ruby on Rails learning sweet spot – Another potentially interesting “first Rails” book, to compete with AWDR.
• Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate – I should probably check this out, though amusingly I appear to be mostly too conservative about my HTML to actually use Prototype.

Cleaning out browser tabs on a Monday morning.

• Repsonding to Comments About Rails – Scott Bellware, who happens to be a Microsoft MVP, defends a shift to Rails from ASP.NET. Saves me the bother, and kicks off a lot of interesting discussion in the comments. Emotions run rather high at times, but Scott does a good job of staying level-headed.
• Rails Rumble – Contest coming in September where teams get 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a Rails app from scratch.
• 5 Tips to Speed Up Your Rails App – Advice from Ben Curtis.

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.