A Fresh Cup

Streamlined “is a framework, on top of Rails, that allows you to quickly generate interfaces for your ActiveRecord models. It started as a way to generate Administrative backends, but has become more general purpose over time.” Looks way classier than scaffolding, but it’s also having a bit of code ferment right now as it switches from being a generator to being a plugin. Another one to dig in when I get the chance. (via CodeHappy)

A few days ago I speculated that it might be time to open a support group or mailing list for developers trying to rise up and throw off the chains of Microsoft. Fortunately for me, the lazyweb has come to my rescue here. The guys over at Softies on Rails just announced the opening of a new forum for people making the journey. See you there!

There’s a good-looking set of instructions over at My Preferred Rails Development Environment (via dzone). In it, Yehuda Katz walks through the basic install steps for Eclipse, and then configures it with a set of plugins to speed Rails development.

I’m not going down this road myself at the moment, though. When learning a new language, I prefer to stick fairly close to the bare code and do a fair amount of typing (and even, dare I say it, some cut and paste) as I get the syntax locked into my brain. So right now I’m still mainly working in TextMate . Mileage varies, though, so if you’re a hardcore IDE person it’s nice to see how easy it is to set up a powerful free one for this stuff.

Interesting – What is Hobo? describes Hobo, which bills itself as “the Web App Builder for Rails.” Basically, it’s a set of plugins to add even more DRY and RAD features to the Rails framework. I think I need to spend some more time digging into plain vanilla Rails first (if there is such a thing), but this looks like it’s a rather mature project and worth some exploration in the future.

• SQLGrinder is another DBA tool, this one using JDBC for connectivity. $59 to register. My initial attempts at using it to connect to a MySQL database on a different machine weren’t successful, but then, so far everything I’ve tried to connect to a MySQL database on a different machine have been unsuccessful.

• BuildFactory is a continuous integration tool that runs on the Mac, integrated with Subversion and various editors. $35 to register. I don’t need this yet, but might come in handy in the future.

Yeah, so the world doesn’t really need Twitterific , but then, there are many other mildly fun addictions it doesn’t need either.

James Higgs has been on the PC-to-Mac trail longer than I have. His Mac OS X applications I use post has plenty of links that I’ll be checking out (though, thankfully, I think I’ll be able to avoid putting MS Office on my Mac).

I’ve still been putting my personal 20% time to reasonably good use. Tonight I deployed LarkWrite – a new home for my personal journal, with software custom-written in Rails. I kept an online journal for five years or so and then got too busy and got out of the habit, but it’s time to get back into it again. The application is just barely functional enough to use right now – it lets me enter and markup and display stuff, and has a few different display modes, and probably has some bugs as well. But I’m reasonably pleased at how it’s coming along, and considering that it’s still under 200 lines of code I’m happy with the implementation as well.

I’ll be tweaking on this one and adding features for a bit. When I think it’s in a more ready state I’ll make the source available as well. Then it’s on to the next application.

Another cool resource: cheat sheets features close to 100 command-line cheat sheets for Ruby and associated coding – the one on Capistrano helped me out immensely tonight, and I’ve got my eye on a couple of others (TextMate for Rails, for example). You can access them all online in HTML glory, or

 $ gem install cheat

will bring it into your local system where you can access the cheat sheets directly from the command line.

I admit it, I watch traffic to my various Web sites. Terrible character failing, I know. Anyhow, at the moment A Fresh Cup is on track to get somewhat less traffic in a month than Larkware gets in a single day. So I guess I’ve got a ways to go. By the end of the year I’d like to see this site built up to the point where it’s got the sort of authority that that one does, only in a new field. Of course, there are some barriers to that: right now, I don’t know much, and not many people know that I’m over here. But I’m learning fast (I hope) and word is slowly spreading. Stay tuned, and feel free to tell your friends to come and visit.

The UJS Rails Plugin promises a very DRY way to add all sorts of AJAXy JavaScript to your rails application with pretty elegant code (my word, did I just write that bunch of jargon with a straight face?). Unfortunately, I’m not far enough along in my Rails work to make good use of it yet. Maybe later…

There doesn’t seem to be any lack of Rails documentation online. The Ruby on Rails Manual site has every version from 1.0.0 to 1.2.1 online, together with reader comments, an RSS feed of the latest comments, and a Firefox search plugin available.

Processing Credit Cards with Ruby on Rails might come in handy for some of the future Rails sites I’m thinking about. (via Ruby Inside)

RuseWiki is a Rails-based wiki with strong antispam features. Apparently not released yet but available via SVN. Not that I need a wiki for anything at the moment, but you never know.

Sometimes I miss the obvious – though I linked to Komodo IDE a few days ago, I completely missed ActiveState’s free Komodo Edit , a lighter-weight version of their product without the additional debugging, team, and other features (comparison between the two tools is here). Looks like this may answer the question I had a while ago about finding a decent CSS editor for my Linux environment. Though I’m more than happy with CSSEdit on the Mac side of the house, I’ll definitely be taking a look at this one for its cross-platform (Mac/Linux/Windows) goodness.

I added the DynamicCalendarHelper plugin to my current Rails project today, only to discover that I couldn’t call it the way that I expected from a view. Eventually I found the answer at Typo Sidebar – CalendarHelper which had instructions for turning the plugin into a global view helper. I was expecting a somewhat more seamless experience.

So either

• This doesn’t work as intuitively as much of the rest of what I’ve seen in Rails
• This particular plugin could use some work
• I don’t understand what’s going on here

My money is on the third alternative at the moment.

James Higgs is the latest developer I’ve seen to publicly express a dissatisfaction with working in the Microsoft ecosystem. In his blog entry A change in my digital life he links back to this blog as well, which makes me either an inspiration or a bad influence (or perhaps a little of both).

I’m starting to think it’s time for a support group, or at least a mailing list.

One of these days I need to find time to dig into the Prototype javascript library. What’s New in Prototype 1.5?” covers the new version that just came out. (via dzone)

The new version 4.0 of Komodo is out. It’s got all sorts of spiffy features for dynamic languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, TCL) as well as Rails support. But you know, right now I’m just not feeling the need for a $245 IDE for Rails development. Of course that may be just because I’m only doing little baby applications so far, but at the moment lightweight tools (like TextMate) are doing fine for me.

Softies on Rails (the home for Microsoft refugees pursuing Rails, mostly on Windows), provides a list of Rails links . There’s some good stuff in there, and many of them promptly went into my RSS reader.

Of course, if I keep adding new career related links to my existing old career related links, my RSS reader may well explode…

RubyFurnace is an online repository for Gems and Rails plugins. There are quite a few there already to browse through. I’m guessing more tools for finding the best and most applicable to your own projects are still to come. (via dzone

Mosquito is a Mac application that can be scripted to go through a Web site, supplying input as necessary, and saving screenshots as it goes along. The author suggests using it as a tool for checking that CSS changes do not screw up your site rendering, without having the bother of manually going through every page. (via dzone

IdeaShuffle is my first Rails application (well, the first one that you can get to from the public Internet, anyhow). It’s a tiny product brainstorming helper. It doesn’t do a whole lot, but on the other hand, there’s not a whole lot of code there, and I’ve only been poking at Rails for a short while.

I’ll probably be back to refine it and add more features in a while (got any ideas? Leave me a comment) but for the moment I’m off to the next idea, so it’s time to toss this one out there in its current state.

Ruby 1.8.5 released!

I don’t know which is more annoying – languages that only rev once every few years, or onces that are in a constant state of ferment so you never quite know where the line is between “beta,” “working,” and “deprecated.”

Learn Cocoa is a baby steps tutorial to building a simple Cocoa app (well, really, just sticking some components together, but it introduces the toolset). I’ll probably work through it, though at the moment I don’t have any particular ideas about Mac desktop apps that I’d want to build.

Paul Ingles’ Relative Dates with Scribbish in Mephisto proved to be just the tweak I needed for now. Thanks!

There are a couple of ways to get help for Rails online, but sometimes you just want to have it at your fingertips. Looks like Delynn Berry has you covered: hop over and download the Rails CHM Documentation , freshly updated for 1.2.1.

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.

Mike Clark has a good writeup at Managing Plugins with Piston . So far I’m liking what little I’ve done with Piston myself. Indeed, I may even find some use for it in my Windows corporate life.

It’s nice to see this Mephisto Theme Gallery (via HappyCodr)

Lightning Admin for Postgresql and MySQL gives you a tabbed workspace for two of the major open source databases. Looks interesting, and $19.99 is a reasonable price, but I’m trying not to install any more Windows-only applications these days.

This morning I had to hunt down Copying a MySQL Database From One Machine to Another in the course of moving a Rails app from a development server to a production server, as I didn’t feel like re-entering a bunch of data (and I hadn’t used data migrations to put the data in the database in the first place).

This just goes to remind me of two things about this career transition:

1. There are a zillion things that I know how to do in the Microsoft universe (like copying databases from one server to another) that I need to relearn as I move sideways to a world of other software. This is a cost above and beyond whatever I spend on new hardware and software and directly learning my new core competency.
2. Fortunately, it’s all out on the net somewhere, and I’m darned good at hunting things down quickly.

Name-based Virtual Host Support is another piece of the puzzle that I’m going to need in the near future – making Apache serve two Web sites from the same server. Hopefully figuring out how to use Mongrel behind the scenes with both sites won’t make it much more difficult.

As you’ve probably noticed, things have changed around here. I’ve migrated the site from ozimodo to Mephisto . While the new software does look much spiffier, the main driver for this was simple: Mephisto supports comments out of the box. I’ve been getting a rather surprising (to me, at least) amount of e-mail over my postings on this site. Now you folks can play along right here and everyone can benefit from the back-and-forth. At least, that’s the plan.

Rails 1.2 is out although I really doubt that anyone is reading the news here for the first time. I’m not done learning the previous version yet so I can just sort of roll right in to the new features when I get there, I guess. I also need to take a good look at Mike Clark’s Managing Rails Versions with Capistrano when I get the chance.

There’s that old saying about being able to recognize the pioneers because they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs. So it was nice to wake up this morning and read Maybe it’s time to try something new, or maybe it’s the drugs over on Jon Rowett’s blog, and see someone else joining the ferment of discontent that I’m a part of. I wouldn’t say that any huge part of the .NET community is jumping ship, but it’s nice to not be all alone in exploring.

Luke’s Free Stock Photography Search Site

With the arrival of the new monitor the hardware buying binge is complete. Now I’ve settled in for some more serious development. I spent a couple of hours yesterday working with Rails on the Mac, poking along at my first “real” (as opposed to tutorial) application. I’m not ready to announce it yet, but hopefully I’ll have something to show off within a week or two.

Rails development continues to agree with me. Lots to learn but the pieces fit together in a sensible manner.

I’m proceeding up the Mac learning curve reasonably well, with pauses to try to hunt down tools and utilities I need. There’s not nearly as many choices on the Mac side as on the Windows side, but I knew that going in. Perhaps that will translate to market opportunity for me at some point.

A reader wrote to ask how many hours a day my personal “20% time” comes to. I’ve been allocating not less than an hour a day to this effort. Now that I have the dev environment set up, I expect to up that to two hours most days. As the year goes on and I transition into whatever my new career turns out to be, hopefully that will grow.

Piston lets you have your cake and eat it too by making it easy to manage bits of external Subversion repositories in your local repository.

Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails can send e-mail on any exception in a running app.

A clean slate, Edge Rails recipe is a useful set of instructions for getting a new Rails app set up for development with Edge Rails. I’m happy to see that I’ve gotten far enough along to understand which parts of it I can change for my own environment and preferences, too.

Well, the new Mac is here and happily chugging along. I haven’t started coding on it yet, though I have installed a batch of software. A few initial thoughts:

• It sure is purty, in an industrial design sort of way. But I suspect it could have been $50 cheaper if the case wasn’t so overdesigned, and the keyboard and mouse frankly suck as far as I’m concerned (your ergonomic preferences may vary of course). I’m almost certainly going to pitch the Mighty Mouse in favor of a decent trackball. Unfortunately Unicomp doesn’t make a Mac keyboard, so I don’t know what I’m going to do in that department.
• OS X is reasonably easy to transition to, but I was surprised at the lack of any obvious “start here” introduction for new users. People who say it’s intuitive are full of poop (just like the people who say the same thing about Windows).
• Some things, like getting hooked up to the Internet via my wireless access point, did indeed just work. But they just work in Windows these days too.
• James Duncan Davidson’s Guide for Installing Rails on Mac worked perfectly after I tracked down one broken link.

Much more to come, I’m sure.

Daddy, someone took a bite out of your new computer.

- Thomas Gunderloy

Looks like I’ll be needing these links in a day or two:

• Right Way to Install Rails on Mac OS X?
• Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger
• Sandboxing Rails With MacPorts

Refactoring, Ruby Edition is the permanent home for the book project I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Well, I’ve done several things lately to make progress on my quest to invent a new career not involving Microsoft:

1. I let my current boss know that I expected not to be with the company past early 2008.
2. I spent a bundle of money on a new Mac (which should be here on Monday).
3. I’ve let the publishers I’ve been writing articles for know that I’m not interested in continuing to tackle Microsoft-related topics. This means an immediate income drop, but on the flipside it frees up some time.
4. I’ve started setting aside a solid, real, uninterrupted hour a day to work on new stuff – my equivalent of Google’s “20% time,” more or less. The past few days this time has gone to brainstorming on a few ideas for relatively small applications that I can (I hope) build with Ruby on Rails as a way to get some hands-on time in that environment. Next week I plan to pick one and start building.

To sum it up, I’ve been slowly snipping away my safety net, in the hopes of forcing myself into a new world. With any luck, this strategy will work.

How to paginate, sort and search a table with Ajax and Rails (via dzone) – I’m starting to noodle around with a little app where this might come in handy.

Jay Fields is tackling a rewrite of the classic Refactoring book to use Ruby as its language (with Martin Fowler’s permission). Here’s the announcement, and here’s the first example bit.

Like a lot of other geeks, I paid some attention to the keynote at MacWorld yesterday. Though nothing announced there really interested me (oh, the iPhone looks like a fairly sexy bit of engineering, though it’s a perplexingly stupid decision to not let users install their own software on it, but I don’t carry a cel phone), I hopped over to the Apple store yesterday afternoon anyhow. That’s because I was just waiting to see if there was any changes in the Mac Pro lineup before ordering one.

So, a couple weeks from now I should have a Mac sitting on (well, under) my desk along with the Windows and Linux boxes. I also splurged a bit and treated myself to a new Dell 24” monitor. I figure I’m going to cover about half the cost of this system by not renewing my MSDN subscription this year. Now it’s time to get serious about spending a couple hours each day working on new skills.

Capistrano 1.3.1 is another piece I need to spend more time grokking.

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?

The discussion of Web application frameworks over at Daily Kos just goes to show that there are opinionated blowhards with no social skills whatsoever passionately committed to any programming language you can imagine. (via Riding Rails)

Humble Little Ruby Book

ReminderFox looks to be the missing piece I was looking for to handle appointment and task management in Mozilla-land.

Hack Attack: A guide for switching to a Mac

Well, one small part of my plan to remove Microsoft software from my life has gone off reasonably smoothly – I’ve switched my e-mail, tasks, RSS, and related activity over. All in all this has proved to be rather painless.

On the mail server front, I dumped Exchange in favor of hMailServer, an open source e-mail server which handles the load of mail I get with less setup than Exchange required, less server resources, and generally less hassle. There are a lot of advanced Exchange features that hMailServer doesn’t have, but I never used any of those features, so this is just fine with me.

For a mail client, I dumped Outlook 2003 (after looking at the Office 2007 beta, Outlook 2007 was never a serious contender for me) and went with Mozilla Thunderbird. This was a bit more painful; Thunderbird is rather lightweight in many areas compared to Outlook. On the other hand, the “lightweight” also extends to resource usage, and it’s nice to have a mail client that starts quickly and doesn’t drag the whole computer down. I imported my last six months’ worth of mail to Thunderbird; the rest of the last five years is still accessible to me through a Copernic index if I need it, though giving up that archive is going to be a bit painful if I don’t eventually import it all.

Dropping Outlook also meant getting rid of JetBrains Omea Pro, which I was using for RSS and general organization. After looking at a few alternatives I’ve settled on NewzCrawler for an RSS reader. Because of Larkware, it’s important for me to keep a client-side archive of RSS posts, so all of the online readers are out for me, no matter how sexy they look. I’d ultimately like to replace NewzCrawler with something cross-platform but haven’t found anything decent yet.

There are still a few pain points. Right now I have my task list in Evolution on the Ubuntu box, which is OK but not great; I’m so far pretty unimpressed with Mozilla Lightning for calendaring and tasks. So I’m not sure what I’m going to do there, but I can live with having things spread across two boxes for a bit. And I don’t have things synchronized to my PocketPC either, though to tell the truth I wasn’t much using it anyhow. Also missing is SharePoint calendar integration, important because for the moment we run our household calendar on a SharePoint server, though in the long run that won’t matter because I’ll probably replace that server with something else too.

All in all, moving to a different e-mail setup proved to be far less hassle than I expected it would be – which gives me hope for migrating some other things to non-Windows platforms as well.