A Fresh Cup

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.

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.

Welcome to new readers chased over here by Jeff Atwood’s article. I’m not really a slavering anti-Microsoft attack dog, though I do play one on TV sometimes.

• So Gooey: Can You See The Button? – Web markup samples in JavaFX, Silverlight, REBOL/View, and Tcl/Tk. This does get to the heart of why I don’t especially like XAML. And yeah, there are tools to generate all the goo, but I’d just as soon live without it.
• Capistrano 2.0 Preview 2 – This remote administration tool is moving right along.
• ActiveScaffold goes Gold: 1.0 Released! – Big old improved scaffolder for Rails, just in time for RailsConf.

I’ve now reached the point where I’m finding it easier to find stuff for this blog than for my .NET link blog. Which is good for me but not so hot for the bottom line, since I sell ads over there. But onwards!

• Capistrano: Getting Started – Guide to using the new Capistrano 2.0 bits.
• Rails realities part 24 – Some advice and pointers to more MySQL tuning info. I hope I don’t need this and rather think I will eventually.
• FileColumn – easy handling of file uploads in Rails – Oh man, this was just what I needed to integrate some images via RMagick into the application I’m working on. Saved my bacon.

Those attending RailsConf can now plan their detailed schedule with the nifty MyConfPlan . If you’re bored enough you can even look at my own plans .

• Simplist 2 For Public Consumption – Rails-based CMS.
• Capistrano 2.0 Preview 1 – The next version of Capistrano is coming. It even has its own web site now.

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.

I’m nearly back to being independent again…and perhaps about to start my first Rails gig…so definitely still scouting around for interesting links.

• ANN: Independent migrations plugin – A way to make Rails behave if two developers on the same project come up with migrations with the same number. Something like this seems essential for team development in Rails.
• A Mac-esque Rails Development Environment on Windows – Based on e + cygwin + Console, for those who don’t want to do the whole “get a Mac” thing.
• capazon 0.1.0 – Capistrano tasks to manage Amazon EC2 images.

Life gets more fun all the time. Turns out I’m going back to full-time freelancing at the end of this week.

• Joyent Slingshot – Hybrid online/offline environment being developed for Rails applications. Looks worth tracking, though I’m not sure I want to spend any time in that particular space even if it is hot right now. Bringing Rails to the Enterprise – Useful answers to common objections, though the scalability story is still a bit weak. (via Matthew Bass) Capistrano for (gasp) non-rails apps – Toolman Tim writes about bending Capistrano to your will.

If you like challenges, I can recommend LSL. It’s certainly one of the more hack-inducing, infuriating languages I’ve ever tried to work in.

• tumblr – Tumblelog software that can automatically import RSS feeds, and thus becomes another tool for lifestreaming. They’re coming out of the woodwork now.
• Capistrano security fun – Turns out there’s an information leak in the default use of Capistrano. Not a real high pri issue for most sites, but a bit sloppy. (via Ruby Inside)
• Customize Your Rake Files – To make rcov behave the way you want it to.

Well, I’m working on deploying another little Rails app, but I’ve hit an unexpected snag. I fired up a fresh Ubuntu server for this one, brought in all the latest bits, and now Capistrano is not playing nicely with it. I’m hitting the exact symptoms described in this message but as no one has posted an answer knowing that the symptoms are not unique doesn’t do me a whole boatload of good.

I could perhaps shove it on to the same server I’m using for other things, but there’s a limit to how many mongrel instances I want to spin up on a single server when I have tons of unused computing capacity sitting around. Two differences between the servers may be salient – the working server is Ubuntu server and Capistrano , while the one that is being crabby is Ubuntu desktop and Capistrano 1.4.1. I suspect it’s the Capistrano version that’s making the difference 1.4.0, but what do I know? Not much.

I’d be grateful for any suggestions.

Sorry about all the RSS goofiness. I managed to complete bork the site and had to redo a batch of things, which didn’t do the feeds any good. Not that I’ve had much luck tracking down the original issue.

• Rails vs. Django – There’s a link here to a Django screencast that I probably should find the time to watch, though overall it confirms my suspicion that the two frameworks are largely equivalent in terms of productivity.
• Softies on Rails Interviews: Menuism – It’s certainly nice for me to read at this point stories of people who walked away from Microsoft to do Rails development.
• File Upload Fu – Mike Clark discusses handling image file uploads in a Rails app.
• Lighthouse – Rails issue tracking app from the Mephisto creators, coming soon.
• TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac – Book from Pragmatic Bookshelf, now released. If I did want to become a TextMate expert, this would probably be a good investment.
• Capistrano 1.4.1 – A minor update to the deployment utility that goes along with Rails.
• Our ActiveRecord book …and YOU! – There’s a book all about ActiveRecord coming. You can go make suggestions about what you’d like to see covered.

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.

OK, so very few people are going to learn about the release of Capistrano 1.4.0 from me rather than from some other source. But I’m going to blog it anyhow, because I have ambitions to some day have this be as good a news source for my new community as Larkware is for my old one, and I have to start somewhere.

Anyhow, if you’re deploying Rails applications from one server to another, you need this. It can also do a lot more than that, and some day when I get through a stack of other stuff I will explore it properly. Meanwhile it’s off to run sudo gem install capistrano on a couple of machines to get them to update.