Double Shot #578

Up for my first manic burst of work for the day.

• DailyJS – A roundup of JavaScript stuff from Alex Young, Ric Roberts, and Justin Knowlden. It’s off to a promising start.
• Fixtures without validation with Factory Girl – Nice idea for generating bad data in a concise and repeatable way.
• fast_fixture – Develop with MyISAM, test with InnoDB. Seems a bit iffy but should definitely speed up the tests.
• shoulda-addons – Test profiling and color-coded test names for Shoulda.

Double Shot #577

I’m starting to feel like a sleep deprivation experiment. Good thing other people are writing good software still.

• Devise: authentication for lazy programmers – Lots of activity in this project lately.
• Gity – New git client for OS X. Early days yet, free at the moment. Looks like the goal is to give us menu/keystroke replacements for much of the git command line.
• Integrity 0.2.0 – New release for this continuous integration server with (among other things) hooks to GitHub, Heroku, and Campfire.
• PagerDuty – Switchboard for all your email notifications, with multi-user duty shifts, phone and SMS notification, and more. Looks pretty useful if you’re the one who has to scramble to respond to sites being down.
• Bluepill: a new process monitoring tool – Designed for simplicity and lack of memory leaks. If you’re fed up with god and monit it looks worth a try.
• Help John recover – Rails dev John Lannon got shot in a robbery, and the community is collecting funds to help support him durign his recovery.

Double Shot #576

Today’s challenge: Ziya Charts. If I’m not back tomorrow, I lost.

• Mockingbird: New Cappucino-based wireframing tool. iPlotz and MockFlow are two other tools in this space (was just looking into this for a client yesterday).
• First look at rails 3.0.pre – Dr. Nic dives into getting started and using generators.
• Introducing Resque – The GitHub guys have built a new redis-backed background job library. Given some of the recent experiences I’ve had with their background jobs, I’m not all that sure the kinks are out yet.
• Thinking_Sphinx – Easy Setup Tutorial – Quick start from Philip Ingram.

Double Shot #575

Thanks to everyone who commiserated about my pinched nerve issues. I think I’m still a fair way from death’s door.

• jQuery Grid Rails Plugin – I keep meaning to look at the jQuery datagrid. Maybe this will encourage me.
• gdb.rb – gdb7 hooks for MRI. A fresh way to be nosy about running ruby code.

Double Shot #574

Busy weekend. Let’s unload some of these browser tabs.

• Improving Code using Metric_fu – A concrete example of how metrics can drive better code.
• Eventbug (alpha) Released – New firebug extension to help in debugging event-related issues.
• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 – Probably about time for developers to think about upgrading. I’ve been running 3.7 alphas with no serious trouble myself.
• New in the Twitter gem: Lists! – Just in case you want to code against Twitter’s new shiny.
• Limelight – Ruby/JRuby backed desktop cross-platform UI framework. Looks interesting.
• Ruby / Method aliasing and chaining – Good discussion of method chains and the dreaded alias_method_chain.
• FireQuery – Firebug extension for jQuery development.
• Really easy continuous integration with Signal – A Rails-backed CI server.
• trap_door – Rails plugin to send spambots off to a trap.

Double Shot #573

Been a very long week, but I’m happy with the way various projects are improving.

• Amazon RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service or MySQL in the Cloud for Ruby On Rails. – A quick How-To.
• yUMLmeRails – Rake tasks and Shoes app to create model diagrams for Rails. (via Under the Hat)

Double Shot #572

There is no apparent end of code that needs to be written.

• wysihat-engine-demo – Quick way to see the wysihat editing control in action.
• RailsBridge Bugmash VM Script – Script to build your own server to test the Rails source code from zero.
• bigrecord – ActiveRecord replacement to use distributed stores like HBase.
• Heroku Add-ons – Solr, New Relic, Amazon RDS, Cron, and more for Heroku’s easy servers.
• Git Magic – Another free online book about git.
• Prag Pro Wri Mo – Pragmatic are encouraging people to spend 30 days in November figuring out if they really want to write a programming book.
• FOSS FAQ – StackOverflow-style site from the RedMonk guys, covering free and open source software issues.
• Underscore.js – Javascript utility library providing a bunch of functional stuff.
• Using BlackBird javascript console in Rails – Glue plugin from Elad Meidar.
• Installing Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL on Snow Leopard – Another guide for those who haven’t upgraded yet.

Double Shot #571

Today I think I shall be a performance expert.

• Funding Thinking Sphinx – Pat Allen is looking for sponsorship to spend a month working on the Thinking Sphinx plugin. That’s a good cause.
• Mu – Facebook Connect library written in JavaScript.
• Introducing Amazon RDS – The Amazon Relational Database Service – Essentially, canned MySQL servers in the Amazon cloud.
• nice_find – Find replacement for TextMate that uses grep or git_grep on your project.

Double Shot #570

I wonder what language I’ll be writing code in five years from now?

• Fukuoka Ruby Award 2010 – There’s some money to be had out there for the right projects.
• Transition – Gemcutter is becoming the default gem host for the Ruby community.
• riot – Another ruby unit-testing framework, focused on speed.
• Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2009.10 released – REE is still moving along.
• Ancestry – A new tree gem for ActiveRecord that looks worth investigating.

Double Shot #569

Not too much of note over the weekend. Maybe everyone was at startup school.

• eCSStender 1.0 – Javascript to bludgeon older browsers into paying attention to advanced CSS.
• shindo – “Simple depth first ruby testing” provides yet another test framework.
• assert{2.0} – And here’s “the industry’s most aggressive TDD system” which uses reflection to dump debugging information in case of any test failures.