Ruby

I just released my localized_dates plugin that is based on Rails' new i18n features and helps localizing date and time formats. Check out the announcement and the GitHub project including a massive readme.

a great tip from Dr Nic on how to speed up Cmd-T in TextMate.

FiveRuns quick tip: frictionless switching between different Rails versions. Check it out here.

Explaining the Ruby implementation of the document matching technique used in meOwns.com

Rails Tip of the Day: Use Magic Version Tag to “Downgrade” Rails to Older Version When Generating New Project

The Ruby Hoedown is a short few days away. My talk - The Future is Now: Leveraging the Cloud with Ruby - is Friday morning at 10:30 AM. Here’s the details: “Cloud computing is enabling applications to scale like never before, and fundamentally changing the way developers architect their apps. Learn what the cloud makes available to Ruby developers, and how you can utilize these services using Ruby. Many specific and thorough code examples will be shown and provided.” Let me know what you’d like to learn from the talk and I will be sure to put it in. If you want to hook…

Measuring Return on Investment (ROI) is interesting as there are a few approaches, many of which are determined by how a company defines and determines returns and costs. Investopedia defines ROI as, “A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments,” and uses the following equation to measure it: ROI = (Gain from Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment Last weekend’s Managerial Accounting class provided these additional equations: ROI = Operating Income / Total Assets or…

I’ve updated my “Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers” article on the Amazon Web Service Developer Connection site. The updated code uses Rails 2.1, the RightScale AWS Ruby gem and the Paperclip plugin for uploads to Amazon S3. Other posts you may enjoyPersistent storage coming to Amazon EC2Google App Engine ThoughtsUsing Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, Lucene, and Ruby for Web Spidering Share this post

Ruby on Rails Specialist Initiates Fast, Hassle-Free EC2 Deployments by Partnering With Morph Labs WINTER PARK, FL (July 22, 2008) — Leading web development firm and Ruby on Rails specialist Atlantic Dominion Solutions (ADS) today announced it has become a development partner to Morph Labs, maker of an elastic deployment and management platform for Ruby on Rails applications deployed onto the Amazon Web Services EC2 infrastructure. The addition of the Morph Application Platform enables ADS to offer clients a faster, easier, and less expensive way to deploy their Rails apps onto EC2…

JRuby 1.1.3 was released today. This release includes “primarily obvious compatibility problems and performance enhancements.” The highlights of this release, per the official post by Thomas Enebo, are: RubyGems 1.2 Greatly improved interpreter performance jrubyc compiler usability improvements and bug fixes Reduced memory usage and object churn Dozens of IO-related and core class RubySpec fixes + reduced memory for IO ThreadGroup fixes to resolve Mongrel “dead thread” issues New options/properties for tweaking JIT, thread pooling, and more Block invocation performance…

There are some really amazing sounding jobs this month! The focus is definitely on Rails - and working environments include the skunkworks at an adult entertainment provider, a gaming startup, a mansion in Los Angeles, and one of the biggest companies in America. All the jobs are in the US, alas, but on both coasts and in-between! From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) comes a whole batch of interesting opportunities: Web Developer for a Mobile Start Up (Seattle, WA) - Kiha are looking for a general Web developer with…

Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library developed primarily by Gregory Brown. Back in March, Gregory tried to raise $13000 so he could spend six months working on Ruby-related open source projects. He eventually raised $5525 from the community (plus $5000 from Ruby Central and $500 from Mountain West RubyConf) and has spent the last few months working on Prawn. Prawn can be installed from a pull from GitHub or, for those of us who are less adventurous, with a gem install prawn. Once installed, you can give it a quick test run: require prawn PrawnDocumentgeneratetest.pdf do font…

The Rubyist - not to be confused with the Japanese Rubyist Magazine - a new paper-and-PDF based magazine for Ruby developers has released its first issue. This is a significant milestone, since it was just over a year I lamented about how the blogosphere killed the enthusiasm for Ruby magazines. In response to that post, Jeremy McAnally announced his intention to produce a Ruby magazine, and now, with the advent of simple Print On Demand magazines from MagCloud, it has become a reality. The first issue is available in print for the United States only and costs $8 plus postage. A PDF version…

HTTParty is a new Ruby library by John Nunemaker (of railstips.org fame) that makes it a snap to build classes that can use Web-based APIs and related services. At its simplest, you include the HTTParty module within a class, which gives your class a "get" method that can retrieve data over HTTP. Further directives, however, instruct HTTParty to parse results (XML, JSON, and so on), define base URIs for the requests, and define HTTP authentication information. HTTParty's simplicity is demonstrated in the most "complex" example John gives in his introduction post - a Representative class that…

Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown, the "Ruby conference for the South" enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008 (yes, in a week's time!). Speakers include David Black, Chris Wanstrath, Giles Bowkett, Robert Dempsey, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, and late registration is $199. If you fancy a last-minute trip to what should be a great sophomore Ruby event, register now!. Huntsville isn't a crazy distance from Birmingham, Atlanta, or Nashville, so it shouldn't be too hard to attend if you're already in that corner of the country. Describe Your Vision of…

This episode will show you how to make a model which isn't based on Active Record. You may want to do this if a resource isn't backed by the database.

If you need a full text search engine, Thinking Sphinx is a great solution. See why in this episode.

If you have a lot of logic associated with the data inside a session, you'll need some central location to put this logic. See how to create a session based model in this episode.

Liquid is a safe way to provide a powerful template language to the site's users. See how in this episode.

Static pages can sometimes be a little awkward to add to a Rails app. See a couple different solutions to this problem in this episode.

A half-hearted run through the last month worth of news, including the new iPhone and MobileMe. Also, we’re about to change our format a bit, so this episode is the last of its kind. [link]

My main man Zeldman and the merry A List Apart team has put together an updated, streamlined, and otherwise improved version of The Survey: Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide. Although many Hivelogic readers are developers as opposed to pure designers, this survey still applies. It’s well worth your time, and there’s even a button you can…

Sarah, one of the 37signals team members, totally nails the theory behind not offering phone support: Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback. At the end of the day, it’s the quality of the support you get rather than the method used that counts. [link]

Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire, writes about minimalism in software development and deleting features: When working on a new version of the app, before I think about the features I want to add, I take a look at what I can get rid of first. It’s a quality-of-app thing. I think of it as making space for the new stuff — but first I have to take the wrecking ball to some old stuff. It’s like a balancing act – moving an application with a large user base forward into the future. [link]

If you’ve read my article, Regarding Backups where I discuss my data storage and backup process, you know I’m a fan of the Drobo, an external, expandable, RAID device. Today, Data Robotics has announced a brand new version of the Drobo. I’ve known about it for a little while, but haven’t been able to talk about it until the official announcement today. So what’s new? The Drobo now supports Firewire 800, and has a faster processor for the behind-the-scenes magic that handles the data redundancy. It’s also said to be cooler and quieter, something everybody…

The first online Capistrano tutorial session was very successful, thanks to everyone who participated. Now, it’s time to try again! The second online Capistrano tutorial session is now open for registration: http://events.capify.org/events/2. It is scheduled for Wednesday, August 13th, at 7pm (Mountain time), and will last two hours (plus up to an hour at the end for Q&A). As before, this tutorial is targeted at beginning Capistrano users, those will little or no prior experience. (If you’re looking for a session for more advanced users, keep watching this space—I’ll probably do one…

Tyler Bird, the director of the Capistrano documentation effort, has begun collecting links about Capistrano, to build a centralized de.licio.us account that people can use to find cap-related info around the web. You can read more about it on the capify.org/news site.

Today I’m pleased to announce the first online Capistrano tutorial session. It will be held via Campfire on July 15 at 7pm MDT, focusing on Capistrano basics for Rails deployment. The session will accomodate only ten people. For all details, read up at capify.org: http://www.capify.org/2008/7/6/online-capistrano-tutorial-session If this proves popular enough, and if the format works out well, I’ll consider hosting more of these on more advanced topics.

Capistrano 2.4.3 is now available! gem install capistrano This is a maintenance release. The changes since 2.4.0 include: In 2.4.0 and earlier, port settings in ssh_config files were not honored by Capistrano. 2.4.3 will now honor those settings. The capture() helper no longer raises an exception if stderr text is received, but instead emits a warning. Please report bugs to the Capistrano bug tracker at Lighthouse: http://capistrano.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8716/tickets Patches should be generated against the latest version of the code at GitHub: http://github.com/jamis/capistrano You may…

Net::SSH 2.0.3 is now available! gem install net-ssh This is a maintenance release that fixes the following issues: Net::SSH 2.0.2 and earlier wouldn’t work with Mocana SSH and a few other esoteric SSH servers commonly used on routers and other hardware. (Net::SSH truncated the server’s identity string at the first space, rather than at the end of the line as required by the specification, causing subsequent algorithm negotiations to fail.) 2.0.3 now preserves the entire identity string as reported by the remote server. Malformed entries in ssh_config files are silently ignored now.

Internationalization (i18n) is a tough nut to crack and has long been handled in Rails by a variety of plugins. Thanks to a concerted effort by the Rails i18n team we now have a standardized framework for providing internationalization. Rather than rehash what’s already out there, head over to Sven’s writeup of the new Rails Internationalization framework for the skinny. It’s important to note that this does not provide actual language translations but merely a way for you to plug in other translations and internationalization implementations into your app. tags: ruby, rubyonrails

The ActiveSupport library now has a little nugget worth mentioning – a metaclass accessor available everywhere as metaclass. Not sure what a metaclass (or singleton class, or eigen class) is? Let Ola explain it to you. tags: ruby, rubyonrails

Nested models (nested forms by another name) describe the scenario when you want to create and modify values of nested attributes through a containing model. For instance, if you have an user model with many phone numbers: 123456789 class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :login has_many :phone_numbersendclass PhoneNumber < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :area_code, :number belongs_to :userend you may want to be able to create the user and a group of phone numbers at the same time. This is what this looks like with the new mass assignment functionality of Rails…

Most people will recognize the pattern of memoization to provide a basic caching mechanism (that’s not a misspelling, it really doesn’t have an ‘r’) : 123456 class Person < ActiveRecord::Base def social_security @social_security ||= decrypt_social_security end ...end The big problem with this common type of memoization is that you’ve littered your method implementation with caching logic. Caching is best applied in a transparent manner – and ActiveSupport now lets you easily insert memoization into your classes: 12345678910111213141516171819 class Person < ActiveRecord::Base…

For an application with anything above a moderate level of domain complexity it’s quite likely that you’ve had to perform a query utilizing a join table: 1234567891011 class Article < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :userendclass User < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :articlesend# Get all the users that have published articlesUser.find(:all, :joins => :article, :conditions => ["articles.published = ?", true]) It always makes me feel slightly embarrassed to have to resort to using String snippets to specify my query logic, and this little bit is no exception. Well, now we…

For the last few months I’ve been contracting to three different projects, and then recently two of them finished, with the third being an on-going project for the last two years which will be launched at DEMO in a months’ time. So I’m excited to start looking for a new consulting project to work on. Travel or relocation is an option. Full-time salary is probably not an option. Either full-time or several days-per-week is an option. Making me wear a uniform and serve hamburgers through a small window is not an option. Working in an office is an option. Working on an oil rig…

Everything to love about Ruby: the concise, powerful language; the sexy testing frameworks; and finally, the people. Everything to love about Objective-C: hmmm; well…; and finally, its the only high-level language you can use to write iPhone apps. On iPhone 2.0, to arrive on the 11th of July, you cannot run RubyCocoa. But you can run it on your Mac, so let’s use it to unit test your Objective-C classes. This tutorial shows you how to get started using a new project rbiphonetest [GitHub | Lighthouse | Google Group] If you followed some of my recent tweets, this project was…

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! RailsConf 2008 was a few weeks ago, and I didn’t go. I made babies instead. But if you ignore the whoohaa of MagLev and DHH’s Surplus talk, there was one piece of genuine, new awesomeness that came out of RailsConf. This awesomeness, plus Twitter created at least 6 new projects in the last month. These apps are going to make RailsCamp awesome. That is if RailsConf never happened this piece of delicious coding happiness never would have occurred. It was built at RailsConf, by RailsConf attendees. It was built to solve a problem that only happens…

I didn’t know you could run Ruby within TextMate snippets. As a consequence, a lot of the TextMate bundles I work on either have simplistic Snippets or the advanced code is run via Commands with code pushed into explicit Ruby files in the Support folder. But sometimes I just want a clever snippet. For example, I want the ‘cla’ snippet to use the current filename to create the default class name instead of the current ‘ClassName’ default. I want default foreign key names to be meaningful. I’ve now figured this out (thanks to Ciaran Walsh), and … Um,…

Two years ago Dave Thomas did a keynote at the first RailsConf in 2006 and outlined a few things missing in Rails. One was the seeming unnecessary un-DRYness of duplicating associations and validations in Active Record models since the same information is in the DB schema. Another was support for Composite Primary Keys on Active Record models. A few weeks later I created my first RubyGems as an attempt to solve these problems: Dr Nic’s Magic Models and Composite Primary Keys. The former was funny and an entertaining way to use const_missing? and Class.new. The latter was not funny. It…

Yesterday was a big day here at BuildingWebApps/Collective Knowledge Works. We have transitioned to a new code base, in which nearly all of the code underlying the site has been rewritten. Initially, the site should look exactly the same, and have all the same features, so in one sense this was a great deal of work whose goal was to have no visible change. We had a few rough spots yesterday, but things seem to be in pretty good shape now, so please let us know if you encounter any problems. So why did we do this? The big change is that our application is now a multi-tenant system, capable of…

I had a great time at Startup Camp and Foo Camp. It’s quite an amazing collection of folks that O’Reilly brings together. I’ve posted an article with a few pictures and other tidbits.

After 10 lessons in which we built a simple Rails application without stopping to worry about testing, we’re redeeming ourselves by stepping back to fix up the tests and explain how to write new ones. The lesson was too long for one screencast, so we’ve posted it in two parts: Unit Tests Functional Tests

The web is such a wonderful facilitator of publishing and communication that it’s almost impossible not to be chronically overwhelmed by the amount of information available. I’ve been working on my information diet for years, having dropped most print newspapers a few years ago, then cut out most magazines, and more recently having worked toward an effective approach for dealing with the incredible amount of information available via RSS feeds. Even if I were to focus my interest solely on startups, Ruby on Rails, marketing, writing, or photography, there’s far more content produced…

We’re thrilled to have been selected as one of the seven companies to participate in Startup Camp. This promises to be a fantastic opportunity to learn from a lot of great folks. If you’re wondering just what it is we’re up to, take a look at our About Us. As you’ll see, it’s somewhat divergent from the BuildingWebApps site, but built from the same technology base. We’ll have more to say in the coming months.

For those of you that don’t stalk follow my other streams: Migration Buddy Or, “the inevitable renumbering and conflict-resolution of miggy tardust” This is a tool to help merge rails branches with conflicting migrations. The basic idea goes like this: First you migrate down to the migration you were at when you branched. Renumber any new migrations you created that conflict with any new migrations in the target branch. Commit the renames. Merge to the target branch (usually ‘master’). Migrate back up. Wow, what a pain, right? (Apologies to Saul Williams, you rock). I keep…

I’ve been using git for several months now, waiting for a reason to keep my svn habits around. So far, it’s been pretty smooth sailing. There were some squalls along the way as I unlearned some habits from svn though. I even moved active development of my various open source projects to git. Well, today I’ve moved most of my “active” (and I say that in the loosest of terms) projects to github. Github is fantastic, but why?. The core repository browser stuff looks and works great, but is nothing revolutionary, to be honest. What’s amazing about Github is how it really brings the…

Apparently, the number of exception classes related to has_many :through (HM:T) scared Giles away. I think most of them are there because I put the original ones there. Course, looking at them highlighted does make it seem a bit ridiculous. HM:T associations are the only associations that actually look at other associations to figure out how to query the database. There aren’t a simple set of conventions to go by that raise simple errors like “couldn’t find the `suspended_users` table”. If you actually look at the associations, they’re not much more than simple ActiveRecordError…

I just committed another piece of the puzzle to Rails’ new time zone support, coming in Rails 2.1. This takes a different approach than my previous attempt at timezone-aware activerecord attributes. The whole idea behind this approach, is that times appear in the local time zone while you work with them, but are persisted to the database in UTC. >> Time.zone = "Pacific Time (US & Canada)" >> @status = Status.find :first >> @status.created_at => Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:30:09 PST -08:00 If you set the time, it makes any necessary conversions to your current time zone.

With ActiveSupport::Callbacks being extracted out of ActiveRecord and ActiveSupport::Validations on the way, it looks like Josh and lifo both did a large chunk of the work I was going to do for ActiveModel. Apparently the Russian Mafia is spreading git propaganda and speeding up the Rails routing implementation. Bravo! The QuarkRuby folks succeeded in hacking ActiveResource to access Youtube videos. I think there may be an opportunity to tweak ActiveResource under the hood to make these sorts of plugins easier.

For the past few months I’ve been saying that the next app I make is going to use Google for authentication. I mean, seriously, who doesn’t have a google account? I knew it would be easy, as I’ve already written a gem to handle the authentication, so I thought I would whip it together quick and put it here for whoever finds it interesting. Onward! Step 1: Initial Setup To start with, we need a rails app (I’m using rails 2.1) and my google base authentication gem added as a dependency. First the app. rails googleauth Open up your newly created app and add the following to your…

Behind closed doors, over the past few weeks, I have been hacking away on the twitter gem. The last time I wrote about it was because I added STDIN. The updates I’ll run through right now are way cooler than that, I promise. Below are some of the highlights including a complete rewrite of the command line interface and support for the search API. When Stuff Goes Wrong (0.2.7) Originally the twitter gem pretty much either worked or didn’t and provided very little help as to which happened. In 0.2.7, I added a few more exceptions, RateExceeded and Unavailable, to better give you an idea of…

Tomorrow, myself and a few members of the South Bend ruby group are going to Google’s App Engine Hackathon in Chicago. I’ve been toying around with it a bit, forcing myself to learn something new. If anyone reading this is going, let me know and we’ll have to meet up. I’ve got a few good posts lined up (one google related), but I don’t want to steal the thunder from HTTParty just yet, so I’ll put them on the back burner.

So I’ve made a boatload of gems that consume web services (twitter, lastfm, magnolia, delicious, google reader, google analytics). Each time I get a bit better at it and learn something new. I pretty much am only interested in consuming restful api’s and over time I’ve started to see a pattern. The other day I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if that pattern were wrapped up as a present for me (and others) to use? The answer is yes and it is named HTTParty. The Pattern Every web service related gem I’ve written makes requests and parses responses into ruby objects. So first let’s…

In a certain application I’m working on, each account and each site added in that account get a unique subdomain. Last time, I talked about making sure to reserve a few subdomains for yourself. This time we’ll talk about automating a chore that comes along with developing a subdomained application. example.com Did you know that example.com is a reserved domain? Yep, no one can register it. This means that you can use it for development locally if you want your development addresses to feel more production-like (rather than using localhost). The easiest way to make this work on a mac is to…

I gave a talk on Vertebra today at Pivotal Labs. This time it was a bit more technical then my last talk at railsconf as the system has evolved since then. We’re working furiously on this thing and hope to have the first release very soon. We will be opening up an early beta for a few folks so if you have some wicked cool idea you want to use Vertebra for get in touch and a few people can get added to the early access. Video was taken today of the talk and should get posted online within a few weeks. Slides are on slideshare here if you cannot view the embedded version below.

Valery Kholodkov has written a very cool nginx module for handling uploads. The way this works is that you specify a location block to handle the uploads. So if you are using the standard nginx.conf for rails apps then you would add this in your server block right above your “location /” block: # Upload form should be submitted to this location location /upload { # Pass altered request body to this location upload_pass /internalupload; # Store files to this location upload_store /tmp; # Set specified fields in request body upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.name…

Man it seems like yesterday that Engine Yard was a small 3 person startup with big ideas and little cash. People seemed to like what we were offering and the business grew into a thriving startup. In the beginning we only had plans to be the best fully managed rails/ruby hosting company. And I think we met this goal early on. But it became apparent that we had a strong brand and we started kicking around ideas of becoming an open source software company as well. We believe in Ruby as a platform, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is when we sponsored Rubinius and Merb, hiring many…

Chris Matthieu and Steven Bristol interviewed me for the Rubyology Podcast a few days ago and they have posted the interview here. I talk about my early days of computing, merb, vertebra, rubinius and the story behind how Engine Yard got started and has grown. I’ll warn you though it’s a long interview, 120 minutes! Have a listen if you want to hear the story.

I’m going to be speaking at Oreilly’s Velocity conference next week on Monday June 23rd. Velocity is a conference about Web Scale operations and performance, lot’s of stuff about infrastructure and cloud computing. I’ll be giving a short talk on Vertebra at 4:45pm on Monday and I will also be on a panel called “Getting into the Clouds” with some guys from Amazon, 3terra, Rackspace and joyent at 3:45pm. Should be fun. Come see it if you’re in the area or already coming to the conference. Velocity Conference

As a company offering products for Ruby on Rails developers, we sometimes have to work through customer issues that are specific to certain Rails releases or Rails Edge commits. Among our daily work tasks, frictionless switching between different Rails versions is important. Below, I’ll quickly outline our internal approach to his. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I have noticed many developers using the tedious and time consuming gem uninstall rails;gem install rails -v old_version;gem uninstall rails;gem install rails; procedure. There is a better way. As a starting point, you will need…

Welcome to the Rails TakeFive interview series, FiveRuns’ ongoing effort to gather and share points of view from the Ruby on Rails community. This week, we’re happy to welcome three developers from TechCrunch, more specifically CrunchBase, a structured wiki project featuring technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit. TechCrunch developer and recovering robot soccer addict, Henry Work pulled together fellow developers Mark McGranaghan, who recently left TechCrunch to head back to school to “graduate”, and their fearless intern Rob Olson to talk about Ruby on…

Our customers keep sharing their excitement about Phusion’s Passenger as a reliable and usable platform for Rails deployment. We have noticed an even increased interest after the Passenger 2.0 release at RailsConf 2008. It is great to see the community tackling hard deployment problems and pushing the status quo. Recently, we’ve been getting more questions from customers looking to use FiveRuns Manage to monitor Passenger environments. The good news, since the initial Passenger launch we have made sure that FiveRuns Manage supports monitoring Rails applications deployed on Passenger…

Welcome to this week’s Rails TakeFive interview, our weekly discussion about Ruby on Rails with noted developers from throughout our community. This week, Ari Lerner of CitrusByte and among other things, creator of PoolParty, a framework for maintaining and running auto-scalable applications on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. FiveRuns: Hi Ari – thanks for joining us! Our own Adam Keys recently gave a talk at RailsConf titled Oh, the Fail I’ve Known. In the talk, Adam outlined a few different kinds of fail: learning failure (the knowledge was available but you didn’t have it), technological…

We just added a Rails application dashboard to FiveRuns Manage that summarizes high-level application metrics. If you are a current user of FiveRuns Manage, you can now easily assess your Rails application’s health with a quick glance. If you are not currently a FiveRuns Manage user, it’s easy to start a free 30-day trial by clicking here. Here’s how it works. This single-page view presents what we consider the most relevant data about any monitored Rails application. It highlights important metrics for sysadmins and also provides starting points for developers to improve an…

From "Gift From The Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense…

Best flash-based charts avaiable (commercial) Very good looking charts package including a nice stock chart

Becoming a Worldly Person 10 years ago I broke free of the Jehovah's Witnesses once and for all

About 10 years ago my life changed forever. Together with my wife and baby girl, I left behind dozens of family members and scores of friends, and moved hastily to a new life in Atlanta, Georgia. Recent events have reminded me that without that move I would never have come close to achieving the accomplishments that define my life today. I am celebrating tonight and reminding you that sometimes, all you need to break out of a miserable situation is the courage to make the first big leap. The year was 1998 and luckily for me the job market for Java programmers was white-hot! It took only about…

Stanislav asks: Would you work with micromanaging boss, no salary, and all your work thrown away? Unfortunately, my subject line ruins the punchline of his (non-joke) post about institutionalized public education, which you should go read anyway. I get the impression he opted out of for his young daughter and it made me think about my own kids, who are 11 and 8 years old. My daughter is about to start middle school and my son is going into fourth grade. They're relatively smart and athletic kids, and overall they are growing up in a typical American suburban way of life. I really haven't…

It's impossible not to ponder striking it rich at a start up, but there's another alternative if you're looking to make some good money -- build your brand.In January of 2005 I created a blog. I truly can't remember why I created it, but I do remember that I was making $60,000 a year. Then in February I joined ThoughtWorks and my blog became part of blogs.thoughtworks.com. I had instant readership, but not a lot to say. Two and a half years and a lot of blog posts later I turned down an offer that was $174,000 a year. This wasn't $174,000 a year because the work sucks. It was a good job, but…

The last few entries have focused more on the industry and leadership than usual. You might find that odd, but the reality is, I write about what I'm doing. When I'm coding in Ruby, you get Ruby entries. When I'm coding in Flex, you get Flex entries. Lately, I've spent more time shaping teams, processes, and individuals -- thus the posts of that nature.A Scotch Drinker feels I've become Elitist.I like scotch and scotch drinkers in general, so I gave his/hers entry some thought. You should read the entry if you care, I'm not going to summarize it. But, here's a few quick responses.There's no…

50% of all people doing business software development should find a new profession.The dotcom bubble brought us so many bad colleagues. A friend of mine once told me: In 97 he moved from France to the Valley. He basically spoke no English, and was immediately offered several positions as team lead. He couldn't understand their questions and he couldn't articulate answers. It didn't matter; they offered him the job based on his resume and his ability to draw UML diagrams.There are more interesting stories that may or may not be true, but my friend's experience best summarizes the time for me.

Back when I made $20,000 a year I bought a used Honda Civic. I needed something to get me from point A to point B fairly reliably. I was looking for the best deal given my requirements and I found a Civic that seemed to fit the bill. I had a good advantage as a buyer, I knew what I wanted and I knew approximately what it should cost. The car lasted for several years, and I was always happy with the purchase.The story could be much different. If I knew less about what I was buying I would have had to rely on someone else. If I ended up relying on someone unqualified I might have ended up with…

It's been about 18 months since my first entry about Refactoring: Ruby Edition. It's been a long journey, but the book should be seeing day light in the next few months.It's available for pre-order on Amazon now, and it should also be available on Safari in the near future.Thanks to everyone who helped, and I hope the book is as fun to read as it was to write.© Jay Fields - www.jayfields.com

When you have multiple Rails applications that don’t share a common database and you want to share the user authentication information – or rather, use one app to provide authentication for another – there are a few options. Here’s how I solved it recently. This is the simplest way I could think of to get this working. I couldn’t find a plugin to do this, so here’s the result of my pdi. Effectively what we’re doing is separating the user’s data - their profile info, if you like - from the credentials, and moving the latter to ActiveResource. This is something you should do in…

It’s been a while since I blogged here. Mainly, I think it’s because as I get deep into the daily grind of building other people’s social apps, I no longer feel like any of the code I’m writing is worthy of a post. This is not to say that I don’t love my work, just that maybe the techniques we’re using aren’t that special. (Maybe I’m wrong. Lots of people at Rails Conf came up to me and said they love reading this blog.) So, readers, what content do you want to see on the Caboose blog moving forward?

If you want a discounted room, contact me today, preferably on irc.

Your name needs to be on the list, otherwise you won’t get in. Also, you’ll need to prove your worth, by submitting a documentation patch to Rails core. Do that, then sign up here: http://register.caboose.org.

This is a quick note to inform you that any plugins or code hosted on *.caboo.se will be moving to GitHub very soon. If I’m hosting your project, you have about a week to move your code repository, if you haven’t already.

by Facebooker plugin committers Shane Vitarana and David Clements People are spending an increasing amount of time on social networks. Facebook is arguably the most popular worldwide social network and offers a simple API for offering your applications to tens of millions of users with Facebook accounts. This 67 page PDF will get you up and running with the Facebooker plugin. You’ll learn to install and configure the plugin. You’ll send HTML, Javascript, and images to Facebook (with caching). You’ll learn about the parts of Facebook that you can augment. Finally,…

Technical editing by the creators of Phusion Passenger™. Phusion Passenger™ dropped onto the scene in early 2008 and immediately caused quite a stir. Many developers have hoped for a way to run Rails applications natively inside Apache, and now it’s possible! Passenger™ makes development easier and is the best way to run Rails applications on shared hosts. You may even find it so easy to use that you choose to deploy your production applications with it as well. After viewing this 54 minute screencast, you’ll be a Passenger expert. You’ll learn: How to…

The first REST screencast was the top-selling screencast at PeepCode for over a year. We’ve started from scratch and built this one from the ground up for Rails 2 (a few Rails 2.1 features are used, too!). RESTful routes have been a big part of Rails since version 1.2, but they are also very confusing! They’re all about building your application to deliver HTML and API-friendly XML from a single piece of data. This screencast covers the basics of REST and walks through a simple application to show how REST routes work. You’ll learn about the magic that goes on behind the scenes…

by Aaron Bedra of Relevance No one wants to wake up to an application that has been hacked. This 47-page PDF talks about common vulnerabilities found in Rails applications and how to solve them. After touching on common model and view vulnerabilities, Aaron takes you through a session with the Tarantula fuzzing plugin. General server lockdown issues are covered. The book finishes with a sample risk analysis, including assessments of threat capability, vulnerability, and other risk-related issues. Save yourself unnecessary pain and regret by reading this important PDF today! Included for all…

Web applications become much more useful when powered by the oldest communication technology on the Internet: email. This 60 page PDF shows how to use the MMS2R RubyGem to receive and parse email from both desktop clients and mobile devices. You’ll learn about: Using MMS and email as an API to your web application. Understanding cellular and mobile gateways for sending and receiving MMS messages. Setting up scripts to fetch and process email. Automatically removing advertising inserted by carriers. Testing mail reception with Test::Unit and RSpec. Strategies for matching email addresses…

This question gets asked quite a few times, if there’s an easy way to handle exceptions raised while dispatching a request (routing exceptions, invalid method etc.) gracefully and show a customized error page. After this commit, there is. rescue_from to the rescue Now you can handle those exceptions inside your application.rb like : 123456789101112131415 class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base rescue_from ActionController::RoutingError, :with => :route_not_found rescue_from ActionController::MethodNotAllowed, :with => :invalid_method private def route_not_found render…

Then you’re experiencing modrails ! So here’s your candy : cp /opt/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git ~/.git_auto_complete.sh mate ~/.profile Add “source ~/.git_auto_complete.sh” at the very bottom Open a new shell and go to your git directory Enjoy tabbing

It’s a pretty saturday morning and I am in very jolly mood. Thought I’d share some joy ;-) In 1959, there was COBOL 1234567891011 ADD YEARS TO AGE.MULTIPLY PRICE BY QUANTITY GIVING COST.SUBTRACT DISCOUNT FROM COST GIVING FINAL-COST.MULTIPLY B BY B GIVING B-SQUARED. MULTIPLY 4 BY A GIVING FOUR-A. MULTIPLY FOUR-A BY C GIVING FOUR-A-C. SUBTRACT FOUR-A-C FROM B-SQUARED GIVING RESULT-1. COMPUTE RESULT-2 = RESULT-1 ** .5.SUBTRACT B FROM RESULT-2 GIVING NUMERATOR.MULTIPLY 2 BY A GIVING DENOMINATOR.DIVIDE NUMERATOR BY DENOMINATOR GIVING X. And almost 50 years later, it resurrected ! 123456…

This is almost a cross post from my email to rails-core mailing list : Lately there had been many tiny doc patches at trac, which could easily escape our normal verification cycle. On top of that, we’re entering the whole new git-era of social development which eliminates the notion of “core” in a way. Our aim is to make it really easy to get your doc patches in main repository. So to move forward, I’ve setup a git repository at GitHub : http://github.com/lifo/doc-rails/tree I plan to give commit access to everyone who in the past have written a decent doc patch. Or anyone who is…

UPDATE 1 : The inspiration for this article came from here ( it predates yo mama ). It has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with merb whatsoever. And “fuck you to your face” is NOT directed towards anything/anyone :) Just for fun and profit 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849 require rubygemsrequire thinrequire "action_controller"require dispatcher# Rails pwnedActionController::Base.session = { :session_key => "_myapp_session", :secret => "some secret phrase of at least 30 characters"…

And once again, hackfest is back. Only this time, it’s better than ever, thanks to Git The idea is quite simple. You get 5000 points for each of your patches that get merged to the core. The person with the highest points at the end of the month wins. August hackfest is already on and almost 3 more weeks to go, so hack on for the first prize – a free pass to RailsConf Europe ( special thanks goes to O’Reilly for the prize ) If you’ve never contributed to Rails before, now is a good time. This railscast is a nice head start. Thanks to all those who have contributed to Rails, making it…

From the Bratwurst on Rails team: Fellow Rubyists from Berlin cordially invite all participants of RailsConf Europe to a barbecue in good old German tradition. The event is an opportunity to socialize and meet the conference participants in a relaxed atmosphere, and to make your name or brand known amongst them. Members of the Berlin Ruby Usergroup will take care of your stomach, and drinks will be available at fair prices.The venue will be in the heart of Berlin, close to the conference venue. Entry will be free, as will the food. (If you’re interested in sponsoring, have a look at our…

Welcome to the fourth edition of This Week in Rails, a weekly (and occasionally fortnightly) report with highlights from the Rails community. David broke the news of the availability of confirmed and scheduled talks at RailsConf Europe which will be taking place this coming September. As you can see there will be a lot of exciting material this year, too. The e-book Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s New is now available in 7 languages: English, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Italian and Korean. A Spanish version is coming as well. Olé! A couple of weeks ago I took a…

There won’t be a Living on the Edge this week, but you won’t be starved for info because the Rails community is keeping up. Ryan Daigle has been keeping up with some of the changes on edge Rails and has done a few awesome explanatory posts on them: Easy memoization with ActiveSupport::Memoizable Nested model mass assignments Metaclass accessor (aka the eigenclass) Perhaps even more noteworthy is the introduction of I18n (internationalization) support to Rails core. Sven Fuchs explains the technical details and API as well as the history of Rails and I18n. I18n support is scheduled to be…

The schedule for RailsConf Europe sessions have now been made public. If you still haven’t signed up to go, there is still time to make it. This is the last year we’ll be in Berlin, so it’s a great time to come by.

And finally the moment that we have all been so anxiously awaiting, a new search engine to battle the Google giant. I have always been an advocate for the small guys. Cuil.com was created by Ex-Google workers, Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier. [...]

Our good and sometimes evil friend over at Google are always squeezing the algorithms in how they rank your paid listings against your competitors that are buying the same keywords in an effort to show and reward relevance. This can be a frustrating game for mom and pop shops and agencies to manage as keywords [...]

I recently did a SEO presentation at BizJam and got a few questions about SEO and flash websites and came across this posting in Google’s Blog by Software Engineers at Google, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins. Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, [...]

Hello again! I’ve been quite busy in between jobs and haven’t had much free time to work on my postings…well, let’s make up for lost time! Last time we spoke, I left you with a Rails app that made use of a basic relational database that contained books and associated authors. Let’s move the chains [...]

I attended Danny Sullivan’s sort of new SMX Advanced conference here in Seattle this week and was walking around the exhibitor areas looking to see if there was anything new to report and the best booth stop of the morning for me was at the Microsoft Advertising booth. I talked to a guy that was [...]

Episode 041. Short and sweet this week. Like us. The Rails Envy podcast is sponsored this week by Five Runs. FiveRuns provides Rails developers with a full stack of tools that helps them install, deploy, and maintain their web applications. Check them out at FiveRuns.com. Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440. Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link. Download the podcast ~10:45 mins MP3. Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader In this episode: Hyperactive Resource Testing named_scope with Shoulda Hoptoad It's an HTTParty and Everyone is…

Episode 040. Delayed because of my move. Apologies all around. Thanks for your patience! The Rails Envy podcast is sponsored this week by Five Runs. FiveRuns provides Rails developers with a full stack of tools that helps them install, deploy, and maintain their web applications. Check them out at FiveRuns.com. Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440. Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link. Download the podcast ~13:00 mins MP3. Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader In this episode: Redcloth 4.0.1 Released WSO2 Web Services Framework for…

Last week at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) I decided to put together a video attempting to capture the essence of the event (I did something similar with Railsconf in 36 minutes earlier this year). I ended up with is 37 minute video of great speakers including the keynoters Tim O'Reilly, Damien Conway, Tim Bray, Robert Lefkowitz, David Recordon, Nathan Torkington, and Danese Cooper. Oscon in 37 minutes View on Viddler Here is everyone shown in the video. You should really watch the whole thing, but if you want to skip to a certain person just click their name: Larry Wall, Randal…

We were just holding out on you. There's one more after this one but it's not done yet. MVC Public Service Announcement #5 : Outdated HTML from EnvyAds on Vimeo. View on YouTube View on Vimeo

Episode 039. This podcast was done live and in Portland, OR at OSCON, even though we don't talk about it at all. I love everyone. The Rails Envy podcast is sponsored this week by Five Runs. FiveRuns provides Rails developers with a full stack of tools that helps them install, deploy, and maintain their web applications. Check them out at FiveRuns.com. Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440. Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link. Download the podcast ~13:00 mins MP3. Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader In this episode: JRuby 1.1.3…

Two perspectives. Clay Shirky, writing on A Brief Message: Design is arrogance. The designer says, “I know what you want better than you. Here it is.” A designer offers judgment as superior; as Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Design is humility.Users are experts in their own lives, lives the designer will see only if she understands their wants and needs. Design is recognition that “good” only makes sense in that context. And Peter Denning, as the voice of "a user" in an article that featured fictional,…

Alex and I ran failcamp fast & loose and it worked. (Alex's writeup is here.) Our guiding idea was to discuss failure, in all its guises. We wanted to hold a forum where it was not only OK to admit to not being glossy & perfect, but actually required. We wanted to discuss things practical and philosophical. And we achieved those ends, so we're really pleased with how it turned out! Lots of positive things were said about failure. A number of negative things, too. We talked about how failure had helped us or hurt us, and whether failure is required in life, and whether failure can be…

A good in-depth article on information hoarding: Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we’ll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the…

Karl Duncker was a brilliant psychological researcher in the early 20th century, and one of the important figures in Gestalt Theory movement. His seminal work was his book on "productive thought," Zur Psychologie des produktiven Denkens", as well as the English-language book *On problem-solving. Neither of which it is possible to get your hands on, unless you know how to search a lot better than me. According to a little book I'm reading, Information and imagination, Duncker had this to say about "finding a solution to a current problem on the basis of its similarity to a problem or problems…

I hate feed readers. The idea for creativescrape was midwifed by that hate (a fiery, passionate hate it is). Like email, feed readers are almost exclusively uniform—and uniformly bad. They try to make everything in the world fit into the same mold, however cramped and unpleasant it may be. As developers we naturally find this kind of pure, perfect abstract to be intellectually orgasmic, but as designers we must naturally find it impractical and even repugnant. Thomas and I planned out creativescrape and it took us a longer than a day in terms of calendar days to finish it, but I doubt the…

Most people who start learning Rails today quickly learn about generators. They’re easy to use and very handy. Still, like any other code-generation device, it’s important to understand what they’re doing when you use them. I thought that would go without saying, but I should know better. I remember back in the day of ATL COM programming on Windows, adoption of ATL really took off when Visual Studio added a few wizards to help you create COM components easily. The number of people who didn’t realize what it was doing was surprising. When the smallest bug or issue would come up, they…

Announcing the next Softies on Rails class! Here’s the scoop: REST with Rails When: Saturday, October 4, 2008, 8:30am – 5:00pm Where: Downtown Austin, Texas Cost: $295.00 Wait… Austin? We usually hold our classes in Chicago, but we know that not everyone can make it to Chicago. So earlier this year we asked you to vote on where we should hold our next class, and what the topic should be. Here’s the results of the location poll. Austin won by a slim margin over Southern California, 22% to 20%: And here’s the result of the topic poll. A one-day “REST and Web Services” class was…

Came across an interesting thread on the Ruby-Talk google group. Eric Hegwer started it by asking the question, “What was YOUR first Ruby project?” It’s fun seeing the wide spectrum of answers. People were using Ruby for things I would never have dreamed of. I’d like to ask our readers a similar question: what was the first Rails app you wrote? Maybe you never made it public, but what was your first Rails project?

Just a quick post to mention that I was interviewed on the FiveRuns blog as part of their Take Five Series. Be sure to post a comment there if you have any thoughts or questions about the interview.

If you’re one of our regular readers, well, thank you. But also, you may have been wondering where the heck we’ve been for the last 9 months. I’m happy to announce that we’ve been pouring it all into our latest project, Rails for .NET Developers, to be published by Pragmatic this November. Unsurprisingly, our book is geared toward experienced .NET/ASP.NET developers who are interested in learning more about Rails. We’re certainly seeing a shift in thinking in the Microsoft community regarding the philosophy and approach to web development, as evidenced by the ALT.NET movement and…

Despite popular belief, it is possible and easy to write extensions with projects based on Hoe. It is possible to do both classic and inline extensions. Let's take a look at what both of them look like. Classic Extensions This is a standard extconf.rb based extension, with the build mechanism folded into the Rakefile instead of also having a Makefile in the ext directory. Rakefile EXT = "ext/blah.#{Hoe::DLEXT}" # 1 class Blah VERSION = '1.0.0' # 2 end Hoe.new('blah', Blah::VERSION) do |p| p.developer('FIX', 'FIX@example.com') p.spec_extras[:extensions] = "ext/extconf.rb" # 3 p.clean_globs…

add_tests("lasgn_call", "Rewriter" => :same, "TypeChecker" => t(:lasgn, :c, t(:call, t(:lit, 2, Type.long), :+, t(:arglist, t(:lit, 3, Type.long)), Type.long), Type.long), "CRewriter" => :same, "RubyToAnsiC" => "c = 2 + 3", # FIX: probably not "c = ..." "RubyToRubyC" => 'c = rb_funcall(LONG2NUM(2), rb_intern("+"), 1, LONG2NUM(3))') Can you think of a better / cleaner way? This generates 5 test_lasgn_call methods in 5 different test classes. :same says "use previous output as my input", and Rewriter gets its input from ParseTree's test suite. I've got 297 of these add_tests…

Hoe is a simple rake/rubygems helper for project Rakefiles. It generates all the usual tasks for projects including rdoc generation, testing, packaging, and deployment. Tasks Provided: announce - Create news email file and post to rubyforge. audit - Run ZenTest against the package. check_manifest - Verify the manifest. clean - Clean up all the extras. config_hoe - Create a fresh ~/.hoerc file. debug_gem - Show information about the gem. default - Run the default tasks. docs - Build the docs HTML Files email - Generate email announcement file. gem - Build the gem file hoe-1.5.0.gem…

You guys have no idea how much drbrain edits me.

And the winners are: ActionController's scaffolding.rb with a 100 node dstr! ActiveRecord's mysql.rb with a 274 node block! Date's format.rb with a 51 node hash! Net's telnet.rb with a 35 node dregx_once! Net::SFTP's attributes.rb with a 15 node args! ParseTree's pt_testcase.rb with a 567 node hash! TMail's racc generated parser with a 407 node array (4 times)! open-uri.rb with a 16 node dregx!

Ari Lerner, a Solutions Architect here at CitrusByte recently got interviewed by the guys at TakeFive. Welcome to this week’s Rails TakeFive interview, our weekly discussion about Ruby on Rails with noted developers from throughout our community. This week, Ari Lerner of CitrusByte and among other things, creator of PoolParty, a framework for maintaining and running auto-scalable applications on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. FiveRuns: Amazon + Rails seems to be a prevalent choice right now,looking way back to the first instances as early as 2006, and seeing how far we have come. Can you talk a…

I’m a big fan of researching and playing with new technologies (hey! I remember rails 0.7) so its no surprise that I’ve been playing a lot with Ruby Enterprise Edition and Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and researching it as a viable rails deployment solution. For those of you who are staying with the tried and true Nginx + Mongrel, let me offer a brief introduction to Phusion Passenger (mod_rails). But first… let’s take a trip down memory lane: Phusion Passenger is super easy to install and setup as an Apache mod and immediately simplifies the deployment of rails. It allows you to…

I am actively working on PoolParty, but the website doesn’t necessarily show that the project is in active development. Luckily, it is hosted at github and they have an API to access their changesets. Now, on PoolParty’s website, I am surfacing the latest changeset’s time, message and author as well as a link to the changeset. How? Code (shortened for brevity purposes): :.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__)) require "rubygems" require "yaml" require "open-uri" class Grab url "http://github.com/api/v1/yaml/auser/pool-party/commits/master" refresh_after…

Is your EC2 server pool starting to look like this? PoolParty can help you turn it into this: Why would I need PoolParty? Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud has made it cheap and straightforward to run your own server pool, but there are various issues with volatility, lack of load balancing between instances, no persistent instance storage (currently in private beta). Also there is no mechanism for scaling your instances dynamically (ie, adding or removing instances as your load changes). That is all taken care of by PoolParty, a recently open sourced Ruby gem and the brainchild of fellow…

This is the inaugural post in a series that we’ll be calling Ruby TMTOWTDI (There’s more than one way to do it). Usually the TMTOWTDI acronym is used as a disparaging term towards flexible languages, which offer a myriad ways of solving most given problems. This series, however, aims to use this property of Ruby as an educational tool. The format is as follows: we’ll present a problem, then everyone will try and write the most idiomatic, concise code that solves the problem in a readable fashion. This is not meant to be a golfing competition, nor an optimization one. However, we will…

I feel lucky to have been able to attend last week’s Startup Camp and Foo Camp. These are unusual, invitation-only events, with extraordinary collections of people. Getting an invitation requires some mix of accomplishment, connections, and luck. They are exclusive events not for the sake of exclusivity, but because they only work at a limited size. O’Reilly Media, which hosts the events and foots the bill (there’s no registration fee), gets to pick the attendees from its diverse range of colleagues and contacts. Startup Camp This was the first-ever Startup Camp, created by…

This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course. You will end up with a development machine with the following baseline components: Ruby and all basic Ruby utilities Ruby Gems package manager Subversion client Git client Native development tools (Xcode, C compiler) MacPorts native code package manager MySQL database client utilities and server Gems for Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, Mongrel, Mongrel Cluster, and MySQL…

This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course. You will end up with a development machine with the following baseline components: Ruby and all basic Ruby utilities Ruby Gems package manager Subversion client Git client Native development tools (Xcode, C compiler) MacPorts native code package manager MySQL database client utilities and server Gems for Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, Mongrel, Mongrel Cluster, and MySQL…

There’s a variety of screencasts and podcasts available for Ruby on Rails developers. Here’s a quick rundown of the major ones, and how they differ. Podcasts Audio podcasts are great for listening on the go, and for things such as news and interviews. Tutorial: Learning Rails Our own Learning Rails series consists of 8 podcasts that cover the fundamental concepts behind Ruby on Rails. People: Ruby on Rails Podcast The longest-running podcast in the Rails world is the “official” Ruby on Rails podcast, first created by Scott Barron but produced for most of its life by…

John Straw, chief software architect at YellowPages.com, gave an excellent talk at RailsConf about YellowPages’ conversion to Rails. We’ve pointed to YellowPages in the past as being one of the highest-traffic Rails sites, proving that Rails can scale. John’s talk covered the scaling issues, but the talk was just as much about the process of successfully doing a big rewrite of a critical application at a large company. (YellowPages.com is part of AT&T.) You can download John’s presentation from the RailsConf site. With 2.5M searches per day and more than 170…

brules rules (via hotman648)

Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad from Paris Hilton, Chris Henchy, and Adam “Ghost Panther” McKay

Wecycle Reclame door Locomotive BV (via gcappon)

Models falls over twice - anchor man can’t stop laughing (via strangegal1)

Something is just WRONG about this ice cream commercial

I couldn’t find any useful references to installing Phusion Passenger / mod_rails / mod_passenger on a cPanel-based Web server so I stumbled on regardless and managed to overcome the problems I encountered on the way. Those problems and my resolution are all wrapped up here for future use. Disclaimer These instructions MIGHT NOT WORK FOR YOU. They also might DAMAGE your setup. They shouldn’t, but I need to disclaim that so you can’t complain later. Follow these instructions at your own risk. They work fine for me on a CentOS 4.6 box with cPanel 11.23.4-R26138 and WHM…