almost effortless

If you enjoy these links, you should follow me on GitHub here.

iPhone / iPad icon PSD template

I’ve decided to work with my good friend, Sean Patrick O‘Brien to create a PSD based off the exact overlays, outlines, and masks the iPhone and iPad OS use to mask icons.

visionmedia's express

Sinatra-like JavaScript node.js web development framework -- insanely fast, insanely sexy

Commit 8ae25 to rails

Introduce class_attribute to declare inheritable class attributes. Writing an attribute on a subclass behaves just like overriding the superclass reader method. Unifies and replaces most usage of cattr_accessor, class_inheritable_attribute, superclass_delegating_attribute, and extlib_inheritable_attribute.

jed's fab

(fab) is a lightweight (~2KB minified and gzipped) toolkit that makes it easy to build asynchronous web apps. It takes advantage of the flexibility of javascript to create a concise DSL without pre-compilation or magic scope hackery.

Static websites with Heroku

I recently moved off of Dreamhost in favor of Heroku. I have a few static sites I needed to move over and here's how I did it...

Future Shock

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

Hacker News | Tinkerer’s Sunset

The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing. The iPad will draw more people towards software engineering, because for the first time we will have a general purpose computer that doesn't suck horribly for normal people.

Joe Hewitt: iPad

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.

JSLint

The JavaScript Code Quality Tool

jeffkreeftmeijer's navvy at master - GitHub

Simple Ruby background job processor inspired by delayed_job, but aiming for database agnosticism.

iPad: an Apple for Mom

Most people have a computer at home. For some (like my mom), it’s an ancient Dell laptop they bought years ago. Others have bought into the netbook trend and invested a small amount of money into a machine that, for most people, can only be irritating to use (slow, small, ugly, and burns your lap – not a recipe for success). A few have actually paid good money for what was supposed to be a modern machine, and actually turned out to be yet another annoying slow, painful-to-use, Windows-based machine infested with trial software, spyware, and sometimes viruses.

documentcloud's underscore

Functional Programming Aid for Javascript. Works well with jQuery.

neerajdotname's admin_data

Browse and Manage your data using browser

In praise of git’s index

The key to understanding it is how it interacts with git diff. Once you add something to the index (also referred to as staging it), it disappears off the diff. You can pass --cached to see what changes you have staged, but by default, it doesn’t show you the changes that you have asserted are ready for commit.

jnicklas's capybara

webrat alternative which aims to support all browser simulators

thoughtbot's pacecar

Generated scopes for ActiveRecord classes

quirkey's sammy

Sammy is a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery, It's RESTful Evented Javascript.

New ActionMailer API in Rails 3.0

Action Mailer has long been the black sheep of the Rails family. Somehow, through many arguments, you get it doing exactly what you want. But it takes work! Well, we just fixed that. Action Mailer now has a new API.

Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: David Heinemeier Hansson, 37signals - Unlearn Your MBA

David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints--fiscal, temporal, or otherwise--drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your company.

Bumps ahead as Vimeo, YouTube respond to HTML5 video demand

Although there are still a number of important problems to solve before open video can displace Flash-based video playback on the Web, it seems likely that we will see more progress now that the major players are all on board and the users are enthusiastically calling for better standards support.

Discovering Rails 3 generators

This weekend during Rails Bugmash I stumbled across some nice posts about Rails 3 generators which motivated me to share them and add some comments!

Active Record Query Interface 3.0

I’ve been working on revamping the Active Record query interface for the last few weeks ( while taking some time off in India from consulting work, before joining 37signals ), building on top of Emilio’s GSOC project of integrating ARel and ActiveRecord. So here’s an overview of how things are going to work in Rails 3.

Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic

Flash an exotic prototype, then—Presto!—get people to buy your more boring stuff. That kind of thinking still rules at most electronics companies. Apple under Steve Jobs only shows off actual products. The difference? Apple's arcane secret to success.

omgbloglol Rails 3 Introduction

This post is kicking off a series that I’m doing about moving your skills and migrating your code to Rails 3. I’ll be sharing some practical insights and covering some pretty in-depth topics as we go along (I’ve got some notes for entries about upgrading plugins, taking advantage of new features like the agnosticism, migrating applications, and so on), but before I go into a lot of specifics, I thought it might be useful to go over some of the high-level philosophical and architectural changes that have gone on in the Rails code between versions 2 and 3.

How A Spare Computer Became Twitpic

In 2008, Noah Everett wanted to share photos on Twitter. Since there was no way to do it, he grabbed an old server and created Twitpic as a side project... A $1.5+ Million A Year Twitter Success Story...

API_Cheatsheet - Couchdb Wiki

chartbeat

The web doesn't work with a 24-hour lag and neither should your analytics. Chartbeat gives you real-time analytics so that you know what's happening when it's happening. Control the story, track a product launch, exploit an opportunity from the moment they happen.

The Concept *is* the Execution

You cannot design a great service without an obsessional focus on the details.

Graffiti Analysis

Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study in the motion of graffiti. Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag.

How I solved email overload using gmail

It's simple. Every single email that arrives in my in-box is immediately put in a filter.

If you enjoy these links, you should follow me on GitHub here.

Steve Krug on Usability

I can’t think of a better intro to the essential points of usability than this presentation by Steve Krug. I especially appreciate his “least you can do” approach. Enjoy.

iBusted

...the Sun-Times is forwarding every page request to http://mobile.suntimes.com (the root “home page” of the optimized site), thus breaking every link to every single article they’ve published. This is the very definition of a broken website.

Caliper: Hosted Ruby Metrics

Ruby metrics don't get any easier than this.

Admin Noob

System Administration for Noobs

AJAX activity indicators

An important design element that’s part of the whole AJAX business is somehow letting your user know that stuff is actually happening while the server crunches away. A common way to do so, is to add a little animated GIF that is only shown when the AJAX request is happening.

The Ruby Toolbox

The Ruby Toolbox gives you an overview of these tools, sorted in categories and rated by the amount of watchers and forks in the corresponding source code repository on GitHub so you can find out easily what options you have and which are the most common ones in the Ruby community.

Waging War on Whitespace (using TextMate)

To avoid diff cruft you’ll need to instruct your text editor to remove trailing whitespace, preferably every time you save so you don’t have to remember to do it.

roman's warden_oauth

warden_oauth enhances the Warden authentication framework, offering a simple interface for creating oauth strategies.

ffmike's has_messages

This plugin provides a nice and easy way to create simple internal messaging system in your application.

jpignata's temping

Temping allows you to create arbitrary ActiveRecord models backed by a temporary SQL table for use in tests.

Gem Bundler is the Future

This guide went over how to use Bundler today, with a Rails 2.3.4 app. According to Yehuda, this eventually will be packaged in Rails 3, so the commands will be baked into Rails…so something like script/bundle. The nice thing is that you can use the bundler with any Ruby project, so this is good to know in general.

tipsy

Tipsy is a jQuery for creating a Facebook-like tooltips effect based on an anchor tag's title attribute.

One in Three: Inherited Resources, Has Scope and Responders

So we were there, building an application based on scaffold, and as we saw duplicated code we started to realize Inherited Resources contains a lot of tools that could be used outside its context. And this is what is happening right now, two new gems are being launched: Responders and HasScope.

Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”

Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem

It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again. All game designers know this, so they pick a point to stop improving — to “lock the game down” — and then spend a frantic year polishing. But Broussard never seemed willing to do that.

jzawodn's mytop

a "top" clone for MySQL

Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks // RailsTips by John Nunemaker

Below are 7 Mongo and MongoMapper related features that I have found to be really awesome while working on switching Harmony, a new website management system by my company, Ordered List, to Mongo from MySQL.

Server-Side Javascript: Back With a Vengeance

Last month was Javascript season in Europe, with two conferences dedicated to the language that powers interactive web applications, and a third, which featured it heavily. If a common theme emerged, it was the buzz about Javascript leaping out of the browser to serve other domains, and the noise has only become louder in the aftermath.

Subdomains and sessions to the rescue!

After some research we decided to go with the subdomain-fu gem, which is great to give your application the ability of handling subdomains. Another great resource we have used is Ryan Bates’ screencast about the subject. But they did not solve our problem completely, so here we are going to document a few steps to help you get up and running easily with subdomains and sessions.

CodeRack: Rack::Snapshot

Rack::Snapshot is a quick way to expand image urls for the popular image sharing services. If you have a URL to a public page for an image on Skitch, Img.ly, Twitpic, Yfrog, Flickr, or Twitgoo, this middleware will embed the direct image URL for you.

config/deploy.rb from tobi's imagery

Capistrano tasks for a GitHub-style deployment.

sickill's racksh

Console for any Rack based ruby web app.

tobi's clarity

Web interface for the grep and tail -f unix tools. Useful for real-time log analysis. Remotely related to splunk.

tobi's imagery

Image server / proxy that can resize images on demand based on common file prefixes ( such as _small, _medium ) and apply other rmagick effects. Supposed to be used between a Squid/Varnish and S3.

Introducing RR

I'm pleased to introduce a new Test Double (or mock) framework named RR, which is short for Double Ruby.

This time I have an excuse for the non-weekly nature of the weekly digest... I've been traveling! Please do check out some photos if you're interested on that sort of thing.

Video of Node.js by Ryan Dahl at JSConf.eu

Node.js might be the most exciting single piece of software in the current JavaScript universe. Ryan received standing ovations for his talk and he really deserved it!

How to Begin Playing With Rails 3

Curious to take a look at Rails 3?

Lawnchair

Sorta like a couch except smaller and outside, also, a client side JSON document store. Perfect for webkit mobile apps that need a lightweight, simple and elegant persistence solution.

stupid ruby tricks

Over the past few months of slinging Ruby here at Thoughtbot, I’ve picked up quite a few stupid ruby tricks smart ruby techniques that really help out your code.

Vanity: Experiment Driven Development for Rails

You’ve got your TDD, your BDD, your load testing, your user testing, your code metrics. All tools for testing your code and improving it. Here’s a question for you: what are you using to test your ideas?

SelectorGadget: point and click CSS selectors

SelectorGadget is an open source bookmarklet that makes CSS selector generation and discovery on complicated sites a breeze.

Ruby Kernel system, exec and %x

The Ruby Core Library documentation is very similar for Kernel.system, Kernel.exec and %x[..]. Recently I needed to kick off a system process, so I spent some time working with all 3 options.

Node.js is genuinely exciting

I don’t see myself switching all of my server-side development over to JavaScript, but Node has definitely earned a place in my toolbox. It shouldn’t be at all hard to mix Node in to an existing server-side environment—either by running both behind a single HTTP proxy (being event-based itself, nginx would be an obvious fit) or by putting Node applications on a separate subdomain. Node is a tempting option for anything involving comet, file uploads or even just mashing together potentially slow loading web APIs. Expect to hear a lot more about it in the future.

dcparker's ruby-gmail

A Rubyesque interface to Gmail. Connect to Gmail via IMAP and manipulate emails and labels. Send email with your Gmail account via SMTP. Includes full support for parsing and generating MIME messages.

Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway

There's no question that, for whatever time budget you have, you will end up with better software by releasing as early as practically possible, and then spending the rest of your time iterating rapidly based on real world feedback.

New Amazon EC2 Feature: Boot from Elastic Block Store

You can now launch Amazon EC2 instances from an AMI backed by Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store). This new functionality enables you to launch an instance with an Amazon EBS volume that serves as the root device.

The Stars Look Down

...much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference... deriving personal value from these transactions... is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.

Questions for Jeffrey P. Bezos

For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books. It’s astonishing.

Campfire API

The Streaming API allows you to monitor a room in real time.

Mounted Web Apps Sites

...and between the two of use we had a Pancake stack that was proxying to couchdb in pretty short order.

Converting Rails application data from MySQL to PostgreSQL

Our antiquely Perl-like script worked better than we expected — our application started right up with all of its data intact.

State of Ruby VMs: Ruby Renaissance

In a short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. In fact, keeping up with all of the most recent developments within each VM is now easily a full-time job. For that reason, and with RubyConf ‘09 in full swing, let’s take a quick survey of the space and where it’s taking us.

Odeo Releases Twttr

There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

Why I Don't Care That I'm Killing Music

...and brought to their knees they should be, without a doubt. For years they have enjoyed a monopoly, where they controlled the price of music and kept it artifically high to fuck us over. Personally, I don't think I would feel so good about stealing shit from people if they hadn't spent the last 4 decades rubbing our noses in it...

Internet Vices

[Double True.]

Three things about Marco Arment

All of this happens with zero intervention from me. Which means substantial, challenging prose that used to get skipped in the rush of the day now becomes available anyplace it suits me. In the line at the ATM. On a plane. Wherever.

Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 Finally Ships

The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

Log in or sign up? - Leah Culver's Blog

...we have just added the concept of user accounts. This includes the need for registration and log in (as well as log out and forgot password and so on). Leafy Chat only requires an email address and a password for both registration and log in, so it would be great to have some clever way to have both forms on the homepage.

The Nerd Handbook

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

Hacker News: Help: I'm lost

From the outside you'd be amazed to know that inside I am in terrible turmoil. You know me because of code I've written, books I've published, and my contributions here. Perhaps you follow me on Twitter. But I have reached a point in my life where I do not know what to do, or where to turn.

Using the New Gem Bundler Today

As you might have heard, Carl and I released a new project that allows you to bundle your gems (both pure-ruby and native) with your application.

Using the Rubygems Bundler for Your App

The new Rubygems bundler makes managing your application’s gem dependencies easy. And for applications with many components, it makes separating components’ dependencies easy too.

Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

A Web cache sits between one or more Web servers (also known as origin servers) and a client or many clients, and watches requests come by, saving copies of the responses — like HTML pages, images and files (collectively known as representations) — for itself. Then, if there is another request for the same URL, it can use the response that it has, instead of asking the origin server for it again.

Interview with Ezra Zygmuntowicz – Engine Yard

The cloud providers are splitting into a few camps. On one side, you have companies like Amazon that offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and Google who offers platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS offers rapid development, and no server administration, but it locks you into a specific provider. Enter Engine Yard, a company that's enhancing Ruby on Rails to run on on top of arbitrary IaaS. In this interview Ezra Zygmuntowicz paints the picture.

CouchDB Twitter Clone Architecture

So I've been thinking through the architecture of a Twitter-esque system in Couch as a kind of thought exercise to get a better handle on some of the more difficult corners of view generation. What would be the most effective manner of creating Twitter-like status streams?

Understanding Access Credentials for AWS/EC2

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a dizzying proliferation of credentials, keys, ids, usernames, certificates, passwords, and codes which are used to access and control various account and service features and functionality. I have never met an AWS user who, when they started, did not have trouble figuring out which ones to use when and where, much less why.

Multiple File Upload With Progress Bar Using jQuery

Today I am going to show you how to create a multiple file upload form that allows multiple file selection using Ctrl/Shift keys and also displays a progress bar for each of the selected files while they are uploading.

SWFUpload jQuery Plugin

When I first stumbled across SWFUpload about two years ago I was impressed by how easy it was to implement. However, their example code has always bugged me as being rather crap, having to assign a separate global event handler for each event, and the lack of multiple handlers for a single event.

How to Gemify your Rails Plugins

Ever since Rails added support for declaring gem dependencies, there is really no (good) reason to use plain ol’ plugins.

Plugging Rack into Rails

Rails 2.3 has Rack baked in. It uses Rack for things like sessions and parameter parsing. But what if you want to add your own middleware to a Rails app?

The Meaning of Information Technology

The first commercial computer was the Lyons Electronic Office I and was used in 1951 to perform vast calculations pertaining to the making and consumption of biscuits. You see, after the war, J. Lyons & Co., a popular chain of British tea shops, was confronted with an appetite for pastries so astronomical (which is understandable given years of tedious disputes with Germany), that the human mind was incapable of solving unaided the problem of distributing tea cakes to their customers.

librelist.com

Librelist.com is a free as in freedom mailing list site for open source projects. It is a place for FOSS communities to discuss all the things they want without ads, censorship, signup requirements, bundled apps, or requirements that you use any particular email client or service.

Introducing Resque - GitHub

Resque is our Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later.

PersistentFS.com

PersistentFS is a fast and efficient POSIX-compliant file system that provides unlimited online storage in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage cloud. A PersistentFS file system can be mounted on any Linux computer connected to the internet and accessed like local storage. All data written to the file system is uploaded to Amazon S3 for reliable and cost effective off-site storage, while remaining instantly accessible. This allows you to take advantage of Amazon S3 using your existing software, without writing a single line of code.

CodeRack: Canonical Host

There are often times when you'll need to redirect requests for some domains or subdomains to a single canonical host. This middleware lets you specify the canonical host for your application, and will perform a 301 redirect for all non-canonical requests.

Rails Best Practices

[Nice overview.]

Why do we have an IMG element?

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an element? Why not an element? Or an element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

gabriel's shrub

S3 Proxy for Google App Engine [Awesome.]

S3Hub: S3 Client (for Mac OS X)

View your S3 online storage, upload, download, set permissions, share with friends and more.

Official Google Blog: This week in search 10/30/09

On Wednesday, we rolled out our new music search feature, fully integrated into Google's web search. Now, when you search for a band, singer, song name, or album title, Google will recognize it and return a special music result on the top of the page. These new special music results do exactly what you want - they let you listen to the full song.

Traffic Server Podling Status Page - Apache Incubator

Traffic Server fills the need for a fast, extensible and scalable HTTP 1.1 proxy and cache. We have a production proven piece of software that can deliver HTTP traffic at high rates, and can scale well on modern SMP hardware. We have benchmarked Traffic Server to handle in excess of 35,000 RPS on a single box. Traffic Server has a rich feature set, implementing most of HTTP/1.1 to the RFC specifications.

Start-up studies: A pop quiz

There’s a classroom exercise that’s a part of the Stanford technology venture program hits its students with each year: If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible?

One-handed computing with the iPhone

The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone1 is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.

Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You're History

There are a million different ways for Netflix to fail. But that has always been the case. Netflix should have failed already, taken down by Blockbuster or Wal-Mart, kneecapped by Hollywood, made irrelevant by BitTorrent or iTunes. Yet time and again, the company has not only survived but quietly thrived—on the strength of its unique algorithms and its relentless focus on getting customers content they didn't even know they wanted.

Speaker's Tip: Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared

People take days off of work, spend hundreds on a conference ticket, travel for thousands of miles, and pay hefty rates for flights and hotels to come hear you speak, and you tell them you didn’t have time to prepare a talk? What’s cool about that?

Underscore.js

Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects.

The Y Combinator Startup School 2009 Summary

Y Combinator’s Startup School 2009 was an incredible learning experience for new and experienced entrepreneurs alike. There are ten talks. Here are their key points.

Module: Rack::Utils

Rack::Utils contains a grab-bag of useful methods for writing web applications adopted from all kinds of Ruby libraries.

Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine. This move is obviously a big win for open source.

Things Caches Do

There are different kinds of HTTP caches that are useful for different kinds of things. I want to talk about gateway caches — or, “reverse proxy caches” — and consider their effects on modern, dynamic web application design.

WebSequenceDiagrams.com - Create sequence diagrams in seconds

Don't waste your afternoon drawing UML Sequence Diagrams. Just enter the description here, and click "draw". The SD/MSC Generator is an easy alternative to using mouse-centric tools like Microsoft Visio.

stefankroes's ancestry

Ancestry allows the records of a Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord model to be organised as a tree structure (or hierarchy). It uses a single, intuitively formatted database column, using a variation on the materialised path pattern. It exposes all the standard tree structure relations (ancestors, parent, root, children, siblings, descendants) and all of them can be fetched in a single sql query.

Treating User Myopia

When I said users don't read anything you put on the screen, I was lying. Users do read. But users will only read the absolute minimum amount of text on the screen necessary to complete their task. I can't quite explain it, but this kind of user myopia is epidemic. It's the same problem, everywhere I turn.

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Today marks the launch of Amazon RDS - the Amazon Relational Database Service. Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS handles all the "muck" of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business.

Flickr! It’s made of people

We’ve launched People in Photos, a new feature that will help put a face to the Flickrverse and enable you to highlight members that you’ve photographed in a whole new way. People in Photos lets you add a member to a photo, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in.

How We Made GitHub Fast

Now that things have settled down from the move to Rackspace, I wanted to take some time to go over the architectural changes that we’ve made in order to bring you a speedier, more scalable GitHub.

Ruby Enterprise Edition Features Guide

With REE, one can tune the garbage collector’s behavior for better server performance. It is possible to specify the initial heap size to start with. The heap size will never drop below the initial size. By carefully selecting the initial heap size one can decrease startup time and increase throughput of server applications.

Passing environment variables to Ruby from Phusion Passenger

Some environment variables must be set before Ruby is started because the Ruby interpreter itself uses them. The RailsBench GC settings environment variables, which are now supported by Ruby Enterprise Edition, are examples of such environment variables.

Using the Nginx Memcached module with Passenger

Nginx, everyone's favorite speedy web server has a module to hook in directly to memcached. For those of us running Ruby servers behind nginx we can avoid hitting our running Ruby processes completely on a cache hit.

Surprises

Now, when coding, I try to think: “how can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does”.

Railssummit Slides

Here are the slides of [Pratik Naik's] presentation at Railssummit 2009... about Rails focused tips/tricks.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer talks with entrepreneurs at a JuicePitcher event about the history of his startup, Mint.

Connecting to Multiple Databases Using ActiveRecord

You can call establish_connection with the key that points to another database config in your config/database.yml file

Shortwave

...is an extensible quick-search and shortcut bookmark. [Awesome.]

What problems does Google Wave solve?

It will probably take years before Wave fully penetrates large corporations and replaces the email systems everyone is used to. But it solves so many thorny problems with email that it might well manage to do so, where so many other tentative “email fixes” have failed.

21 Rack Middlewares To Turbocharge Your Ruby Webapps

In this post, we're going to highlight various Rack middlewares from CodeRack, an on-going Rack middleware competition...

hiddenloop's paging_keys_js

Keyboard short cuts for paging through listings one item at at time (and across entire pages). Inspired by the navigation at FFFFOUND!

Monthly Digest? ;)

Pomodoro

Pomodoro Desktop is a desktop application for Time Management on your Mac OSX. It is a simple but effective way to manage your (coding) time, and it's based on the Pomodoro technique

Clean CSS

Optmize and Format your CSS

Hacker News | GitHub's Unicorn Setup

[Interesting comments as usual.]

Picnik

Photo editing the easy way, online in your browser. Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.

Unicorn! - GitHub

We’ve been running Unicorn for more than a month. Time to talk about it.

Munin

Munin the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

On Gem Forking

So, GitHub has recommended Gemcutter as an alternative to hosting gems on GitHub...

Cloudvox

API-driven phone calls, in minutes (call your code: AGI/AMI, HTTP, Asterisk-Java, Adhearsion). Cloudvox is the most practical, stable, open environment for API-driven phone calls.

Gem Building is Defunct

We will continue to serve old gems at http://gems.github.com/ for at least one year. [New gems can't be built, though.]

* is Unix

Ryan’s I like Unicorn because it’s Unix appears to have started a mini-meme of folks writing simple forking network servers in their language of choice. I’m really enjoying reading ‘em — they’re a sort of Rosetta Stone of network code...

Chargify

Chargify simplifies recurring billing for Web 2.0 and SaaS companies.

Everything I know about Open Source I learned from Indie Hip Hop

Slides from an Aloha on Rails presentation.

FlipClock

Get the FlipClock Widget for your Dashboard!

nginx and varnish on Mac OS X

Since I'm a happy user of the macports collection already anyway, I let it do the 'heavy lifting' of actually installing nginx and varnish. In addition I provided a launchd startup item for varnish and also added a host entry for wahlcomputer to enable virtual hosting for nginx and varnish.

atmos's rack_hoptoad

A gem that provides exception notifications to hoptoad as rack middleware.

Ubuntu Intrepid - adding an Nginx init script

...let's go ahead and create one for easy control of Nginx, and to ensure it restarts on a reboot.

Generate gem.yml and .gems for Rails

A rake task which will generate gem configuration files based on your “config.gem” specifications in Rails. This comes in handy when deploying to Engine Yard, or Heroku.

Custom Chef Recipes with Engine Yard Cloud

One of the power user features of Engine Yard Cloud is the ability to use custom Chef recipes to install or configure anything that can run on Gentoo Linux that we have not already automated as part of the platform. This allows for extensive customizations of your environments and empowers you to run virtually all custom software you might need.

SHJS

SHJS is a JavaScript program which highlights source code passages in HTML documents. Documents using SHJS are highlighted on the client side by the web browser.

Getting ready for CouchDB 0.10

I’ve setup a local copy of CouchDB, from the 0.10 branch, just to see if my application code could handle its awesome powers. Here are my two big takeaways...

Paperclip, S3 & Delayed Job in Rails

Here’s how I use Paperclip (with storage on S3) and delayed_job to process images after they’re uploaded in the background.

Ryan Singer of 37signals - UI Fundamentals for Programmers

I gave a talk on “UI Fundamentals for Programmers” at WindyCityRails in Chicago last month. The talks covered modeling, breaking apps into screens, visual techniques, flows, and a few coding tips. [This is a great talk. Highly recommended viewing.]

Source code beautifier / syntax highlighter – convert code snippets to HTML

hilite.me converts your code snippets into pretty-printed HTML format, easily embeddable into blog posts and websites.

Keeping controllers empty with faux attributes - Momoro Machine

The barely any code way... use a fake attribute. Define an attribute setter on User, and then just make a small form in the view to set it.

Build it

The good innovation -- the innovation that makes the world a better place and builds real wealth in society -- that stuff is done by radically self-reliant creators who get their hands dirty. Not talkers. Not dreamers. Builders.

ActionRails

At ActionRails, we offer a variety of services designed to push your Rails developers to the next level... Application Evaluation; Weekly Code Reviews; Developer Hotline.

And if only 1% of those people...

...he forgot there was a number lower than one percent...

Working hard is overrated

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Nginx_As_a_Reverse_Proxy - Couchdb Wiki

Nginx can serve as a reverse proxy to CouchDB for scenarios such as URL rewriting, load-balancing, access restriction, etc.

S3Sync

This is a ruby program that easily transfers directories between a local
directory and an S3 bucket:prefix. It behaves somewhat, but not precisely, like the rsync program. [I can verify that this is an awesome little tool.]

Full Stack ETag Support

The conclusion that I draw is that I definitely want to use Rack::Cache—100% improvement over reassembling the HTML on each request is too good to pass up. As for the 20% speed boost that full stack ETag buys me, I am not sure that the complexity that is introduced warrants the speed boost.

Browser Cache Usage Exposed

...reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time...

Place Pages for Google Maps

A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.

couchapp

CouchApp is designed to structure standalone CouchDB application development for maximum application portability. CouchApp is a set of scripts and a jQuery plugin designed to bring clarity and order to the freedom of CouchDB's document-based approach.

nginx, worker_processes, and passenger_max_pool_size

The Phusion Passenger pool size is independent from the number of
Nginx worker processes that you have. Setting the number of Nginx workers to the number of CPU cores should be sufficient.

Sinatra: Writing Extensions

Sinatra includes an API for extension authors to help ensure that consistent behavior is provided for application developers.

How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed?

...but to make this work for apps delivered by disk image, users have to understand that they must copy the app from the image to their startup drive. This is where some get lost.

Sammy.js, CouchDB, and the new web architecture

Welcome to the new world. HTTP Databases and JSON Storage. The simple act of making the database and the browser more powerful on either end has destroyed the need for the middle tier.

GitHub is Moving to Rackspace!

In just a few short weeks we will be moving GitHub to a new home at Rackspace. We’re aware of the current stability and performance issues, and we want to let you know what we’re doing about it.

hurl

Hurl makes HTTP requests. Enter a URL, set some headers, then view the response. Perfect for APIs.

Still not weekly ;)

Github and Engineyard part ways

[This Hacker News thread has some more detail from EY and GH. EY couldn't afford to continue with the preexisting arrangement, so GH is moving to Rackspace.]

Tornado Web Server

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

Twitter And The Revenue Dilemma

The company has to decide whether or not to turn revenue on. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a real decision. Once revenue is on, how the company is valued by the market can change dramatically.

Using Ruby Enterprise for Rails script/console

If you want to just use REE for script/console, without setting it for
everything, you can...

If architects had to work like software developers

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Ravelry

What we’ve done only takes 1 not-even-fulltime (I have lots of other duties) programmer/sysadmin and it’s very cool that the software available today makes this possible. It’s important — we can’t be spending money on “professional services” and we only have 3.5 employees.

How Twitter works in theory

It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. Twitter clearly works in practice... and I wanted to write about some theories that help me understand it.

MiniBatteryStatus Widget

MiniBatteryStatus is a small Dashboard widget that monitors battery status, charge percentage and remaining battery life. Integrated with Growl to alert you when it's time to recharge your battery.

Protecting your Paperclip downloads

[Excellent write-up that covers protected downloads using Apache, nginx, the local filsystem, and/or Amazon S3. Awesome.]

Yehuda Katz Interview

A pretty good idea would be to contribute heavily to open source, and then look for work at companies that look at open source work as equivalent to a resume. If you build up enough really good open source work, you'll soon find people clamoring to hire you. [Even with my limited experience, I've found this to be true. Working in Open Source is a really efficient way to improve your skills, and helps immensely when looking for work.]

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review - Ars Technica

Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood. John Siracusa dives deep into Apple's new OS offering to see what's new, what's still the same, and whether it's worth upgrading.

aM laboratory

Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute.

3 bugs that will screw you

Definitly turn up your paranoia when dealing with e-mail, security or payements. If someone’s picture doesn’t upload occasionally due to an ill-conceived model, that not a huge problem. If 30k people get sent a bad e-mail, hacked, or overcharged due to three lines of code, that’s a serious bummer.

5 Tips for Sphinx Indexing

Sphinx is our favorite tool for the job. Written in C++ by Andrew Aksyonoff, and originally released to open source in 2001, Sphinx is a blazing fast search engine. Considering that fast and complex full-text searching is a somewhat frequent need, I’ve put together this post with my top five tips for implementing Sphinx.

Metal Lights Wallpaper by ~ToffeeNut on deviantART

Minimal desktop with two styles: Spotlights and Streaks.

Remove the Add Bookmark button from Safari 4

By default, the Add Bookmark button (+) is attached to the URL address in Safari 4. There isn't an option to turn it off, but there's a workaround...

Productivity Tip: Empty Your Dock

Inspired partially by my preparation for the Tiger upgrade and partially by my proficiency with QuickSilver, I’ve emptied everything out of the doc. Only the Finder and Trash are persistent. Everything else, in when in use, out when not.

The Menubar Challenge

...taking everything you own, save for the bare essentials, and moving it into storage. For a set period of time, retrieve items from the store when needed. Anything not accessed after said set period of time you likely do not really need and should be disposed of.

Dark Wood

The wood-like wallpaper pack. Hope u'll like it.

The Funded Publishes Ideal First Round Term Sheet

Start with the Y Combinator docs for your first early angel round, and move to Adeo’s document in your first real round of venture capital.

Poor Man's Deploy

Start a Sinatra server on port 4000; GET / to that server triggers a git pull and mod_rails restart; Hit port 4000 locally after pushing

Antares Trader Blog

Previous on this blog alluded to my misgivings about the big merge between Rails and Merb. I liked the trimmed-down, uncomplicated API of Merb. I knew what it was going to do and how to make non-standard things happen. Well it looks like Rails 3 is getting some of that mojo.

Rails Rumble :: Welcome to the '09 Rumble

The Rails Rumble is a 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, your team gets one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby and Rails.

SizeUp

SizeUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems.

MSNBC.com acquires EveryBlock

After considering a number of options (some wildly different from others), we decided that working with MSNBC.com was the best fit for our site and our team.

ChangeDetection

ChangeDetection.com provides page change monitoring and notification services to internet users worldwide. Anyone can use our service to monitor any website page for changes.

Video Game Lessons for Business Strategy

I see video games as a petri dish, a place where the challenges and rewards of the real world are simulated in a simpler, more discrete fashion. Often the challenges faced remind me of the same challenges I face in my work as an entrepreneur. In the spirit of Scott Berkun’s Management lessons from Gears of War 2, I present you three business lessons I’ve learned from video games.

Managing UI Complexity

I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it.

aanand's deadweight

Deadweight is RCov for CSS, kind of. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.

Continuous Integration Spring Cleaning at GitHub

We’re currently in the process of revamping our test suite (which we’ll blog about in the future) and moving servers, so I thought it’d be a good time to re-evaluate our options.

I Hardly Know Her

IHKH is a minimalist Flickr viewer. Captions and titles are omitted and metadata is hidden until needed. Images can be made large in place.

laserlemon's vestal_versions

vestal_versions keeps in the spirit of consolidating to one versions table, polymorphically associated with its parent models. But it goes one step further by storing a serialized hash of only the models’ changes.

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

RED: <>

RED is a robot that checks HTTP resources to see how they'll behave, pointing out common problems and suggesting improvements. Although it is not a HTTP conformance tester, it can find a number of HTTP-related issues.

Weekly in name only ;)

What's New in Edge Rails: Default RESTful Rendering

Controller responders handle the chore of matching the HTTP request method and the resource format type to determine what type of response should be sent. And since REST is so well-defined it’s very easy to establish a default responder to handle the basics.

Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

“Here’s an analogy,” Balzer said. “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

Approaching a Minimum Viable Product

The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you’ll need enough money to answer them all.

save! > save

When you’re not expecting something to fail, always use the methods that raise exceptions on failure.

What's New in Edge Rails: Cleaner RESTful Controllers w/ respond_with

REST is a first-class citizen in the Rails world, though most of the hard work is done at the routing level. The controller stack has some niceties revolving around mime type handling with the respond_to facility but, to date, there’s not been a lot built into actionpack to handle the serving of resources.

cldwalker's hirb

A mini view framework for console/irb that's easy to use, even while under its influence. Console goodies include a no-wrap table, auto-pager, tree and menu.

josevalim's simple_form

Simple easy contact form for Rails with I18n, validations, attachments and request information.

The Rails State Machine

Ruby on Rails recently added a built-in ActiveModel::StateMachine implementation and even more recently tied it in to ActiveRecord. And, for being a built-in library, it’s pretty damned fully-featured.

Deployment Script Spring Cleaning at GitHub

As we get ready to upgrade our servers I thought it’d be a good time to upgrade our deployment process. Currently pushing out a new version of GitHub takes upwards of 15 minutes. Ouch. My goal: one minute deploys (excluding server restart time).

Quick_magick

QuickMagick is a gem for easily accessing ImageMagick command line tools from Ruby programs.

GreenAsJade's s3-swf-upload-plugin

A rails plugin which allow user upload files to S3 through an embedded flash directly. This fork has environment setting of amazon creds (to avoid hardcode in app), configurable message for the select button, bugfix on submit-without-select, much improved feedback to the user about what is happening, ability to check the file they selected, before it gets actually uploaded.

RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More?

I would need to test first to find the optimal valuation, but I am guessing it would be between 5 and 10 Twitter followers for each RSS subscriber.

You Have to Choose Who To Read

The wonderful thing is that in A.D. 2009, the option of reading primary sources is open to anybody who’s willing to take a little trouble.

Anatomy of a feature

“Oh, it’s easy, just a quick http call. I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds.” But of course it’s not as simple as just writing a quick script. It’s tempting to think that adding a feature like this is just about adding the functionality — but there’s a bunch more to it than that.

up and running with cassandra

I think that Cassandra is the most promising current implementation of a runtime distributed database, but much work remains to be done. We're beginning to use Cassandra at Twitter

Embrace technical debt

As in many scalability decisions, we’d have been much better off investing in agility, so that we could change the architecture in response to actual customer demand, rather than trying to predict the future. That’s what Just-in-time Scalability is all about. Sometimes quick and dirty actually incurs less debt.

CSS Prism

Enter the URL of any CSS file to view and modify its color spectrum.

Ramen Profitable

Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails.

Basecamp, now with more vroom

To make a long story a little less long, we saw some pretty extreme performance improvements from moving Basecamp out of a virtualized environment and back onto dedicated hardware.

Pro Git Book

This is the website for the Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and published by Apress. Here you can find the full content of the book, a blog with tips and updates about Git and the book and open source projects related to Git or referenced in the book.

Drag & Drop Sortable Lists

Time has come for us to make a sortable list, and let’s face it, drag&drop are the prettiest ones. So, let me explain how to proceed.

Reputation - Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

A person participating in a social structure expects to develop a reputation and hopes for insight into the reputations of others, but each designed model of participation and reputation embodies its own set of biases and incentive structures. Balancing these forces determines in large measure the success or failure of a social system.

pubsubhubbub

A simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub protocol & open source reference implementation.

Death spiral!

As Tom Peters says, "You can't shrink your way to greatness," and yet that's what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don't. This isn't a dip, it's a cul de sac. It's over.

Pay Walls

Newsstand and subscription prices have never been the main source of revenue for newspapers anyway — advertising is. But they can’t make as much money from web advertising as from print for several reasons. Pre-Internet, newspapers had inordinate control over the supply of news, and therefore over the supply of advertising, and they grew fat on the profits.

Rails Rumble - This Bird's Ready to Rumble

Of course, even applications that aren’t quite so Twitter-centric can benefit from some Twitter integration. Here’s a list of some resources that may inspire you to include them in your Rumble application in some way.

Uploadify and Rails 2.3

A few weeks back we (Steve and I) added multiple asset upload to Harmony using Uploadify. If you are thinking that sounds easy, you would be sorely mistaken.

madx's rackable

Rackable is a tiny module that aims to make any Ruby object Rack-friendly and provide it with a REST-like interface. Basically, what it does is providing an object with a call() method that uses the Rack environement to dispatch to a method, giving helper objects such as headers, query parameters, ...

grosser's text_filter

ActiveRecord / Rails Filter Text Fields Before Assigning them

Railscasts Self-Referential Association

Creating a social networking site often requires a self-referential association on the User model to define friends/followers. In this episode I show how to do exactly that.

Developer Color Picker

A custom color picker designed specifically for developers. Makes getting colors out of Photoshop/Acorn mock-ups quick and easy.

Drupal Job Boards

If you're just getting started in computer science or looking to specialize in a web technology, then you should definitely look into Drupal. Jobs in the marketplace are in high demand, especially compared to some of the other CMS platforms. The number of Drupal job opportunities continues to increase.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.

Do it Later With Delayed Job

The killer feature that delayed_job has is send_later, this lets you transparently turn a method call on a class or object into a delayed_job. It also supports declaring certain methods to be handled asynchronously in an environment file...

DropBox Y Combinator Application

Y Combinator Funding Application, Summer 2007, DropBox

TrafficServerProposal Apache Proposal from Yahoo

Traffic Server fills a need for a fast, extensible and scalable HTTP proxy and caching. We have a production proven piece of software that can deliver HTTP traffic at high rates, and can scale well on modern SMP hardware. We have benchmarked Traffic Server to handle in excess of 35,000 RPS on a single box. Traffic Server has a rich feature set, implementing most of HTTP/1.1 to the RFC specifications.

Daring Fireball: Charging for Access to News Sites

...and it’s not really surprising that they’re failing to evolve. The decision-makers — the executives sitting atop large non-editorial management bureaucracies — are exactly the people who need to go if newspapers are going to remain profitable.

cldwalker's alias

Creates, manages and saves aliases for class methods, instance methods, constants, delegated methods and more.

Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?

If you travel to Australia, and the yield sign says "Give Way",you notice it again. That's why travel is so memorable... As we get older, unfamiliar things and new perceptions are fewer and fewer... Thus it seems that time is passing faster... My own philosophy, which I often forget to follow, is to optimize my perceived lifespan by doing as many unfamiliar things as possible.

Fever and the Future of Feed Readers

I’m not sure what the solution is here. Feed readers as we’ve known them are dying, but it’s as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

The Journey to Ruby 1.9

Here’s some tips and tricks for those who want to upgrade their own Ruby install and have their gems to be compatible.

Big Old Rails Template from A Fresh Cup

Here’s a list of what this template sets up...

Don’t offer $50 for your favorite feature

I bet every Mac and iPhone developer (and probably some Windows developers too) has heard this at least once, if not dozens of times, from someone who uses their software: “I will PayPal you $50 right now if you will add this feature for me.”

Structural Tags in HTML5

The HTML5 specification has added quite a few interesting and useful tags for structuring your markup. For a majority of everyday uses, these tags will replace many of our typical div entries from our code. So let’s dig in.

Five Features from Mercurial That Would Make Git Suck Less

This isn’t an attempt to convince you to use Mercurial exclusively. And I’m intentionally skipping any mention of Mercurial’s shortcomings. I want to see these features in upcoming versions of Git.

Serious doubts

I’ve never doubted the viability of running a serious business of writing iPhone apps before. For the first time, now, I am. [The developer of Instapaper on the state of the iPhone App Store.]

rails admin interface roundup

...I evaluated four plugins for admin UI...

Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces

Strangely, to the developers of intelligent control interfaces, these interfaces appear to work perfectly well. Moreover, when the developers demo these interfaces, the demo comes off without a hitch - and is often quite impressive. This is not the normal result of broken software. This "demo illusion" convinces the developers that the product is ready to ship, although it is not and will never be ready to ship.

Gah! Up is Down! Right is Wrong! Make it Stop!

I'm not a fan of the GPL quite simply because I don't see the GPL as "open". The GPL is not defined by what it is, it's defined by what it isn't. It's "against" proprietary closed source code. It's against corporations. It's against software as a commercial product... Knowledge is expanded when it is shared. When solutions to problems are shared, that frees us up to tackle the next obstacle rather than spending time solving problems that have already been solved by others... If you truly believe that knowledge is not a zero-sum game, and that sharing knowledge tends to increase the sum of societal knowledge, then you don't go putting petty restrictions on your knowledge.

There are no small changes

Adding a plugin to a codebase is easy. Integrating a new feature within an existing application is not. When you’re striving for quality there are no small changes.

How Capitalism Saves Ruby from Corporatism

...or... Owning the Means of Production. This talk was given at FutureRuby in Toronto, Canada in the summer of 2009.

Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context

I’m skeptical about the prospects of any new system or product that isn’t intended for use by the people creating it. Gmail, for example, is the best web mail system because it was designed to be used not just by “typical” users but by expert users, including the engineers at Google who made it.

One of the Most Time Consuming Startup Roadblocks

So take a risk this month: outsource your first task and see where it takes you. When was the last time a single tool or work habit offered the opportunity to save 20-60 hours in a month?

Paperclip file rename

While developing an application with Sebastián that allow users to upload videos with some file name restrictions, meaning that it must contain only A-Z and 0-9 digits, underscores (_) as a valid component as well, and also the name must be preceded by it’s own #id, we came up with the need of applying this custom filter to each uploaded video.

YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye

Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. [Die!]

Hacker News on Zed Shaw: Why I (A/L)GPL

[Interesting comments, as usual. My take: the GPL is like half-assed open-source. Sure, you can see the source, but it's not really open.]

..."weekly," eh?

pauldix's typhoeus

Like a modern code version of the mythical beast with 100 serpent heads, Typhoeus runs HTTP requests in parallel while cleanly encapsulating handling logic.

iPhone-like password fields using jQuery

That may have been the reason why Apple developed implemented an alternative method on iPhone/iPod Touch: passwords get masked while typing but the last character in row is shown in plain text.

Tango Palette Dashboard Widget

Colors from Tango Desktop Project with one-click! Click on color box will copy hex value (without #, useful, for example, with Photoshop) into the clipboard. Enjoy!

The EveryBlock source code

EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a "microlocal" level — by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site's backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code.

MongoMapper, The Rad Mongo Wrapper

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Mongo and how awesome it is. Towards the end of the article (and in the slideshow) I mentioned MongoMapper, a project I’ve been working on.

Cassandra Wiki

Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store. Cassandra brings together the distributed systems technologies from Dynamo and the data model from Google's BigTable. Like Dynamo, Cassandra is eventually consistent. Like BigTable, Cassandra provides a ColumnFamily-based data model richer than typical key/value systems.

tmm1's youtube-g

youtube-g is a pure Ruby client for the YouTube GData API. It provides an easy way to access the latest YouTube video search results from your own programs. In comparison with the earlier Youtube search interfaces, this new API and library offers much-improved flexibility around executing complex search queries to obtain well-targeted video search results.

JaredKuolt's robustthread

This module allows for the creation of a thread that will not simply die when the process dies. Instead, it joins all RobustThreads in Ruby’s exit handler.

zilkey's active_api

ActiveApi allows you to define an XML schema in Ruby, and use that schema to convert ruby objects to xml. Features XSD or DTD generation; Versioning; The ability to represent your model in a way that is not tightly coupled to the model itself.

neerajdotname's admin_data

Rails plugin to browse and manage your data using your browser.

adamsalter's sitemap_generator-plugin

This plugin enables 'enterprise-class' Google Sitemaps to be easily generated for a Rails site as a rake task, using a simple 'Rails Routes'-like DSL. It allows you to take care of familiar Sitemap issues...

GooOS, the Google Operating System

Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS.

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

New on Posterous: Audio and video *plays* on your iPhone in Safari, no flash needed

Now, audio and video you attach and send to Posterous can be played on an iPhone in Mobile Safari. No more "missing flash" errors!

Getting Pretty Lonely

As the developer evaluates communities to participate in, they must evaluate the legal impact such participation will have on their own project. The closed source communities are, by definition uninviting to outsiders. GPL communities are open and embracing of other GPL developers, but generally off-putting to liberal-license and closed-license developers. Only the liberal-license communities are attractive to developers from all 3 camps.

The Mythical Man Weekend

The "I can do it in a weekend" beast reared its naive head on Hacker News recently which in turn generated some intelligent discussion on the topic. We've all been there and we've all learned the hard way.

When GitHub goes down...

There are quite a few ways to deploy without github… ah the wonders of git!

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku

An interview in 3 parts with Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko of Heroku from their recent visit to New Relic. They discuss the vision behind the creation of Heroku, their passion for helping developers create scalable, high-performance Rails apps in the cloud, taking full advantage of cloud deployment, and their tips and best practices to create a high-performance app.

[whatwg] Codecs for audio and video

After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for video and audio in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship. I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features like img and image formats, embed and plugin APIs, or Web fonts and font formats.

Secrets of Simplicity

Rules for being simple and usable (Giles Colborne)

Go Daddy DNS & Heroku

As easy as using Heroku is, setting up DNS seems to be one of the trickier parts.

The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News

The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.

Twitter, an Evolving Architecture

Most of the tools used by Twitter are open source. The stack is made up of Rails for the front side, C, Scala and Java for the middle business layer, and MySQL for storing data. Everything is kept in RAM and the database is just a backup. The Rails front end handles rendering, cache composition, DB querying and synchronous inserts. This front end mostly glues together several client services, many written in C: MySQL client, Memcached client, a JSON one, and others.

P2: The New Prologue

Prologue broke ground when it brought microblogging to WordPress.com. Now it’s cooler, faster, sleeker, and ready for 2009 and beyond.

fesplugas's typus

Effortless backend interface for Ruby on Rails applications. (Admin scaffold generator.)

Posterous is the best way to publish video and photos from your new iPhone 3G S

Posterous has always been about email, so when Apple announced the iPhone 3G S would shoot video, we already knew it would just work with our site! We've optimized Posterous to work well with the iPhone 3.0, so now it's better than ever. [The benefits of having a simple, universal input are obvious.]

Fails on Rails

The total cost of development for a failed Ruby on Rails system is much less than a failed Java EE system.

Development virtual machines on OS X using VMWare and Ubuntu

I’ve been using Linux as my primary development environment for a number of months now, despite being an abject Mac fanboy.

How to speed up gem installs 10x

Answer: Turn off ri and rdoc installation.

Perch

Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS.

Installing Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL on OS X, Third Edition

Over the past few years, I’ve helped you walk through the process of getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Mac OS X. The last version has been getting a lot of comments related to issues with the new Apple Leopard, so I’m going this post will expand on previous installation guides with what’s working for me as of January 2008.

Thoughts on Opera Unite

Opera’s CEO Jon von Tetzchner claims that “Opera Unite now decentralizes and democratizes the cloud." I call bullshit. Opera Unite does indeed rely on a P2P-like network to function, but the big problem is that you must push all your traffic through Opera’s proxy service.

LESS - Leaner CSS

Less is Leaner css. Less extends css by adding: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. Less uses existing css syntax. This means you can migrate your current .css files to .less in seconds and there is virtually no learning curve.

YC Company Hosting Stats

[Interesting stats and discussion on hosting.]

Rip: a RubyGems Replacement?

This makes package management as simple as passing files between friends. Email me your latest library, and I can run rip install path/to/lib. That’s it — you don’t need spec files, and you don’t need to build anything before your send me your code.

BigTable

BigTable is a fast and extremely large-scale DBMS. However, it departs from the typical convention of a fixed number of columns, instead described by the authors as "a sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map", sharing characteristics of both row-oriented and column-oriented databases. BigTable is designed to scale into the petabyte range across "hundreds or thousands of machines, and to make it easy to add more machines [to] the system and automatically start taking advantage of those resources without any reconfiguration".

Opera Unite reinvents the Web: a Web server on the Web browser

[Very interesting possibilities here. Making it easier for people to serve content on the web can only lead to good things.]

tenderlove's markup_validity

Test for valid markup with test/unit or rspec

Hemlock

Hemlock is an open-source framework that combines the richness of Flash with the scalability of XMPP, facilitating a new class of web applications where multiple users can interact in real time. Games, workspace collaboration, educational tools… The only limit is your imagination.

Rip: A New Package Management System for Ruby

But why a completely new package manager? What's wrong with RubyGems? We asked one of Rip's developers, Chris Wanstrath...

Ruby at ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks started using Ruby for production projects in 2006, from then till the end of 2008 we had done 41 ruby projects. In preparation for a talk at QCon I surveyed these projects to examine what lessons we can draw from the experience. I describe our thoughts so far on common questions about Ruby's productivity, speed and maintainability.

[git pull] drm-next

See? All the rules really are pretty simple. There's that somewhat subtle
interaction between "keep your own history clean" and "never try to clean
up _other_ proples histories", but if you follow the rules for pulling,
you'll never have that problem.

In this edition, Timothy moves to Washington DC and Trevor trims down his "watch list" on GitHub and shares many interesting projects with you via his delicious feed.

Trevor's Links

Email. Twice daily. No more, no less.

So, using some motivation from The Four Hour Workweek1, I opted to come back to the studio and change my behavior. That morning, I emailed my entire team and my clients to let them know that I would only be checking my email at 10am and 4pm each day.

How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of

Many web sites allow users to casts vote on items. These visitors' votes are then often used to detect the items' "popularity" and hence rank the rated items accordingly. And when "rank" comes into play things gets tricky...

Online communities, etc.

Anyway, I'm bored on a long bus drive and there's no real moral to the story here, just writing. I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.

Really Simple Rails Log Rotatation

I always used logrotate Linux tool to setup log rotation for my Rails apps which has worked fine although it required finding some external config file and understanding its config options and syntax. [Great tip for development/test environments. Might not be a good idea in production?]

Instapaper bookmarklet, modified to close the current tab

I modified the bookmarklet slightly so that the tab closes immediately, without disturbing the pop-up. This way, saving something for later is one simple action, instead of two.

DeliciousSafari

Use and create Delicious bookmarks from the Safari web browser.

So, about this Shopify Platform

The Shopify platform allows any programmer to create applications that integrate natively with the administration interface or storefront. These applications can be written in any language and communicate with Shopify using our handcrafted REST API. We even provide some amazing rails generators to get started quickly.

Introducing Trample: A Better Load Simulator

Most load sim tools make requests to a static list of urls. They spawn n threads and make requests to the urls on the list in succession, in each thread. Unfortunately, though, if your applicaition makes use of any kind of caching (including your database's internal caching facilities), this kind of load simulation is unrealistic.

TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker

TOSBack keeps an eye on 44 website policies. Every time one of them changes, you'll see an update here.

Twitter Blog: Not Playing Ball

We do recognize an opportunity to improve Twitter user experience and clear up confusion beyond simply removing impersonation accounts once alerted. We'll be experimenting with a beta preview of what we're calling Verified Accounts this summer.

cdto

Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd'd to the front most finder window. This app is designed (including it's icon) to placed in the finder window's toolbar.

Trevor's GitHub Links

quirkey's sammy

Sammy is a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery inspired by Ruby's Sinatra.

kabuki's heresy

Heresy is a schema free wrapper around your database, heavily inspired by both CouchDB and FriendFeed.

paulmars's seven_minute_abs

ab testing for rails

binarylogic's searchlogic at v2

Searchlogic has been completely rewritten for v2. It is much simpler and has taken an entirely new approach. To give you an idea, v1 had ~2300 lines of code, v2 has ~350 lines of code.

semanticart's is_paranoid

ActiveRecord 2.3 compatible gem "allowing you to hide and restore records without actually deleting them." Yes, like acts_as_paranoid, only implemented differently...

brynary's webrat

Webrat - Ruby Acceptance Testing for Web applications.

mbleigh's twitter-auth

Standard authentication stack for Rails using Twitter to log in.

courtenay's splam

Simple, pluggable, easily customizable score-based spam filter plugin for Ruby-based applications.

jeremy's ruby-prof

a fast code profiler for Ruby

nakajima's roleful

Generic roles for you and your objects.

37signals's wysihat

A WYSIWYG JavaScript framework

binarylogic's authlogic

A clean, simple, and unobtrusive ruby authentication solution.

joshuaclayton's blueprint-css

A CSS framework that aims to cut down on your CSS development time.

stephencelis's dots

Free progress dots for your scripts. Test::Unit-style.

wycats's merb-extlib

Ruby core extensions library extracted from Merb core.

jodosha's plugin_migrations

Rake tasks for running plugin migrations.

tcocca's acts_as_follower

A Plugin to add "Follow" functionality for models

mojodna's active_queue

A toolkit for queueing tasks and creating worker processes

"Weekly" <- in scare-quotes

Trevor's Links

Stowe Boyd launches Microsyntax.org

Stowe Boyd launched Microsyntax.org... a number of ideas for making posts on Twitter contain more information than what is superficially presented, and this new effort should create a space in which ideas, research, proposals and experiments can be made and discussed.

Amazon Payments Account Management

Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions enables you to charge your customers on a recurring basis using a single authorization from the customer. It is for those who offer digital content subscriptions, collect membership dues on a periodic basis, or provide premium services on their website.

7 Great Reasons Not To Take VC Money

Raising venture capital for early stage start-ups seems to be the prevailing path for most entrepreneurs; however, most would-be founders should reconsider.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

When to use self in Rails models

When I started with Rails, half the words in my models were self. This wasn’t necessary. Now, when I edit code by other people, I find myself constantly deleting “self” from their code.

The random person test

Why not try to write code that future programmers will thank me for because it was so clear and obvious? Programmer skill should be measured not only in the complexity of the problems that they can solve, but in the clarity of their solutions.

Patience and hard work

There is a gaping chasm between a web app sitting on a server somewhere, and the ingredients of a business. Establishing a brand, getting the right kind of people to listen, and growing your own customer-base doesn’t happen as a by product of really sweet Javascript effects.

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today

Google wants other providers to adopt Wave - the protocol allows federation between independent Wave clouds. The team hopes that Wave will become as ubiquitous and interoperable as email and instant messaging, not just a Google product.

Ask HN: I'm Tired of Hacking. What Do I Do? Please Advise.

I just can't do it anymore. I hate sitting on my ass all day writing some code. My neck has been hurting for two years for spending so many hours in front of the computer. I kind of have been hating my career for a couple of years now and I have no clue about what I should do.

MacRuby, changing the Ruby ecosystem

MacRuby is an Apple-sponsored, open source, full Ruby implementation on top of Objective-C runtime. In other words, whatever code runs on Ruby 1.9, should/will run on MacRuby. Yes, you read correctly, MacRuby can/will be able to run all your Ruby code.

Mac-friendly Autotest

ZenTest’s autotest is great, but it has one drawback: In order to detect whether you have modified a file, it relies on filesystem polling. In other words it constantly traverses the filesystem and thus causes a lot of CPU and harddrive load.

Include vs Extend in Ruby

Now that we know the difference between an instance method and a class method, let’s cover the difference between include and extend in regards to modules. Include is for adding methods to an instance of a class and extend is for adding class methods. Let’s take a look at a small example.

Class and Instance Methods in Ruby

Class methods can only be called on classes and instance methods can only be called on an instance of a class. It’s simple when you understand it, but I remember being confused when I was learning Ruby. Hope this helps. If I was unclear or incorrect at any point above, let me know. [Nice, easy to follow overview.]

djng—a Django powered microframework

djng is my experiment to see what Django would like without settings.py and with a whole lot more turtles. It’s Yet Another Python Microframework.

Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering

We've launched user accounts at EveryBlock and we faced the interesting problem of needing to cache entire pages except for "You're logged in as [username]" bit top page. The solution ended up using is two-phased template rendering.

Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI and Rails

[Good overview of ESI pros/cons.]

The open, social web

If I told you that the iPhone was the best example of the success of standards and open source, you’d probably laugh at me, but check it out...

Timothy's Links

Server Monitoring with Cacti + ServerStats | HostingFu

This is kind of cool: if you've got a computer somewhere on your local network and you want the laity to have access to rough stats, all you've got to do is fire this package up, tweak xinetd a little bit, and voila--your boss can look over your shoulder from the comforts of his own office.

Slicehost for Android // Slicehost - VPS Hosting

Trevor pointed me in the direction of this one. It's a neat little app--very minimalist and very Linux-y--that lets you check on your bandwidth, slice stats (e.g. mem/proc/distro name and version) and gives you the option to do a remote /sbin/poweroff or an /sbin/shutdown -h now. Very neat.

Research: Password 'secret question' woefully insecure

Let's get a movement going here: if enough Internet types spread the word that no one in their right mind or who possesses any kind of meaningful credential endorses "secret questions" and that, in fact, the research shows that they make accounts _less_ secure, maybe we can kick up enough dust to get rid of them.

Three Letters

This take on the classic joke has a sysadmin slant; guaranteed to be appreciated by everyone from Exchange rebooters in silk cravats to consolemen who live on the metal.

Trevor's Links

Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification

You’ve heard it’s coming in 2012. Or maybe 2022. It’s certainly not ready yet, but some parts are already in browsers now so for the standards-savvy developers, the future is worth investigating today. Ian “Hixie” Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, hopes that the spec will go to Last Call Working Draft in October this year.

The Mega RailsConf 2009 Round Up

A week ago, RailsConf 2009 kicked off in Las Vegas. As usual, it didn't fall short on drama, interesting sessions, and inspiration for the 1000+ attendees. This post is an after-event summary and long-term source of links to the best RailsConf 2009 related content found so far.

Nuts & Bolts: Campfire loves Erlang

Erlang definitely isn’t a replacement for Rails, but it is a fantastic addition to our collective toolbox for problems that Rails wasn’t designed to address. It’s always easier to work with the grain than against it, and adding more tools makes that more likely.

Tango Icon Theme Guidelines

The Tango icon theme's goal is to make applications not seem alien on any desktop. A user running a multiplatform application should not have the impression that the look is unpolished and inconsistent with what he or she is used to. While this isn't about merging styles of all desktop systems, we do aim to not be drastically different on each platform.

RightZoom Makes the OS X Maximize Button More Like Windows

Mac OS X only: System utility RightZoom runs in the background and modifies the OS X maximize behavior to fill the whole screen—perfect for readers that recently made the switch to Mac.

Railscasts - Factories not Fixtures

Fixtures are external dependencies which can make tests brittle and difficult to read. In this episode I show a better alternative using factories to generate the needed records. [I prefer Machinist to Factory Girl, but this is a particularly good episode all around.]

db/seeds.rb in Rails

Added db/seeds.rb as a default file for storing seed data for the database. Can be loaded with rake db:seed (or created alongside the db with db:setup). (This is also known as the "Stop Putting Gawd Damn Seed Data In Your Migrations" feature) [DHH]

Timothy's Links

The Security Implications Of Google Native Client

This is a really cool from Matasano about how things like ActiveX and Java work from the perspective of someone trying to execute compiled code from a remote source without giving away the whole store, security-wise. Nice pictures, very informative.

How to Add Date And Time To Your Bash History file -- Debian Admin

This is a neat one-liner for your .bashrc that just might make your .bash_history a little more searchable. Add it to your custom .bashrc lines.

Postfix main.cf analysis

Here's the setup: the one dude pastes his postconf -n and the other dude does through it, telling him what's what. Kind of a cross between a postmortem and an x-ray. Useful to test your postfix knowledge/skills.

SoS Wiki - - Split Screen Vi

If you use vi/vim and you don't do split screen, you are, in the immortal words of whatever Internet meme, doing it wrong. Study up!

Set Gmail as Default Mail Client in Ubuntu :: the How-To Geek

This is a neat little trick for writing a line or two of bash that will allow you to use gmail (via firefox) as your default email client in a gnome environment. It wouldn't take much to adapt the instructions for other desktop environments. (Props to Artie for sending this my way)

Reports: Thief holds Virginia medical data ransom

I guess, technically, that since I'm on the side of the law by virtue of my professional situation, I ought to regard this as terrifying or reprehensible or something. But you gotta admit: something about the idea of a blackhat utterly pwning someone's network to the extent of the pwnage described here is really, really exciting.

Postfix Backup MX eMail Server Anti-Spam Configuration

The English is a little messy on this one, but the conf text is right on. This is a nice little list of basic (yet above and beyond "stock") config options for reducing shenanigans and closing commonly exploited gaps.

Restore a single table from a large MySQL backup

I'm not sure that I understand the ruby syntax completely, but people are passing this link around, so this is my obligatory bump.

Apologies for the 3 week gap in "weekly" posts. I was taking a vacation in Hawaii (pics!) and took a bit of time to enjoy life offline :)

Trevor's Links

Geocities: Lessons So Far

Geocities was once called Beverly Hills Internet. The company was founded in 1994 but it wasn’t until mid-1995 that they publically offered what people now think of as a Geocities trademark: free webpages, or “homesteads”. [An article about the Archive Team trying to save Geocities content before Yahoo takes it down.]

How the OAuth Security Battle Was Won, Open Web Style - ReadWriteWeb

At some point in conversation Hammer-Lahav realized that the problem went far beyond the Twitter implementation. The OAuth protocol had an inherent vulnerability; big companies like Google, Netflix and Yahoo had implemented OAuth and scores of tiny startups had too... OAuth has support, but it doesn't have a centralized authority ready to deal with problems like this. Over the next week a story unfolded as the community moved to deal with the security issue. It's a dramatic story.

Tell me your best worst joke, Reddit.

[Includes such classics as: What's brown and sticky? A stick. --- Why does Snoop carry around an umbrella? Fo Drizzle. --- and, my personal favorite: Two snares and a cymbal fall off a cliff.]

Welcome to the Anti-Pitch

We're sick and tired of hack developers ripping off naive clients. And while I'm completely disgusted by some of the horror-stories I've heard lately, clients keep asking the wrong questions. As real developers, it's our responsibility to make the tough decision to speak the truth. This is an example of what we call the anti-pitch. [Excellent. I'm using this technique next time I'm dealing with potential clients.]

What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees

...hackers sent them screenshots from the site Twitter employees use to manage the microblogging service, admin.twitter.com... [It's amazing to see all of the back-end stuff necessary to run something so "simple" as Twitter.]

Honeypot filter as a Rack middleware

Our site’s suggestion box got hammered by a spambot recently, so I created this simple Rack middleware to protect our app from any requests that include a honeypot field.

Rails Edge: Implement FooController.action(:name)

Rails actions are now Rack endpoints, and can be retrieved via FooController.action(name) and called with an env.

Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

Is your web server using using gzip encoding? Surprisingly, many are not. I just wrote a little script to fetch the 30 external links off news.yc and check if they are using gzip encoding. Only 18 were, which means that the other 12 sites are needlessly slow, and also wasting money on bandwidth.

Passenger: Command line done right

What’s really great about Passenger is that the attention to detail doesn’t end at the installer. The Linux process list is a list of programs that are currently running. Usually, programs are shown in this list by their command line name, often an indecipherable mix of letters and numbers. Passenger processes are easy to spot and easy to understand. Human readable names in a machine-centred interface.

Muxtape Pushes Play Again

Muxtape’s stock parts are highly regimented, allowing bands to express themselves with freedom, though not completely freely. Every component is 300 pixels square, and there is virtually zero layout flexibility; you can have whatever arrangement you like, so long as it comes in rows of three. What’s more, for now there are no ‘social’ components to draw upon; no commenting, no friending, no favoriting, etc. The new Muxtape platform is nothing if not regimented.

An Aspirational Twitter

Tweetie is a desktop version of an application of the same name for the iPhone which, in my limited experience, is the first time an application has migrated from the phone to the desktop. As a friend mentioned, “Platform merge in progress!” and he’s right... When I use Tweetie, I’m reminded that a maniacal attention to detail not only makes you want to reach out and touch the digitally untouchable, it describes the familiar as the new, and, most importantly, it speaks of an aspirational future.

adamsanderson's open_gem

Gem Command to easily open a ruby gem with the editor of your choice. [Awesome. See the Issues tab for detail, but you need to set GEM_OPEN_EDITOR to 'mate' in your bash profile despite what the instructions might say.]

Tweetie for Mac

You can download the free version, which is ad-supported, and try it out for as long as you want. [The only Twitter client I've been able to use, aside from Tweetie on the iPhone.]

Benchmarking your Rails tests

The first step to faster tests is knowing what is slow. Fortunately, this is dead simple with the test_benchmark plugin by Tim Connor, and originally built by Geoffrey Groschenbach. Install the plugin, and when you run your tests via Rake, you’ll see handy output showing you the slowest tests, and the slowest test classes.

Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground

But perhaps the most important factor that has made Twitter such a rich category for client software is that there is so little friction to switch between apps. There’s nothing to import or export, and zero commitment.

Venture Capital Down 50%. It’s Not Just the Recession, Folks.

There’s a huge difference between what venture capitalists say and what they do. [VC] fell off a cliff in 2001 and 2002 and it’s falling off a cliff now.

A Painful Decision

I can’t reveal details without breaking confidences, but suffice it to say that a significant number of Rails core contributors - with leadership (if that’s the right word) from DHH - apparently feel that being unwelcoming and “edgy” is not just acceptable, but laudable. The difference between their opinions and mine is so severe that I cannot in good conscience remain a public spokesman for Rails. So, effective immediately, I’m resigning my position with the Rails Activists. [I haven't gotten up to speed with the controversy around this issue, but I can say for certain that Mike Gunderloy stepping back from his participation in the Rails community is a real serious bummer.]

Heroku - Commercial Launch

We have over 25,000 apps running on the platform today, and many of our users have been asking for pricing and paid services for some time now. So today we’re pleased to announce that we are officially out of beta and available for commercial use.

ShakeItPhoto Launches

It’s been 3 months in the making and 3 months of waiting for Apple approval, but wait no more… ShakeItPhoto is ready for download at the iTunes App store for the low price of 99 cents. Take a photo and shake it like a polaroid to make it develop!

GitHub Issue Tracker

It gives us great pleasure to announce our integrated issue tracking system! On repository pages you’ll now see an “Issues” tab in the top menu.

Phusion Passenger 2.2.0 w/ Nginx support

After spending weeks on further development and intensive testing, we’ve now come to the point wherein we have the distinct honor to announce Phusion Passenger for Nginx as an addition to the Phusion Passenger server line-up.. Our thanks goes out to Engine Yard for financially sponsoring this first release of Phusion Passenger for Nginx, as well as all the people who have in some way donated in the past for making this release possible in the first place.

Is Open Source Experience Overrated?

Just as commercial software can't possibly exist without customers, perhaps open source experience is only valid if you work on a project that attains some moderate level of critical mass and user base. Remember, shipping isn't enough. Open source or not, if you aren't building software that someone finds useful, if you aren't convincing at least a small audience of programmers that your project is worthwhile enough to join... then what are you really doing?

Rails 2.3.2 upgrade gotchas

With the latest stable release of rails out the door for about a month, we’ve had a chance to upgrade the bulk of the applications we maintain to 2.3.2.1. Here are some “gotchas”, aka issues, aka roadblocks to Strategic Enterprise Adoption that we discovered while upgrading some of them.

Draft: The problem with Project Management tools

While I agree that it’s important to release code, I think pivotal and other similar tools lead to a mindset where releasing code is in itself the unit progress. But, as any successful team will tell you, completed tickets and releases released are horrible units of progress, since unless your customers love every single thing you do (they don’t), your unit of measurement becomes the amount of features and changes deployed.

Clone TinyURL in 40 lines of Ruby code

I wrote Snip with Sinatra then deployed it up to Heroku so this is also a good excuse also to describe Heroku, a truly amazing service for the Ruby programming community. The total number of lines in Snip is actually 43, in a single file named snip.rb. including the view template and layout. [It's amazing what you can accomplish with Sinatra and Heroku.]

ruby gc tuning

In my experience, a typical production Rails app on Ruby 1.8 can recover 20% to 40% of user CPU by applying Stefan Kaes's Railsbench GC patch to the Ruby binary, and using the following environment variables...

Customer driven iteration vs Whiteboard driven iteration

Customer driven iteration takes customer validation rather than released features as its core unit of progress. It assumes that you have not accomplished anything and therefore cannot feel good until your metrics tell you that your market will use and pay for your stuff.

Can the Statusphere Save Journalism?

...the discussion shifted to deep conversation about the future of journalism in the era of socialized media with one simple question, “are newspapers worth saving?” Walt thought for no more than two seconds and assertively replied, “It’s the wrong question to ask. The real question we should ask is if whether or not we can save good journalism.”

Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?

Attention is engaged at the point of introduction, and for many of us, we’re presented with worthwhile content outside of our RSS readers or favorite bookmarks. Relevant and noteworthy updates are now curated by our peers and trusted or respected contacts in disparate communities that change based on our daily click paths... Retweets (RT) and favorites in Twitter, Likes and comments in FriendFeed and Facebook, posting shortened links that connect friends and followers back to the source post, have changed our behavior and empowered our role in defining the evolution of the connectivity and dissemination of information.

jamis's safe_mass_assignment

ActiveRecord plugin for allowing (careful) mass assignment of protected attributes, separate from values provided via users of your application.

Timothy's Links

Sébastien Wains » Howto : setting up dns2tcp

For the "I can't browse from work" crowd or the "stuck behind the Great Firewall of China" set, there are any number of high-visibility, high-availability solutions: tor, your buddy's apache proxy, etc. For those who want to try an obscurity/security/proxy solution that's a little closer to the metal, there's dns2tcp via ssh which, predictably, sends your encrypted traffic from your computer out of your network as a dns request and returns it the same way: you're secure going out and you're not sending up big, "hey everybody: look at my port 80 requests!" red flags to the secret police or the sysadmin or whomever. Cool stuff.

Securing a Web server

This is a pretty good read: it's got a little too much depth to be considered a crash course, but it's too abstract to be a tutorial or how-to. A nice, mid-level view of best security practices.

Twitter + Stimulus = Conservative Stupidity

Normally I wouldn't bookmark DailyKos--that would be kind of like bookmarking HuffPo or Reddit--but this is a neat little article about social engineering / industrial espionage that involves exploiting confirmation bias among partisans. Short read. Good read.

Lifehacker - Should Comic Sans Be "Banned"? - Fonts

This made me laugh out loud. It may make you laugh out loud as well.

Convert files and data online

Supposedly this is the best online format converter. Handy in a pinch (or if you're tired of your CLI converters screwing the pooch on higher ascii and spitting out comic book character swears in place of kanji).

Testing mail servers with swaks

At first glance, this looks like a "for Dummies" tutorial for a piece of software that is, essentially, "telnet for Dummes". But swak lets you do something that you can't (easily) do with plain, old-fashioned telnet. You can, for instance, set a timeout time, specify authentication types, etc. with a commandline flag or two. Handy if you're troubleshooting that new mail server install or doing some eyeball/ball park benchmarking.

Introduction to Quality Assurance and Metrics

If you're looking for a no-bullshit crash course in QA/QC that has decent depth, look no further.

Fujitsu Develops High-Speed Image-Capture Technology for Palm Vein Biometric Authentication : Akihabara News .com

Palm vein biometric authentication? Seriously? I mean, I guess super-futuristic biometric auth devices that scan _inside_ the body for unique identifiers are kind of cool in an aesthetic sense, but they're certainly not very cool from a security sense: I thought we had agreed as a global society that physical objects, no matter how apparently unique they are, are unsuitable for secure auth because they are, at the end of the day, still just objects. And all objects can be replicated.

Skimmers: Reader Finds Card Skimmer On Bank ATM

First reaction: "wow that's totally awesome--I can't believe someone came up with this." Two seconds later's reaction: "wow, my opinion of the human race just got ratcheted down a peg or two: I can't believe it took us this long to invent the ATM card data skimmer."

The peasant mentality lives on in America

You know, three weeks ago, I had no idea who Matt Taibbi was. Then, courtesy of reddit, I got put on to his write-up of the Meltdown and I've been hooked. This guy hits hard, doesn't pull punches and walks the stylistic tightrope between the unnaturally polite tenor of expose journalism and the warbling catachresis of incendiary blogging.

What happens if I don't pay my taxes?

This is a good article because a.) it's timely and b.) is written from a hacker perspective/mentality. It starts with the question, "what is the nature of the system?" and then wonders about different methods of potentially short-circuiting it or circumventing aspects of it. Kind of makes taxes fun. Almost.

What to do when the root partition is full?

This is a good list of comments to scroll through as it discusses Linux mounting tricks, how to use LVM and, basically, lists reasons why not to panic. And, I don' t know about you, but the fewer reasons I have to panic, the better.

Thanko's Latest 4GB Necktie Camera

Yeah, it's basically just a flat camera and a necktie that's been cut open in the back, but the idea is still totally effinf awesome.

A Short Introduction To Cron Jobs

There are two reasons that introductory level, "how to" type documents for the basics of Linux administration are so ubiquitous: those reasons are that they're useful for experienced users to a.) write and b.) comment upon and they're useful for inexperienced users looking things up. This one is about cron and using crontab. And it's a great example of that.