Links for 09-26-11
How Batman can Help you Build Apps - Shopify
I’d like to give a quick tour of what makes Batman different and why you might want to use it instead of the other amazing frameworks available today.
Bare-bone, stripped-down Devise | Plataforma Tecnologia Blog
It is important to keep in mind that Devise was built by us to be flexible and capable of handling different requirements from different clients, so it is PlataformaTec’s priority to have it as flexible as possible!
A framework for writing Campfire bots
Pogodan | per-app environment variables with pow and rbenv
However with RVM we'd been taking advantage of the per-directory .rvmrc files to set per-application environment variables for configuration (e.g. DB URIs, API keys, etc.) on our dev machines.
summarized the changes over 1.9.2 (Ruby 1.9.3 Release Candidate 1 Released (What's new?))
A First Look at BankSimple | BankSimple Blog
Gem Versioning and Bundler: Doing it Right « Katz Got Your Tongue?
dwilkie/carrierwave_direct - GitHub
Process your uploads in the background by uploading directly to S3
gzigzigzeo/carrierwave-meta - GitHub
File's metadata saving plugin for carrierwave
Dump and load relational objects between Ruby environments
Preview mail in the browser instead of sending
What Self can teach us about the future of JavaScript /by @assaf
[FYI: historic] The desicive moment of the language name Ruby. (Re: [ANN] ruby 1.8.1)
GoRuCo 2011 - Jeremy Ashkenas - CoffeeScript for the Well-Rounded Rubyist on Vimeo
Animated GIFs Capture Stanley Kubrick's Most Immortal Scenes | Co. Design
Open Source Mac OS X Git client
How to use iPhone 4 as a Pay-Go iPhone
How to setup an iPhone 4 as a Pay-Go phone
A fully featured HTML5 WYSIWYG editor written in CoffeeScript on top of the Rails 3.1 asset stack
Anything in the master branch is deployable To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie: new-oauth2-scopes) Commit to that branch locally and regularly push your work to the same named branch on the server When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can merge it into master Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately
Ruby on Rails Guides: Ruby on Rails 3.1 Release Notes
Highlights in Rails 3.1: Streaming, Reversible Migrations, Assets Pipeline, jQuery as the default JavaScript library
Mobile development with HTML5 | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
This post will go over some key concepts and features of HTML5, setting the stage for more advanced subjects.
the largest and most reliable Postgres service in the world
sstephenson/sprockets at v2.0.0 - GitHub
Rack-based asset packaging system
10.6: Terminal and 'focus follows mouse' modification - Mac OS X Hints
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string NO
Active Record batch processing in parallel processes
My semi-educated guess on the Amazon tablet
History.js gracefully supports the HTML5 History/State APIs (pushState, replaceState, onPopState) in all browsers. Including continued support for data, titles, replaceState. Supports jQuery, MooTools and Prototype. For HTML5 browsers this means that you can modify the URL directly, without needing to use hashes anymore. For HTML4 browsers it will revert back to using the old onhashchange functionality.
paperplanes. Web Operations 101 For Developers
cloudHQ for Dropbox - Basecamp, Dropbox and Google Docs
Integrate Dropbox, Basecamp, and Google Docs
Access attribute values directly, without instantiating ActiveRecord objects
No images, no external CSS No dependencies Highly configurable Resolution independent Works in all major browsers, including IE6 Smaller than an animated GIF (3K minified, 1.7K gzipped) MIT License
an IRB alternative and runtime developer console
Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.
Skeleton: Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development
A Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development
Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.
What they're "protecting" us from - Anil Dash
It's a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale.
Store user timelines in Riak
A Gentle Introduction to CarrierWave | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
CarrierWave is self-described as a “classier solution for file uploads for Rails, Sinatra and other Ruby web frameworks.” Although I’ve head it referred to as “a new kid on the block” it’s actually quite an old gem. The initial checkin is from August 2008 and the first release was in March 2009. The original name was Merb::Upload and it started without support for Rails.
Share links instantly between computers - SendTab
SendTab is a browser extension that lets you share links instantly between computers.
A really thin wrapper around ruby-build for rbenv.
Rendering Rails 3.1 assets to string – Phusion Corporate Blog
Understanding “Prototypes” in JavaScript « Katz Got Your Tongue?
ignore the code: More on Software Patents
it is simply not possible to create any non-trivial piece of software that doesn’t violate hundreds of patents. As a result, you can’t release software without putting yourself into a position where you might suddenly lose all of your money.
Why software patents are not fixable – Marco.org
On Being A Journeyman Software Developer: Being honest vs Making excuses
Often times, we choose to be in certain situations and then, rather than admitting that the situation is bad and dysfunctional, then convince ourselves -- and justify to others -- that this is the only way it can be. While we are free to choose trade-offs for whatever situation we place ourselves in, it is important to be honest with ourselves about the causes of the situation.
kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer - GitHub
GCC Installer for OSX! Without Xcode!
At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation.
Nodeload2: Downloads Reloaded - GitHub
Simple Ruby version management
Bulkr: Backup, download flickr photos & sets (Mac, Windows & Linux)
Bulkr is the complete solution to backup, browse & download photos on Flickr. Install it free.
Ava's 5 girls and 3 boys !! - a set on Flickr
Ava's 5 girls and 3 boys !!
has_many :bugs, :through => :rails
After moving to Sam Stephenson’s awesome Pow, not being able to use ruby-debug was the primary obstacle I had adjusting to my new development environment. But as it turns out, it’s very simple to use ruby-debug with Pow.
Subtraction.com: A Word About Unsolicited Redesigns
If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.
LevelDB: A Fast Persistent Key-Value Store - Google Open Source Blog
LevelDB is a fast key-value storage engine written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values. We are pleased to announce that we are open sourcing LevelDB under a BSD-style license.
The debt ceiling backlash within the GOP - War Room - Salon.com
Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post
Free Time - Marc-André Cournoyer's blog
Yeah, life is hard, I agree with that.
Intellectual Ventures And The War Over Software Patents : Planet Money : NPR
If you don’t measure it, you can’t optimize it. Coda Hale of Yammer talks about service-level performance metrics, how they use them to guide their development strategy, and how you can improve the transparency of your own software.
codegram/rack-webconsole - GitHub
Rack-based interactive console (à la Rails console) for your web application's front-end
Safari plugin to add Chrome like omnibar in Safari
Terminus is an experimental Capybara driver implemented in client-side JavaScript. It lets you script your application in any browser on any device, without needing browser plugins.
Blog II - The Sequel Blog - Dangerous Reflection
Bottom line: don’t call ruby’s reflection methods with user-defined strings or you open yourself up to denial of service.
Slicehost—a scrappy web company bootstrapped with $20,000—cashed out for big bucks in 2008. How did they do it? More importantly, was it worth it?
Today we’re happy to announce KIF, the “Keep It Functional” framework. KIF allows for realistic iOS integration testing through simulated user interaction.
Rails migrations with no downtime
Faraday: advanced HTTP requests made easy
Faraday is a library for making HTTP requests and to serve as a backbone for writing API wrapper libraries such as twitter. It has an interesting philosophy, but to really appreciate it you must first understand what problem it solves.
Today marks a very special occasion in the history of Heroku, as we are honored to announce that Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, has joined the Heroku team as Chief Architect, Ruby.
HTTP Scoop 1.4. The HTTP sniffer for Mac OS X.
Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue… I’m so confused!
Ruby is a language that tries to anticipate your needs as a programmer. One common need is a way to terminate execution early when we find there is no further work to be done. Unlike in some languages, where we would have to either abuse the exception mechanism or use multiple loop breaks and method returns to achieve the same effect, Ruby provides us with the catch and throw mechanism to quickly and cleanly make an early escape. This leaves begin/raise/rescue free to be used for errors, and nothing else.
Format dates and times based on human-friendly examples, not arcane strftime directives.
Experimental fork of Pieter's nice git GUI for OS X. Includes: sidebar, fetch, pull, push, add remote, merge, cherry-pick, rebase, clone, clone to. Mac OS X 10.5+ (see wiki for screenshot)
Scaling a web site using HTTP caching and JS async calls | Merbist
The challenge is that a lot of people using the Rails framework are used to doing page caching instead of relying on HTTP caching, even though this feature was added a long time ago. The major problem with page caching is that it doesn’t scale that well as soon as you run more than one server. Indeed you would need to store the page content to a shared drive between your servers or use memcached and do some work to avoid hitting your app every single time. On the other hand, HTTP caching is extremely easy to handle at the application level and it will dramatically reduce the amount of requests hitting your app. Let me explain a little more about HTTP caching.
framework-agnostic styled alert system for javascript
Courtesy Suicide » Matt Legend Gemmell
Excessive verbiage isn’t courtesy; it’s just waffling. Get to the bloody point.
Dynamic nested forms using jQuery made easy; works with formtastic, simple_form or default forms