Agonizing over whether to go desktop (27″ iMac) or laptop (17″ MBP) with my next computer purchase. Not that I have the cash for either at the moment. But if I did…

• jQote – client-side templating
  A nice jQuery-based way to do client side html templates. Thinking about using this for some customizable widgets I wrote.
• 55 Unconventional And Original Free Fonts For An Unique Design
  Some really nice fonts here. Not sure if this is 100% the case, but all of the ones I checked were free for commercial use as well.
• Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5
  Deep Blue Sky does some investigation into browser support for various CSS3 and HTML5 features. Good info.
• Devise
  A full stack Rails authentication engine built on top of Rack-based Warden that uses a strategy provider pattern. Use of Rack allows authentication to be shared across different types of applications (Rails, Sinatra, etc) and strategy pattern allows new, customizable strategies (i.e. Invitable) to be created and shared. Very interesting…
• Part II: We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned.
  I’m enjoying this series. If you are developing a customer-facing software service (or want to someday), you should follow along. Good tips.
• How We Made GitHub Fast
  Lots of red meat here.
• Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC
  More info and GitHub’s data serialization and RPC protocol. BERT and ernie – too funny.

My 82-year old grandmother is on Facebook and regularly writes and responds to status messages and wall posts. My 2.5 year old daughter can navigate my iPhone to find games she wants to play or look at pictures. These are crazy times.

• prawn – 0.5.1
  A new release of Prawn is out. Looks like with the merger of prawn-grid and its advanced CSS 3 support, you have tons of new options for doing grid-based or columnar layouts in your pdfs.
• TweetStream: Ruby Access to the Twitter Streaming API
  Ruby gem for receiving data from twitter via push instead of polling.
• Arial versus Helvetica
  A cool graphic showing the typographic differences on individual letters between Arial and Helvetica.
• rack-chromeframe
  Middleware that injects the necessary code snippets into outgoing html response to use Google Chrome Frame.
• Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters
  “CSS is the weakest link in the web developers toolbox. The problem goes deeper than CSS’s lack of variables. Unlike the “function” in programming, CSS has no fundamental building block.”

Sigh. Two years ago Textmate was the “HAWT” editor (and not a small part of why I moved to a mac). Now all the “cool kids” are moving to vim. Color me nonplussed.

• There’s No Such Thing As A Good Client
  “…a business model is about equity, and consulting is only useful for income. This is why consulting is a terrible business model.”
• Firefinder for Firebug for Firefox for Fiddling with jQuery
  Firefinder is a plugin for Firefox/Firebug that can use to test jquery selectors. Looks like a nice little tool to add to the toolbelt.
• Deployment: Diffs and Dependencies
  A couple of nice rubygems here for checking diffs between local and remote code and local and remote gem repositories.
• Why You Should Switch from Subversion to Git
  Wait, what? Git? What’s that?
• Shades of Gray: Ruby 1.9′s String
  A question was raised on the tulsarb mailing list today about strings in Ruby 1.9 and how they are no longer Enumerable. Here’s some more info from James Edward Grey, including the justification and some tips to handle incompatibilities if you need code to run on 1.8 and 1.9.

Last month marked the three year anniversary of my purchase of Agile Development with Rails and the canonical “Pickaxe” for Ruby. Wow. Time flies doesn’t it.

• GitSharp
  Git for .NET. Head explodes as my two worlds collide.
• The bar for success in our industry is too low – (37signals)
  These days, “success” is defined as the potential to make a lot of money at some unspecified date (once we figure out the right business model of course). I agree with Jason and think it’s time we get back to listening to Grandpa’s advice – “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!”
• Hey, PAC man. Sup, subdomains !
  Good article on using subdomains (particularly locally) with Rails apps. Also introduces Rack::CustomDomain – rack middleware for switching on custom domains / CNAME support for your customers.
• Ruby on Rails Integration – compass
  Updated documentation + screencast added to show how to integrate compass (my favorite!) and Rails. If you haven’t tried this yet, you need to. Today.
• acts_without_database
  A plugin for using an ActiveRecord model without a backing database.
• A Wealth Of Ruby Loops And Iterators
  A bunch of examples here showing different ways to iterate in Ruby.
• Scott Hanselman’s 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
  Scott’s annual(?) tools list always has some great finds for a developer’s toolkit (particularly the .NET crowd). Very Windows-centric, but some good stuff here (web apps, etc) with crossover appeal.

Finally, it ends. Longest week ever.

• better
  A collection of “better” replacements for Ruby standard libraries. i.e. “require ‘better/tempfile’.” All of the libraries are supposedly drop-in replacements.
• Table of Contents jQuery Plugin
  Plugin that can automatically build a table of contents based on website’s h1 – h6 tags.
• osx-trash
  Gem that allows you to manipulate the Mac OS X trash from the command line.
• KeyCue – find, remember, and learn menu shortcuts
  A really cool tool for learning and discovering new keyboard shortcuts. Hold down a hotkey combination and an overlay pops up with all available keyboard shortcuts.

Auto-upgrade feature of WordPress is nice when it works. Had to do a lot of chmod 777 to make it happen.

• jquery week-calendar
  A very nice looking jquery calendar plugin.
• freemium
  Subscription management and processing Rails plugin for SaaS / recurring billing. Looks like it only supports a couple of gateways at the moment.
• A Closer Look: The Font Sizing Choice
  Bottom line – if you still need to support IE6 (and you can actually figure out the crazy math), use em. Otherwise, it should be safe these days to use px.
• New Screencast: Think Geek Background Fade Technique
  An interesting background fade technique using css.
• comma_pile
  A Ruby gem for processing and aggregating CSV files.

• pivotpro
  A gem to automate interaction with Cucumber and PivotalTracker.
• slickgrid – jQuery grid/spreadsheet
  A JavaScript grid/spreadsheet component that focuses on being high-performance and on grid features over data manipulation (that the author feels is best left to the developer). Does indeed look slick.
• CSS Dock Menu using JQuery
  Nice example of a Mac-style dock using JQuery + a Fisheye Interface component.
• Wrap text in Ruby
  A snippet that uses regular expressions to wrap text.
• ColorSuckr
  Extracts color from photos to create color schemes. Great for matching colors to background images.

• RubyTrends
  A good place to find popular Ruby projects and/or resources. Particularly helpful for those starting out and looking for good Ruby or Rails books.
• A Git Workflow for Agile Teams
  I’m always intrigued by the development workflows that others use. Not to mention, posts like this were invaluable to me when I was learning Git.
• Easy Google Maps with jQuery
  A nice little ditty for displaying a google map with jQuery.
• Speeding up Google Analytics load times with a jQuery plugin
  Another jQuery plugin for using Google Analytics.
• Fail Whale Pillow
  Nice. Just nice.