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.”

Only took me 4 days to get my mac re-situated after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Re-situated may be overstating it, actually.

• app_store
  A Ruby module for fetching information from Apple’s App Store.
• James Edward Gray II — How to become a successful rubyist
  A nice interview with Oklahoma’s very own JEG2.
• jQTouch
  A jQuery plugin for mobile development (iPhone, Android, etc) using HTML5, CSS3, and javascript.
• Tweetie-style paging with pageSlider
  A nice-looking jQuery based slider plugin.
• 7 Stages of new language keyword grief
  Amusing. Although I admit having these feelings more with C# / ASP.NET than I do with open source technologies like Rails. There may be something to that…

Went from 110 degree Texas heat to 70 degree Colorado. A nice juxtaposition.

• An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
  If I had the discipline to put this plan into action, I probably wouldn’t need the plan, but still…
• Top 25 Apps for Designers and Web Developers (on the iPhone)
  Some useful tools for us lucky folks that fall into the categories of web developer and iPhone owner.
• acts_as_taggable_on_steroids was REALLY slow [Snippet] « elc technologies
  Not only a cautionary tale for those using acts_as_taggable_on_steriods – this has some handy techniques for improving performance on your MySQL db.
• Ramen Profitable
  Good article, although, as Graham runs a venture firm, he is heavily biased toward the idea that startups should seek investors at some point.

How did I survive three decades without coffee?

• Load Impact – Free web site load test
  A service for load testing your website. Starts at the great price of free for “low load level” testing (whatever that means) up to $99 for advanced level testing (5000 users).
• Can’t Get Approval for your App? Sell the Source Code
  Interesting way to make lemonade from lemons. Probably not a significant market here, but who knows.
• Plugin Review: Wordpress Console
  Review of a very irb-like Wordpress Console plugin for working with php + Wordpress. Thumbs way up!
• Better Password Inputs, iPhone Style
  Use jquery + css to display password inputs iPhone-style.
• announcement_fu
  A Rails plugin for site-wide announcements. Currently in “pre-beta,” but something I’m keeping an eye on.

I would support a political platform that proposed making meetings illegal on Fridays. You? Who’s with me?

• HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using – Nettuts+
  A good introductory tutorial for getting a taste of what your markup/styling will look like in the brave new world of HTML 5. Key takeaway – alot less divs (in favor of more semantic-sounding tags like header, section, article, etc) and alot of really cool styling techniques that are (typically) only supported in a few (read: non-Microsoft) browsers.
• Top iPhone App Developer Was Losing Out On $2000 A Day Because Of Sloppy Coding
  Yikes! A good reminder to check your production config for proper api keys, connection info, etc…
• hpoom – TweetPeep
  A jquery plugin that allows you to create a wallpapered area of your page with twitter profile images of people discussing a particular topic. Think fixoutlook.org. Very very cool.
• The Journey to Ruby 1.9
  Some help navigating the gotchas from the folks at thoughtbot.