Flashblock plugin for Firefox is a nice thing.

• bullet
  A Rails plugin that will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use counter cache. Cool.
• the update | gemcutter
  Gemcutter (soon to be rubygems.org) will become the default gem host for the ruby community, replacing rubyforge.
• White House opens Web site coding to all
  White House goes Drupal. I’m pretty sure this article was written by somebody with no clue what open source is. Some of the descriptions are nonsensical.
• Why seeding is important for random functions…
  or, How to Cheat at Bejeweled.
• and another thing… – Announcing Refraction
  Refraction is Rack middleware that can provide “mod_rewrite” type functionality using an easier to understand Ruby dsl. Some performance tradeoffs, but not as much as trying to use Rails routing.

Approximately 1 month until Baby 2.0 ships in my household. Unlike software releases, baby releases tend to ship on time or early. Hopefully our MOM and POP servers are ready to scale.

• Do forms work in HTML emails?
  I’d always wondered about this.
• SORT in Redis
  Grumble grumble, I still haven’t bought into this NOSQL thing, but in case you have…
• The IE CSS Bug Which Cost Me A Month’s Salary
  A cautionary tale. Moral – be sure to test in all browsers.
• Double-Load Guards in Ruby
  If you see warnings about already initialized constants, this article is for you. Good tips to avoid this problem in the future as well.
• Treating User Myopia
  Jeff Atwood highlights a problem with a user not understanding how to use Markdown on one of their forum sites, misses the forest for the trees and blames the user instead of the site’s use of Markdown, and a mob forms in the comments. Ah, Friday.

Catching up…

• The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing
  This was my very first thought when I saw the instant typing feature in Google Wave – why would I want the people I’m communicating with to watch me clumsily struggle to type out my thoughts?
• 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS
  All of the styling on these is done with pure CSS – although several use CSS3 techniques that are not fully supported by some, er, lesser browsers. I really dug the rotated effect on #8.
• The Art of Library
  Some general tips & guidelines for writing library code.
• Number to LCD Kata
  Watch Corey Haines tackle the Number to LCD Kata.
• We must ship now and deal with consequences
  Another good take from Uncle Bob Martin on technical debt.
• Three sysadmin mistakes start-ups make
  I’ll admit switching web servers in a crisis, but it solved my problems. So there.

When I was in college my motto was “Sleep is for after college.” I didn’t know about kids.

• Copying files between S3 accounts
  A good writeup of what it takes if you ever need to do this.
• Ruby Daemons and Angels
  A good overview on how to write your own daemons using Kenneth Kalmer’s Daemon Kit.
• dynamicmatic
  Dynamic pages plugin for Static Matic (for mostly static sites that need just a touch of the dynamic).
• Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces
  Good tips here.

I suppose I’ll be “catching the Wave” soon. So what will we say, now? “Wave at me?” I don’t know. That just doesn’t sound right.

• Shoes-and-a-Shotgun
  A quick way to develop and serve up a desktop / Sinatra application.
• railscasts_wordpress
  A syntax highlighting stylesheet for ruby based on the railscast/textmate theme – for use with Wordpress & the SyntaxHighlighterPlus plugin, but the developer is encouraging forks to add support for other syntax highlighters.
• Oh My Zsh gets an auto-updater
  I’ve been thinking about giving ZSH a go. This looks like a nice way to get a (regularly scheduled) boost.

Glad to see improvements to Github performance after the Big Move. Hope it continues.

• jQuery quickSearch plug-in
  Niftly little search plugin for filtering data.
• Google Chrome Frame — technical notes
  Some good notes about using Google Chrome Frame.
• UI Fundamentals for Programmers
  Video of a talk given by 37 Signaler, Ryan Singer.
• StackOverflow cool Ruby questions
  The first in an “endless series” of posts from Khaled alHabache covering selected ruby questions on the popular question and answer site. Good stuff!
• Fork Support – gemcutter
  gemcutter is trying to make some headway regarding the forked gem problem and is asking for your opinions.

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.”

I always enjoy attending the local Ruby user group. It’s the one place in my life where I can really let my geek flag fly and I’m not the biggest geek in the room. At last night’s tulsa.rb meeting we had wide-ranging discussions about such things as Ruby 1.9, Sinatra, Dvorak vs. QWERTY, vim, customizing the irb shell, a comparison of the Ruby, Python, and PHP communities, as well as a truly rousing discussion as to whether or not recycling was a net energy loss or gain and how to harness methane from a landfill. OSIM! (Join us next month if you are in the Tulsa area and want in on the fun)

• watchr – Flexible Continuous Testing
  A replacement for autotest that advertises simplicity and more flexibility.
• Introducing Google Chrome Frame
  Did Google just kill Internet Explorer? Wow. This could be all kinds of win.
• Email Testing with Email on Acid
  Designing emails for proper viewing across lots of different clients is incredibly hard (particularly since Outlook refuses to use a standard rendering engine). Email on Acid looks like a nice tool for testing out your designs.
• Animation woes in jQuery unit tests
  Tammer Saleh shows a nice trick for stopping animations in jquery so that they don’t blow up unit tests.
• A Mess is not a Technical Debt.
  Uncle Bob distinguishes between messes and true technical debts.
• 10 Reasons Pair Programming Is Not For the Masses
  This (and the NYT article referenced) is causing quite a bit of discussion in hackerville.

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.

I thought cloud computing was supposed to be the silver bullet for scalability. Now everybody wants to move to “real” servers. Me is confused.

• SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers
  Creates a pretty nice looking site map for your website
• Ruby on Rails git pre-commit hook
  A quick look at how to setup hooks to run code (for verifying your tests/specs, updating documentation, etc) when you do a git commit.
• GitHub is Moving to Rackspace!
  GitHub makes the official announcement. Really interesting read of the technical details behind the move.
• Need serial key – CodeSmith Community
  An ignorant user asks for a “crack” serial code for a product IN THE OFFICIAL PRODUCT FORUMS. A company official with a sense of humor responds and geek hilarity ensues.
• 33 Killer Web Icon Sets for Free
  Because I am design-challenged, I’m always looking for good, free icons. Here’s a bunch.