I meant to get these links out earlier but Kanye interrupted me.

• cloud-crowd
  A ruby gem to assist with doing parallel processing in “the cloud”
• Mac Tips you may not know
  Some good keyboard shortcuts here.
• Acorn 2.0
  Just discovered a new version of Acorn is out. This is my favorite “poor-man’s Photoshop”. Mac only.
• 10 Really Helpful Traversing Functions in jQuery
  If you use jQuery, you’ll want to commit these to memory.

Eight years, 2 home address changes, 2 office changes, 4 computers, 3 cars, 1 dog, 1 (and a half) kids, umpteen projects, countless sleepful and sleepless nights later, we still remember. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember 9/11/2001 like it was yesterday.

• Online innovation going strong in state
  Good stuff about the numerous online entrepreneurs/companies that reside or got their start in the great state of Oklahoma – including sites like Ping.fm and twitpic.
• Textmate: Re-Usable Command Basics
  Up your Textmate game and dive into this tutorial that shows how to really utilize Textmate and Unix to accomplish some nifty stuff.
• Animate Image Filling Up Using jQuery
  Incredibly cool demo. I could see some cool uses for this.
• fitter_happier
  A Rails plugin that adds uptime monitoring to your application. Came across this yesterday – looks interesting. More info here.
• To self. or not to self.
  The author discusses the merits of prefixing ruby public instance method calls with self. I tend to agree with his conclusion, but suppose I could be persuaded that it adds more noise than value.

• Railscasts – 7 Security Tips
  New railscast from this week shows common Rails security flaws and how to avoid them. Important.
• 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned
  I wouldn’t call these tricks so much as intermediate CSS techniques that you need to know if you don’t want your designs to look sloppy.
• Create a Funky Parallax Background Effect using jQuery
  Parallax backgrounds are neato, but hard to do right, and certainly can be overdone. This shows how to do it. Use sparingly.
• gsub with a block
  Did you know gsub can take a block? – I knew this (thanks to The Ruby Way), but it’s good to be reminded.
• If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers
  This was making the rounds the last few days. Pretty funny.

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.

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…

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.

I think we actually do need a “death panel.” For IE6 that is…

• ruby_koans
  An awesome idea! Learn Ruby by making the tests pass for short “koans” that build up your knowledge and build upon each other.
• The Brads – Alignment in Design
  Great cartoon illustration about using alignments in web design.
• punypng: crushing your images even more
  A better way to crush your pngs (and jpegs?)
• test-first-teaching
  Homework assignments for teaching ruby.
• clickistrano
  A one-click deployment app for Capistrano deployments. Built with Sinatra.
• AnythingSlider jQuery Plugin
  Another jQuery slider plugin, but this one is ‘really “fully featured”.’ I’ve always used the jQuery scrollable plugin from the flowplayer folks, but might be worth looking at another option.
• Telescopic Text
  Just for fun. Click on the highlighted text and watch a simple statement about making tea become a very complex narrative. Brilliantly executed.

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.

Wish I’d had time over the weekend to participate in the Rails Bugmash. Hope to get involved next time if they do it again. Great idea.

• Throttling Interaction with jQuery
  Good tips for managing cpu usage issues from intense jQuery.
• Ruby has a new Whois library
  This one written in pure ruby with no external dependencies. sudo gem install whois.
• jQuery Link Nudge Plugin
  Plugin that nudges links on mouseover. Could be useful for a nav system.
• ruote
  A workflow engine written in ruby. Such a weird name – thought it was misspelled the first time i saw it.
• How to embed a Sinatra app inside a Rails app as a plugin (not using Rails Metal)
  Handy
• google-spreadsheet-ruby
  A ruby gem for pulling data from Google Spreadsheets.