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.

• What’s New in Edge Rails: Independent Model Validators
  Now you can use Validator classes to decouple complex validation logic from your models. Very nice.
• stories
  Not new, but new to me. Stories auto-generates Cucumber-style human readable acceptance test output, without all the extra Cucumber hassle. Since I don’t have customers that read my acceptance tests, I’ve never gotten down with Cucumber, but this might make it into my workflow.
• Which Tweets Matter ?
  Mark Cuban discusses new features for icerocket’s twitter search, including reply/retweet and viewing the person’s follower count.
• deadweight
  Really cool gem for finding & eliminating unused CSS selectors.
• Pretty output of rails errors when doing AJAX with jQuery
  jnunemaker dropped this little goodie on gist for us.
• Practicing product minimalism
  On my first day of work at Microsoft as a PM six years ago, I sat down with my first manager for our first one-on-one and at the end she asked, Are there any questions? I said yes — one last one: “When do we decide to remove features?”