Presentazione fumetto,
SABATO 21 NOVEMBRE 09, ore 18.30:

Don Zauker, Santo subito
un libro di Emiliano Pagani e Daniele Caluri
(DOUble SHOt edizioni)

Ne parleranno gli autori Emiliano Pagani e Daniele Caluri.

“Non appena l’uomo rifiuti il miracolo, subito rifiuterà anche Dio, giacché l’uomo va in cerca, non tanto di Dio, quanto dei miracoli e quindi, dato che rimanere senza miracoli eccede le capacità dell’uomo, questi si fabbricherà dei miracoli nuovi, a modo suo, e finirà col genuflettersi davanti al miracolo del ciarlatano, dinanzi al sortilegio della ciana, fosse pure mille volte ribelle, eretico e ateo.”
Fëdor Dostoevskij – “I Fratelli Karamazov”

E se qualcuno avesse imparato il trucco?

Un piccolo paesino del profondo sud si trova al centro di uno scontro tra le due potentissime organizzazioni che da sempre controllano il territorio italiano: il Vaticano e la Malavita Organizzata. C’è differenza tra un predicatore e un imbroglione? Tra un esorcismo ed un rapporto sadomaso? Tra un politico corrotto e un criminale? Così, tra mafiosi devoti, assassini ignoranti, cardinali arroganti, contadini superstiziosi, politici speculatori e qualche culo rotto, ha origine il mito di Don Zauker.

> Per saperne di più…

Sul web: http://www.donzauker.it/

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Up for my first manic burst of work for the day.

• DailyJS – A roundup of JavaScript stuff from Alex Young, Ric Roberts, and Justin Knowlden. It’s off to a promising start.
• Fixtures without validation with Factory Girl – Nice idea for generating bad data in a concise and repeatable way.
• fast_fixture – Develop with MyISAM, test with InnoDB. Seems a bit iffy but should definitely speed up the tests.
• shoulda-addons – Test profiling and color-coded test names for Shoulda.

I’m starting to feel like a sleep deprivation experiment. Good thing other people are writing good software still.

• Devise: authentication for lazy programmers – Lots of activity in this project lately.
• Gity – New git client for OS X. Early days yet, free at the moment. Looks like the goal is to give us menu/keystroke replacements for much of the git command line.
• Integrity 0.2.0 – New release for this continuous integration server with (among other things) hooks to GitHub, Heroku, and Campfire.
• PagerDuty – Switchboard for all your email notifications, with multi-user duty shifts, phone and SMS notification, and more. Looks pretty useful if you’re the one who has to scramble to respond to sites being down.
• Bluepill: a new process monitoring tool – Designed for simplicity and lack of memory leaks. If you’re fed up with god and monit it looks worth a try.
• Help John recover – Rails dev John Lannon got shot in a robbery, and the community is collecting funds to help support him durign his recovery.

Today’s challenge: Ziya Charts. If I’m not back tomorrow, I lost.

• Mockingbird: New Cappucino-based wireframing tool. iPlotz and MockFlow are two other tools in this space (was just looking into this for a client yesterday).
• First look at rails 3.0.pre – Dr. Nic dives into getting started and using generators.
• Introducing Resque – The GitHub guys have built a new redis-backed background job library. Given some of the recent experiences I’ve had with their background jobs, I’m not all that sure the kinks are out yet.
• Thinking_Sphinx – Easy Setup Tutorial – Quick start from Philip Ingram.

Thanks to everyone who commiserated about my pinched nerve issues. I think I’m still a fair way from death’s door.

• jQuery Grid Rails Plugin – I keep meaning to look at the jQuery datagrid. Maybe this will encourage me.
• gdb.rb – gdb7 hooks for MRI. A fresh way to be nosy about running ruby code.

Busy weekend. Let’s unload some of these browser tabs.

• Improving Code using Metric_fu – A concrete example of how metrics can drive better code.
• Eventbug (alpha) Released – New firebug extension to help in debugging event-related issues.
• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 – Probably about time for developers to think about upgrading. I’ve been running 3.7 alphas with no serious trouble myself.
• New in the Twitter gem: Lists! – Just in case you want to code against Twitter’s new shiny.
• Limelight – Ruby/JRuby backed desktop cross-platform UI framework. Looks interesting.
• Ruby / Method aliasing and chaining – Good discussion of method chains and the dreaded alias_method_chain.
• FireQuery – Firebug extension for jQuery development.
• Really easy continuous integration with Signal – A Rails-backed CI server.
• trap_door – Rails plugin to send spambots off to a trap.

Been a very long week, but I’m happy with the way various projects are improving.

• Amazon RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service or MySQL in the Cloud for Ruby On Rails. – A quick How-To.
• yUMLmeRails – Rake tasks and Shoes app to create model diagrams for Rails. (via Under the Hat)

There is no apparent end of code that needs to be written.

• wysihat-engine-demo – Quick way to see the wysihat editing control in action.
• RailsBridge Bugmash VM Script – Script to build your own server to test the Rails source code from zero.
• bigrecord – ActiveRecord replacement to use distributed stores like HBase.
• Heroku Add-ons – Solr, New Relic, Amazon RDS, Cron, and more for Heroku’s easy servers.
• Git Magic – Another free online book about git.
• Prag Pro Wri Mo – Pragmatic are encouraging people to spend 30 days in November figuring out if they really want to write a programming book.
• FOSS FAQ – StackOverflow-style site from the RedMonk guys, covering free and open source software issues.
• Underscore.js – Javascript utility library providing a bunch of functional stuff.
• Using BlackBird javascript console in Rails – Glue plugin from Elad Meidar.
• Installing Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL on Snow Leopard – Another guide for those who haven’t upgraded yet.

Today I think I shall be a performance expert.

• Funding Thinking Sphinx – Pat Allen is looking for sponsorship to spend a month working on the Thinking Sphinx plugin. That’s a good cause.
• Mu – Facebook Connect library written in JavaScript.
• Introducing Amazon RDS – The Amazon Relational Database Service – Essentially, canned MySQL servers in the Amazon cloud.
• nice_find – Find replacement for TextMate that uses grep or git_grep on your project.

I wonder what language I’ll be writing code in five years from now?

• Fukuoka Ruby Award 2010 – There’s some money to be had out there for the right projects.
• Transition – Gemcutter is becoming the default gem host for the Ruby community.
• riot – Another ruby unit-testing framework, focused on speed.
• Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2009.10 released – REE is still moving along.
• Ancestry – A new tree gem for ActiveRecord that looks worth investigating.

Not too much of note over the weekend. Maybe everyone was at startup school.

• eCSStender 1.0 – Javascript to bludgeon older browsers into paying attention to advanced CSS.
• shindo – “Simple depth first ruby testing” provides yet another test framework.
• assert{2.0} – And here’s “the industry’s most aggressive TDD system” which uses reflection to dump debugging information in case of any test failures.

Friday, beautiful Friday.

• Mozilla Raindrop – As with Google Wave, this “exploration in messaging innovation” may be a solution in source of a problem, but I’ll probably give it a try when it’s somewhat less alpha.
• Rails 2.3.4 and SWFUpload – Rack Middleware for Flash Uploads that Degrade Gracefully – An updated solution for one of the peskiest Rails UI issues.

It’s interesting working with clients who are passionate about URL structure.

• Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC – GitHub’s new binary data serialization and RPC protocol. They may have invented the ruby of RPC.
• Devise: flexible authentication solution for Rails – Built on top of Warden. I’m not personally sold on pushing authentication down into Rack, but if you are this engine is probably worth a look.
• Pimping out git log – An alias to get nicer command line displays.

Hoping for productivity, fearing sick kids.

• First Step on Ruby Metaprogramming – Lots of links and some exercises.
• Trollop – Simple command-line parser for Ruby.
• Fix duplicates in Mac OS X “Open with…” Finder menu – This hit me hard recently. Fortunately the fix is easy.
• Station – Version 0.3 of this CMS-as-an-engine is out.
• staticmatic-compass-susy – Demo site for those three technologies.

I’m rather enjoying doing more PM lately. Probably a sign of creeping megalomania.

• Compiling FreeImage in 64-bit on Snow Leopard – This was an absolute lifesaver as I had to get an ImageScience-using project cooking on my current dev setup.
• Rails in a Nutshell – Your chance to read – and comment on – the manuscript of an upcoming O’Reilly book.
• Kill Your Signup Form with Rails – Some thoughts on “gradual engagement” instead of one big signup form.
• Acceptance Testing with Webrat – Nice introduction over at SlideShare.
• Rails deployment made easy with Inploy – A simple alternative to Capistrano if you’re using Passenger and Git and don’t need anything fancy at deployment time.

Monday looks good when you’ve been sick in bed all weekend.

• SEO FAQ – Derek Powazek is still dumping on the SEO types, and they’re still not happy about it.
• GraphicsMagick – Claims to be a superior alternative to ImageMagick.
• Full Text Search on Heroku – Using postgres native FT indexing.
• How To: Getting Started with Amazon EC2 – Good first guide if you don’t know where to start.
• Friendpaste – Pastebin that includes shared editing, history, forking, API.

Looks like I’m safely booked up for the next couple of months. Maybe the summer drought is over.

More Tools: There are some more folks chiming in on the “Tools of the Trade” thread:

• Larry Wright
• Justin Williams
• Filip Tepper

And a few other odds and ends:

• Representative – Create XML representations of Ruby objects through a declarative markup style.
• Coming soon: Push API – To Codaset, that is.
• Zena – Another entrant in the Rails CMS horse race.
• Productivity FTW: a Ruby server to enhance productivity – A proxy server to keep you from browsing to sites that you know you shouldn’t.

Today it would be nice to hit a few home runs.

• Browsera – Automated browser compatibility testing with a free trial available.
• RubyFIT 1.2 – Port of the FIT testing framework from Java to Ruby.
• The DevIL Image Library For Ruby – Another alternative for loading, saving, thumbnailing, scaling, rotations, and so on.
• Tools of the Trade – Mark Richman chimes in on the theme.
• Gem Bundler is the Future – A rundown on the new plan for handling dependency resolution in Rails 3. I’m not yet convinced.
• CouchDB in Ubuntu – Looks like Ubuntu 10.04 is going to set every user up with CouchDB for cloudish storage.

Tools of the Trade – A few more folks have posted their own lists of what they use to develop software. Lots of good stuff lurking here:

• Elad Meidar
• David Bolton
• Jeff Schoolcraft

And a few other odds and ends:

• Gerrit – Google project to provide Web-based code review and project management for git-based projects. Interesting but too enterprisey for me to want to use.
• Kiln: Looks like the Fog Creek guys are getting into code review too. Can’t tell what SCMs they support, though.
• Repository Hosting – Inexpensive Trac, Git, and SVN hosting. I may end up switching some of my repos here. No fancy social features, but sometimes all you want is a publicly-reachable remote.

Much as I’m spending more time on management these days, I do enjoy the chances I get to write some good code.

• Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists – Derek Powazek on SEO consultants.
• scratch – A Ruby web framework that fits in a gist.

I’m putting in way too many late nights these days.

• BigOldRailsTemplate (or alternate location) – I’m still tucking new stuff into here, most recently support for deploying to Heroku.
• CodeRack Rack Middleware Contest – With prizes for the best Rack middleware.
• On Gem Forking – More on Gemcutter’s plans, now that they’re the GitHub-recommended home for gems.
• Spidr – Ruby web spidering library backed by Nokogiri.
• Rails Developers Workstations Revealed – Collection of desktop portraits assembled by @hakunin and @eladmeidar. Yes, mine is in there.
• My Tools of the Trade – 2009 – An update to my list of hardware and software. It’s inspired similar posts from ivanyv and Maxim Chernyak.
• Rails Tricks, part 2: Mislav’s Will_Paginate – An interesting UI for making will_paginate links more useful.
• vim-fugitive – Git wrapper for vim.
• Rails Concerns – Simple plugin that makes it easy to split up controllers, models, and mailers into partial classes.
• codepad – Pastebin that actually lets you execute your code.
• CSS Font-Size: em vs. px vs. pt vs. percent – One of those topics that designers can argue forever.
• Sauce Labs – “Web Browsers as a service”

I’m getting too old for these late nights.

• Caliper – From Devver.net, a simple way to run metric_fu on any project with an accessible git repo.
• cap-recipes – A collection of capistrano recipes for managing things like delayed job and whenever and passenger.
• Gem Building is Defunct – At GitHub, anyhow. They’re throwing their weight behind Gemcutter.
• The Invoice Machine – New online time-tracking and invoicing service for freelancers.
• ruhl – Yet another new scheme for rendering HTML markup from Ruby in an elegant fashion.
• What I’ve Earned (And Learned) From Writing “Beginning Ruby” – Basically, “writing books sucks.”

Some mornings it’s tough to get out of bed.

• We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned – Good writeup from the Scout team of what was behind some of their recent changes. Part of being smart is knowing when to give up on a feature.
• Ruby DSL Trick With the Hash – Cute little bit of sugar for your Capistrano deployment files.
• Loofah – Very flexible HTML sanitizer based on Nokogiri.
• Introducing Warp Drive for Rails – This looks something like the (so far vaporware) Rails 3 notion of mountable applications, but available today.
• The Ruby 19x Web Servers Booklet - Free eBook comparing the available alternatives.
• rails_xss – Recent commits have added the ability to get “safe by default” in Rails views. This plugin turns on that ability for Rails 2.3, making it consistent with the way Rails 3.0 will behave.

It’d be nice if at least one project were running smoothly right now.

• Free Farm-Fresh Web Icons – A thousand 16×16 and 32×32 icons from FatCow Web Hosting.
• Discontinuing Resourcelogic – I gotta say that I agree with the argument here about the perils of aggressively DRYing controllers by hiding their details in a plugin.
• RailsBridge BugMash VM – Greg Nokes is spearheading a project to make contributing to Rails even simpler.
• Seed: A New Rails Powered Open Source CMS With In-Page Admin Interface – Rails Inside covers a new contender in this market.
• I like Unicorn because it’s Unix – And all the Ruby geeks who wish they were Unix geeks no doubt agree. I’d be just as happy if it were magic pixie dust under the covers, myself.
• Chargify – Another outsourced solution for handling subscription payments.

These significant numbers always tickle me.

• Django for Rails devs – Another attempt at an even-handed comparison from someone who has used both.
• Rails Tricks, part 1: Searchlogic – Some nice advanced usage here.
• Install any HTML theme/template into your Rails app – Dr. Nic goes public about the install_theme project.
• Codaset Opens up its Beta to Everyone. – The new git hosting alternative is worth checking out.