I really should blog more…

Been doing Change.org/Facebook stuff, and general jobhunting. Should have something interesting to say soon!

The age-old war of kitten vs. groundskeeper vs. MLB vs. YouTube

YouTube took down the video, due to MLB copyright.

I’d describe it here, but that’s kinda pointless.

Hobo – Rails made even easier

I’ve just started playing with Hobo, a set of plugins to Rails that roll in acts_as_authenticated, DRYML, and some ActiveRecord helpers, as well as AJAX in the basic scaffold. It also has switchable themes that seem to be pretty easy to modify. More as I get something going on it…

Need a Kitten or 4?

Looks like the mom of our guys (Stampy and Mr. Sparkle) has done it again, this time dropping 4 kittens into the nurturing lap of Tovi, the woman who saved our guys from a life on the mean streets of Silicon Valley.

If they turn out anything like our guys, they’ll be handsome, social, and a lot of fun. You need to give them a home.

Can you “OR” on Craigslist?

I sure can’t. Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but Craigslist doesn’t seem to have a way to do OR in searches. You add words, they get AND’ed together, and the search gets more restrictive.

It’d be nice if they did. As it is, I had to set up 4 RSS feeds for different job search terms and the feeds contain duplicates. Holler at me if you’ve solved this.

Building Up a Ruby Toolbox

In my time off, I’ve been getting up to speed on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. In the process, I’ve been trying to build up a decent toolbox of apps, libraries, and docs. Right now, this is all pretty standard stuff, and I’m hoping to keep adding to it.

Books

• Programming Ruby, a.k.a. the Pickaxe. This is kinda the de-facto text on the language itself.
• Rails for Java Developers. This is probably one of the best programming books I’ve read. It was a quick and easy read, and really hooked in well with my background. All scenarios are laid out as “here’s how you’d do it in a Java stack, and here’s how Rails does it.” Almost without fail, the Rails version is succinct and elegant. Also introduced me to the AppFuse project, which does for Java most of what Rails does – definitely a candidate for usage in my next Java project.

Applications

• TextMate. This is the editor you see in all the Ruby screencasts. It has a lot of IDE features with completion, launching, etc. I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface.
• CocoaMySQL. A lightweight, simple MySQL admin and query tool for Mac. Not feature-rich, but stable and free.

Libraries

These were recommended in the excellent Rails for Java Devs book above.

• acts_as_authenticated, a plugin for doing authentication, user sessions (with ‘remember me’ cookie), account creation, and management.
• authorization, a plugin for doing role-based access, with DB ACLs.