Every once in a while I post about cool plugins essential for Rails development, on the off chance you haven’t discovered them by yourself. Here’s the latest installment.
Archive by Author
The value of continuous integration
It took a sweet while, but I am finally beginning to see the value in Continuous Integration. My Zelda gem is now being tested by Travis every time I push code into the repository and I can release my software with confidence.
Random Active Record
There is no method provided in Active Record to return a random record (to my knowledge). In the past I have used the ever so easy order by rand() for my random record needs. Problem: this is MySQL specific.
Tour Top 100
A new addition to the Space Babies stable today: Tour Top 100. This is a list of 100 Tour de France-related songs. You’ll see classics from Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour.
Radiolab: experimental radio
This week I launched radiolab.nl: a website about experimental Dutch radio. Radiolab is a series of new formats on Radio 1, allowing the makers to test the waters and play with new ideas.
Mentally challenged Citigroup
The security of 200.000 Citigroup customers was compromised recently. But not as part of an elaborate hack or phishing expedition. Citigroup allowed anyone to get everyone else’s customer information by simply changing URLs. No security was in place, at all. This is a serious problem and criminally negligent of Citigroup. They have no locks to [...]
Grab the popcorn
Intense debate. Warring factions. Constructive criticism. Fiasco. Unproductive nerd rage. Does this sound intriguing to you? It’s about the current state of Rubygems, a system that distributes Ruby software. TL;DR version: the Rubygems maintainers keep breaking their system and Ruby developers are pissed off. Sea creature’s blog explains what’s happening in greater detail and it’s [...]
Z@ppelin iPhone/iPad app
Now online: the Z@ppelin iPhone/iPad app. I am involved in the back-end of this application, which in this case means most of the content. If you have children in the ages 2-6, try it out!
Smalltalk best practice patterns
If you’re programming along, doing nicely, and all of a sudden your program gets balky, makes things hard for you, it’s talking. It’s telling you there is something important missing. Yep. Great book (ht: dhh).
CSS3 and HTML5, right now
There’s plenty of talk about CSS3 and HTML5, but really implementing it all is something else. Thanks to my good friends at xhtmlized and a very forward-looking customer, www.zapp.nl is now at the forefront of web browser technology.
