John Topley’s Weblog

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RailsConf Europe 2008 Day 1

I’m in Berlin attending RailsConf Europe 2008. Today was the first day of the conference proper, following an optional day of tutorials yesterday. Following a welcome by Ruby guru David A. Black, the conference started with an hour-long keynote from Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH).

So True

I absolutely love this spoof commercial from the Rails Envy guys, so I make no apologies for embedding it here in case you haven’t seen it yet!

Deal Of The Century

That got your attention, didn’t it? Maybe not deal of the century, but if you’re a UK-based Rails developer then you owe it to yourself to check out the PeepCode subscription packs.

Rails Envy

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer have just started a great new Ruby on Rails blog named Rails Envy.

The Anticipation Mounts…

I just checked the Apple Store and noticed that it’s down for updating. They always do this just before a Steve Jobs keynote when he announces lots of new goodies for Apple fanboys like me to spend our hard-earned cash on.

AssetsGraphed At The Rails Way

You may recall that a while ago I mentioned The Rails Way, which is a site where Rails core team members Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski review code submissions and illustrate Rails best practices. Well, the big news is that they’ve started reviewing my code!

Introducing AssetsGraphed

I’ve just put my first Ruby on Rails application online. It’s called AssetsGraphed. It’s a free asset tracking application that also graphs your data.

Joel On Power

Joel Spolsky is bang on the money when he writes about the confusing new Windows Vista Start menu controls for controlling your login session. The Power icon is particularly problematic.

Welcome To The Social

I’ve just been reading a hilarious review over at Engadget of the installation process for the software that comes with Microsoft’s new Zune device. Apart from the fact that the software clearly isn’t finished and has a high stinkage factor, what caught my eye was some of the language used in the screens.

The Best Way

One of the difficulties of learning a new programming language, framework or technology is that of knowing whether you’re doing things in the best way. Tutorials and books can only take you so far, then after that you’re flying solo staring at a terrifying blank screen in your editor or IDE.

Best Of Breed Web 2.0 App

I dislike using the term “Web 2.0″ because no-one really knows what it means, but nonetheless it has come to represent a certain type of Web application.

Learning Lisp

The title of this post is misleading because I’m not actually learning the programming language Lisp. Not directly, anyway. I have come across some of the more exotic and esoteric aspects of programming during the past year or so, some of which originated in Lisp.

Pimping Carson Systems: Bare Naked App

Sorry to pimp Carson Systems again, but they’ve just launched a new site that details the entire process of bringing their second Web application—Amigo—to market.

Preventing SVN Exposure

Dan Benjamin over at Hivelogic writes about not exposing information about your Subversion repository if using Capistrano to deploy a Ruby on Rails application. Looks like required reading if you’re using these tools.

Get Your Vits

Carson Systems have just launched Vitamin, which is billed as “a resource for Web designers, developers and entrepreneurs”. I’ve just had a quick look around the site and it looks like it’s going to be essential reading if you’re at all interested in Web design or the whole Web 2.0 thing (whatever that is!)

Keychain Access From Shell

Allan Odgaard over on the TextMate blog writes about a neat shell script that can be used to extract passwords from the OS X keychain. I only wish I had time to learn the shell properly.

Practise What You Preach

This one’s a classic. For reasons too dull to go into, I needed to research the UK government’s e-GIF standard and ended up at the UK GovTalk website–setting standards for seamless electronic government. This site is not only very dull but is chock-full of documents about standards, and proudly displays the appropriate badges that proclaim as much.

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