In this week’s Rails TakeFive, we’ll take a slight departure and offer up a podcast interview with James Cox, founder of smokeclouds, a UK-based Ruby on Rails and scalability consultancy...

Of the 300 new features in Leopard (Mac OS 10.5), Time Machine may be the one that excites me the most. I've already used to to repair applications after failed updates, pull back browser history ite...

An update to David Mercer’s now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been updated for the CMS’ latest revision and guides the user ...

Back in April at TheNextWeb I Met up with two great guys, Jude and James, who were shooting tech startup interviews for Intruders.tv. I was able to do a quick 6min SugarStats.com interview and they we...

Working with the root account on Mac OS X.

I need more followers on twitter :-)

Embarcadero to acquire CodeGear (tags: codegear) Swiftcore IOWA (tags: iowa ruby component framework sweet) Swiftcore IOWA (tags: iowa ruby component framework demos sweet) National Geographic C...

Continuing in the spirit of Conference-Driven Development, I’m happy to announce the first public release of JRuby-Rack! You can use it to run Rails, Merb, or any Rack-compatible application ins...

We’re working to make What’s up in Ruby a valuable source for the Ruby community. Today we’ve added to that resource by adding a feedback form, an RSS feed of the conversation items,...

One thing that kind of annoyed me about Gentoo Prefix is that you always needed to do a little work to enter the prefix: $ ./bootstrap-prefix.sh /path/to/prefix startscript Personally, I just want t...

Ampersand has received a lot of press lately and I decided to put my oar in as well. My recent history with ampersand is kind of embarrassing, to say the least. I was giving a Ruby class in UK a f...

After I found the Rails X-Sendfile plugin , decided to code something similar for Rack (and Ramaze). The result: Rack::XStatic middleware . Example usage: xfile.ru rackup file . Start it with: rackup...

A quick heads-up on a product we’re launching soon. CustomerFu (www.customerfu.com) is an online tool for companies to manage customer complaints. What happens in many companies - when they̵...

Michael Klishin made a sweet mapping of a merb server’s boot process. Hopefully we can get stuff like this made for other parts of the framework as well as I think it can really help you find yo...

If you haven’t added bash completion for git you should do so now. As with all bash completion it just makes you feel happy :). I’ll wait while you do that…. Now, if you’re li...

Dan Manges has a nice write-up on why the factory pattern is better than Rails fixtures: Rails: Fixin’ Fixtures with Factory. The factory is used to create valid objects for testing with default va...

Ajax Performance Analysis

Today I wanted to extract a report from a search appliance. This task involved logging in to the appliance, receiving a cookie, and following a few links. No problem with Mechanize, right? agent = WWW...