Markaby’s for rails by why (who has recently took up creating a potentially very fun, pratical way for the youth to get involved with programming, Hackety Hack. Cool)

Markaby rids the dirty syntax of intertwined html and ruby in your view
<%= %>.destroy

Markaby supports the rails notion of top to bottom ruby code in web development

In this post Kevin Barnes make the analogy of software being like a “Code Garden”. Best analogy or not for describing the software process I enjoyed reading Kevin’s justifications.

I’ve been using iTerm when I want a terminal session on el mac, but overall I am not a big fan of iTerm. Anyways, I stumbled across tabTerm, which is just the normal Terminal app w/ tabs. Its cool, its got tabs, hurrah

But, perhaps Terminal in 10.5 will come with tabs (guessing from this note)?

A quick note that a laptop can make an excellent shield when your 1.5 year old nephew is trying to clock you in the head with hard objects. =]

I heard about Joost from Stuart. I downloaded it today without expecting anything great, however, its impressive: good quality video, a decent amount of content, on demand viewing, really easy to use “pretty” interface, and it feels like your watching TV (as oppose to an internet video stream or abc.com show). Now when is my mac book pro’s remote going to work with it? Maybe it does, I haven’t tried it yet =]

Yahoo Pipes is very cool. It seems to be very popular, but I have just discovered and started playing with it recently. I think of it like mac’s Automator, but more information specific and for all of the internet.

I thought this was pretty interesting and silly when I came across an advertisement for it. Surprisingly it feels quite natural starring at and listening to an artificial person informing me about stuff. Creating a virtual site character is quite entertaining and seems like it may be useful in situations where you want to give an overview that pertains to what a page or site is about. link

I heard about GeekTool on Bill Clementson’s Blog. Its a cool little app that lets you write console output or images on top of your Mac desktop similar to conky

Platypus allows for scripts and unix apps to be turned into Mac Applications that can reside in the Applications folder and be used for opening files from within finder.

I haven’t managed to find an official site for Platypus. Anyone in the know?

I found this from a link at sean’s place. It’s well… amazing. :]

Robotic Beer Launching Refrigerator - More amazing videos are a click away

Speaking of beer…. Doh gotta get some sleep

Over at Giant Robots… Tammer Saleh writes about using rSpec with Spec::Rails. This post shows how natural language is used to write the spec in the code and how running it produces meaningful information along with the verification of the statements.

I read something about JRuby today, I think it was that they have a new release that is many many times faster. Anyways, this inspired me to play around with it some. I pulled the newest code from their subversion repo, set up my environment and wrote out some code for a bit

Conclusion… Its really cool and its hard to believe that it actually works. It feels strange creating Java objects in ruby, using their Java methods, and then using them like ruby objects. Very strange, but that strange feeling is cool. Thinking about the huge set of Java libraries instantly available is pretty amazing. No wonder Sun wanted these guys. :)

OS X has definitely won me over as a web development platform.

   

• Great for testing out HTML and CSS. I’m able to run a diverse set of browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE6 (using crossover Mac). I still have to get to a windows box for IE7 testing thought (thankfully its the least broken IE browser). As a side note firebug also rocks for finding HTML and CSS problems.
• Development speed is increased by not having to spend time fixing the OS or the applications. Everything just works.
• TextMate which is awesome for programming and general text editing (Lots of the emacs keys I hit by instinct work in it!)
• Its easy to run all of the DB and web servers on its Unix base that you’d need for a development environment
• High quaility graphic and photo editing software is available
• Rails will be included with OS X 10.5. Cool

Check out listpic and realize how nice it is for searching craigslist. Now they just need to expand it south from SF. :)

WOXY is a web radio station that I discovered listening to the web 2.0 podcast. They play non mainstream indi sounding rock which is defiantly not what I normally listen to, but thats probably why I’ve been enjoying it.

On the podcast they were presenting , which is a site that lets you trade CD’s with people for 1 buck. It goes something like: you post or find something you want to trade, lala sends both of you postage paid envelopes to put the cd in, it sends out the person you are trading with. Cool idea.