We’ve just unleashed FiveRuns TuneUp v0.8.17. This release fixes an issue when running on JRuby. It also corrects a snafu I introduced by building 0.8.16 against a modified working copy. My bad! If ...

Useless and probably false trivia of the day: Where was CamelCase invented?: In Scottland

I'm taking part in the Rails Guide Hackfest which is "an attempt to improve Rails documentation and make the barrier to entry as low as possible." You can take a look at it here: http://guides.rails.i...

While reading about the DRY principle (for “Don’t repeat yourself”) and the evil of copy-and-paste coding (again), I started thinking what to do instead. Actually, what to do is more or less obv...

CachedModels hit 0.0.2. First of all, I transformed it to a Ruby gem, so you can use it outside Rails! Second, I dramatically enhanced performances, avoiding useless cache lookups and expirations. Tak...

I had lunch with Dan Benjamin this past Tuesday, which is always a great time. I was telling him about an application we are going to launch next week, to get his feedback on both the plans we will be...

(or sanitising as us Brits prefer to write!) I really hate having to call the hhelper method every time I display a model attribute in view. Imagine how happy I was to find a plugin that did all ...

A friend of mine sent me a link to the best talk I have ever seen Steve Jobs give, yet. I found this talk truly inspiring, sincere and refreshing and would like to share it with my friends that read ...

It was a year ago that the Rails Envy podcast was born. Run by the now infamous Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack, Rails Envy has been entertaining and informing us with Rails (and some Ruby) news since...

FiveRuns is sponsoring MerbCamp this weekend in San Diego. Check out a new post featuring Merb highlights and opinions over the past year from several TakeFive interview participants.

If you've ever built a rubygem and found it frustrating, the first thing you should do if you haven't already is get familiar with hoe. Hoe is a tool for sowing and raking gems. That is, hoe provides ...

I just released version 0.8.0 of MetricFu. New in this release:Source Control Churn now supports Git (thanks to Erik St Martin)Flog Results are sorted by highest Flog ScoreFix for a bunch of 'alread...

Site update I'm rejigging this site. Step 1: New minimalist theme. Step 2: New server and new blogging software setup. Step 3: Profit I'm still working through the kinks so in the meantime check...

Hampton Catlin's recent Ruby Survey (results here) showed that more Ruby and Rails developers prefer the jQuery Javascript framework to the Prototype framework that comes with Rails. jQuery has become...

In today’s troubled world, it’s nice to be able to talk about different currencies. The Euro is one that has gotten very popular lately, and you can actually type the character in Linux. In Ubun...

Since I started to work with Ruby, being involved in several projects, contributing, giving support or maintaining Windows version of those packages, this is the first time a bug report made my day: ...

I’ve dreamed of the ability to ask TextMate “what frigging bundle command/snippet is being activated by Ctrl+P or Shift+Ctrl+G?” I’ve silently pined for it. (Answer: params[:id] in Rails, and ...

I recently had a couple of projects that consisted of a few static HTML files and a couple images. I could have used a blog or lightweight CMS, but those were overkill. I could use scp, but remember...

It’s that time again. The Rails Rumble is going down on 10/18 and 10/19. Once again, I’ve created a primer to even the field out a little bit. <object height="302" width="400"> <pa...