The various shiny objects that caught my eye lately.
11 Ways of Staying Focused
- Probably my biggest challenge, I need all the help I can get.
Top 14 Stumbling Blocks for New Businesses
- Some of this I’ve seen elsewhere, but there’s soom good points in
here.
What is a Wiki - And How to Use One for Your Project
- I know what a wiki is, but this is a good introduction on how to
leverage them for projects.
The Four-Day Week Challenge - Cutting
back to a four day work week. It’s a great idea, but I don’t think my boss is going to go for that :)
Rails Manual - Just like
http://api.rubyonrails.org, except the interface doesn’t completely suck
eggs.
Rails Tips - The extremely
prolific Peter Cooper (seriously, does
he sleep?) releases something new, Rails
Tips, which although part of the
previously
mentioned
Ruby Inside site, is actually a completely separate site, with a number
of useful tips. Seems similar to his
Snippets site, but limited to Rails
stuff.
The Garden State Effect
Mark Pilgrim’s Essentials 2006. -
Mark just switched to Ubuntu Linux after many years with Macs.
Nice Markets for the Potential ISV
- Ian Landsman’s list of good potential markets. There’s some
interesting thoughts in here, but his reasoning is more interesting.
Rewired Brain Revives Patient After 19 Years
- The title says it all. Amazing.
These are the shiny objects that captured my attention the last couple
of days.
Update: I somehow managed to misspell Relevance’s name. Fixed.
I’m missing RailsConf this year (I have no excuse, I live two hours
away). I’m living vicariously through the other attendees though,
keeping an eye on the blog posts.
One announcement that I just caught was that
Relevance has announced
Streamlined, which is a
framework on top of the Rails framework. Some of the interesting
features include (pulled from Justing Gehtland’s
post):
- Generator for churning out the initial views and configuration
- A declarative DSL for managing views, including relationship
management, field selection, etc.
- Full Ajax-enabled management views with sorting, paging and live
search (with configurable field-inclusion)
- An extensible component system for representing relationships at
runtime * REST-ful web service layer around all models
- Auto user-management and inclusion of declarative role-based
authorization
It looks like this gives you a really good jumpstart on building data
driven applications (as if Rails wasn’t enough of a jumpstart). The
management views in particular sound nice
(Django has this already, really the
only thing Django has over Rails as far as I can tell).
They’re planning on realeasing this at OSCON in July. I’m looking
forward to it.
A few links that caught my eye today:
An introduction to Ruby on Rails for DB2 developers
- Nice article if you’re a DB2 user and want to know what the fuss is
about. Written by Edd Dumbill.
Ruby-Gnome2 Website - Appears to
be a decent GUI toolkit for Ruby. I wish someone would get QT’s Ruby
bindings working on Windows. The thing I miss most about Python is
PyQT.
Sapphire in Steel: The Little Book of Ruby - Nice
introduction to Ruby with plenty of code samples, in PDF form.
Ruby Cookbook -
The Perl Cookbook, ported to Ruby.
Ruby Inside - A great new blog by Peter
Cooper, focused solely on Ruby. The last two items
came from this site. I don’t know how he finds all these cool links.
Configuring Rails Environments - The Cheat Sheet
- Now you can find out what all of those neat settings in
config/environments/* are.
From a list of metaphors and analogies used in high school writing:
- She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes
just before it throws up.
- Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
- He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a
guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one
of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country
speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar
eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
- The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil,
this plan just might work.
- Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
- The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you
fry them in hot grease.
View the complete list
here
Probably the worst title I’ve ever chosen for a post.
Regardless, I’ve been using Montastic for a
month or so now, and it’s great. It’s a free website monitoring service
that lets you know by email when it can’t reach one of your sites. It’s
got a limit of 100 sites (I’ve got a ways to go before reaching that).
I’ve only received one false positive since I’ve started using it.
Seth Godin speaks at
Google.
Great stuff.
From his post No to
average:
This is scary. It’s really scary to turn down most (the average) of
what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities.
Scary to quit your job at an average company doing average work just
because you know that if you stay, you’ll end up just like them. Scary
to go way out on an edge and intentionally make what you do
unattractive to some.
Which is why it’s such a great opportunity.
Seth’s probably one of my favorite business writers right now.
via WorkHappy
According to Reuters, our commutes just keep getting longer and longer:
Dave Givens drives 370 miles to work and back every day and considers his seven-hour commute the best answer to balancing his work with his personal life.
Umm, yeah. This is obviously extreme, but it sounds like ridiculously
long commutes are becoming more common:
In the most recent U.S. Census Bureau study, 2.8 million people have so-called extreme commutes, topping 90 minutes. … The average one-way commute grew by 13 percent to 25.5 minutes between 1990 and 2000.
My commute is less than 15 minutes, one way. Most days, I get to come
home for lunch and see my wife and kids. I used to have a 7 minute
commute. I kind of miss that.