Interesting Ruby and Rails Tidbits #31

By Peter Cooper

The latest installment of our series of roundup posts, covering some of our latest findings in the world of all things Ruby (or not). These items wouldn't make it in as separate posts, but they should be of enough interest to Rubyists generally to make it a worthwhile browse for most readers.

Active Record "Intellisense" for TextMate

If you've used Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools at all, you'll be familiar with Intellisense, a powerful autocompletion tool. Carlos Brando (of Ruby Inside Brazil) has written in with news of a pseudo-Intellisense system for ActiveRecord users using TextMate. There's a YouTube video that shows the system in action. Essentially, when you're working with ActiveRecord objects, you can auto-complete field names quickly - useful if your objects are packed with attributes.

RailsWayCon in Berlin, Germany twixt May 31–June 2, 2010

RailsWayCon (for which Ruby Inside is a media sponsor) is a Rails conference being hosted in a couple of weeks in Berlin, Germany. There's still time to get a ticket! Speakers include Steven Bristol, Jonathan Weiss, Heiko Webers (of rorsecurity.info), Stefan Tilkov, Yehuda Katz, and Oleg Shpynov.

If you register for RailsWayCon, you also get free access to the Webinale 2010 conference.

CodeRack - A Rack Middleware Directory

Last year, CodeRack was a Rails Rumble-like contest to produce middleware for the Rack Web request abstraction system - we even listed 21 of our favorites at the time. Now, CodeRack has been transformed into a general Rack middleware directory. So far, 103 are listed.

AAC 2010 in Orlando, FL twixt October 28–30, 2010

Acts As Conference goes into its third year between October 28-30 in Orlando, Florida. This year they have three content filled days including hands-on workshops, speaker sessions, open spaces, lightning talks, and more. All attendees are treated to three days of breakfast, lunch, morning and afternoon breaks, along with conference Internet and power. Workshops and sessions this year will focus on software craftsmanship, web development, and Agile development.

There's "super early bird" pricing through to May 21 (tomorrow!) of just $250 and then regular early bird pricing through to October 21, before it reverts to the "standard price" of $525. So check it out right now if you're interested and want to save some dough. Workshop and session proposals are also currently being received.

_Why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

Smashing Magazine has run a profile of Why The Lucky Stiff, the whimsical, arty creative Ruby developer who went missing last year. The post gives a good roundup of Why's creative output and includes a video of a presentation he gave at the ART && CODE Symposium.

Yehuda Katz On Character Encodings in Ruby

ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, SHIFT-JIS.. is it all just double dutch to you? Even if not, Yehuda Katz's guide to character encodings in Ruby is a great read. He goes into how Ruby 1.9 handles different character encodings, as well as the pitfalls to be aware of.

HDDN - A New HD Video Content Delivery Network Launches Today

NetDNA kindly provides Ruby Inside (and many other blogs, including CopyBlogger) with content delivery network (CDN) services, meaning that Ruby Inside should load pretty fast around the globe. Today they've launched an all-new service called HDDN - High Definition Distribution Network. HDDN is basically an international CDN for HD video. If you're on Twitter, you could be in with a chance to win one of four six-month video streaming packages by tweeting about the contest.

fbgraph - FaceBook Open Graph Ruby API

fbgraph is a new Ruby library by Nicolas Santa that provides access to the Facebook Open Graph API.