To help keep people from only listening to the naysayers and learn for themselves… Scott has provided a new page that has all the essential Git information in one easy spot.

As far as I can see, Scott has quickly become the ‘go to’ guy when it comes to all things Git.  He’s provided many informative screencasts as well as a fantastic book, and now this!  I suggest that you all go out and Git a look at this new site. (sorry… I couldn’t help myself)Similar Posts:

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I know what you’re all saying… it’s been done before.  There have a been a few, ActiveCollab being one promising version until they went to a pay app.  The Railscollab project took what ActiveCollab had and made recoded using Rails, which is way cool.  I would love to contribute to that project but it’s really a clone of a clone (which originally was a php app).

The decision was finally made to start from scratch using rails to create a Basecamp clone that would be completely RESTful with some extra added functionality.  This would be a huge learning experience for myself and also I would love it if other contributed as well.  You can find the project at Github.  Please fork the repo and let me know what you would like to see or what changes you have made!Similar Posts:

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Alrighty, I recently finished the video presentation from last months Ruby Meetup. After playing around with many different video services, I have decided to upload to Viddler.

Also, as you can see the video quality is not the best. Do any of you have some words of wisdom on compression settings or anything like that to make my life a bit easier? O yeah, and if anyone knows how to do that split screen action like Rails Envy has recently done… I’d like to know about that too.

And now… here is Wil Chung speaking about his social experiment, Mobtropolis.

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Just wanted to let everyone know and of course if you’re a member of ChicagoRuby… don’t forget to use your discount code for some extra discount!

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Hello

RunMyProcess is happy to announce a new feature that will increase its possibilities of connection to web applications.

RunMyProcess is now able to emulate the behaviour of a Web Browser.

Therefore, for example, although Basecamp does not provide API to create/update/delete Project/Company/People (operations which you can only perform through your Web Browser), RunMyProcess will emulate a human behaviour to perform such actions: with a specific login service, you will connect to Basecamp server and then perform any operation as if you were connected through your navigator.

We are pretty sure, you will have other needs of such a functionality to retrieve data or perform action on any Web site.

Don’t hesitate to call us for any information

Best regards

RunMyProcess Team
http://www.runmyprocess.com

I understand this is just an ‘example’, but has anyone told them that Basecamp has an API?Similar Posts:

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To begin, I wanted to say that the basis for this article orginally came from a post over at Garbage Burrito on how to get a Mac-esque development environment using windows. After being asked a few times at my local Ruby group how I develop on a Windows machine… I have decided to go a little more in depth and show you exactly what I’ve come up with. So here we go!

Most of you may already know that Sqlite3 is the default database used by Rails now in 2.02. This can be easily changed using the ‘-d’ parameter when using your ‘rails’ command. The reason I mention this is because I’ve been using Sqlite3 for a bit and have had a bit of difficulty when it comes to using add_column in my migrations. For that reason I am going to suggest installing MySQL. If you know what you’re doing and don’t want MySQL, go ahead and skip this step.

Step 1 | With that being said… Go install MySQL. You can easily find it at their site. I suggest not grabbing the ‘Essentials’ version just to make sure that you have everything you need if the time comes. Make sure you go through the installer and at the end you’ll want to use the ‘Server Instance Config Wizard’ to setup the server.

Step 2 | Go install e-Text Editor! I have used a bunch of text editors to try and get that TextMate feel but this is so far the closest Windows alternative. If you like it, please buy it. The creator updates very frequently and I’m sure he would love your support.

Step 3 | Since e-Text Editor is a TextMate clone… it uses a lot of UNIX commands. So we’ll now need to now install Cygwin. This is a emulated UNIX shell that can run under Windows. This also helps since a lot of the tutorials for Rails were created under Mac/Linux… you can easily follow along. Pretty much click through the installer. There are only a couple places to make sure settings are correct. When you hit the ‘Choose Installation Directory’ screen, you will want to make sure that ‘Install For’ is set to ‘Just Me’ and the ‘Default Text File Type’ is set to ‘Unix / binary (RECOMMENDED)’. These are probably the default settings but I wanted to make sure that you get this correct. Go ahead and continue clicking through the installation screens until you get to the ‘Select Packages’ screen. Think of these as a list of ‘addons’ for Cygwin. You will need a bunch of them so I will list all that I use. To make it easier, click on the ‘View’ button until it changes to ‘Full’. Now we can see all packages available. These are the packages I have installed (many are selected by default but these are extras you will need):

• curl
• gcc (needed to compile certain gems)
• git
• grep
• keychain
• make (needed to compile certain gems)
• ruby
• rsync (it’s useful for other things not Rails related)
• sqlite3
• subversion
• subversion-ruby
• wget
• which

Go ahead and finish going through the installer. It may install for a while, that is normal.

Step 4 | Do yourself a favor and install Console. This very useful program lets you have tabbed command prompt windows open. Once that is installed you will want to go into settings and add a tab for Cygwin. Name it whatever you want but you’ll want to enter this command ( c:\cygwin\bin\bash –login -i )into the shell field. Enough said.

Step 5 | Install Ruby Gems. Download and unzip to your system. I put mine in the root directory, doesn’t really matter where it goes. Once you have that done… use Cygwin to navigate the the Ruby Gems folder. Then install Ruby Gems by invoking setup.rb.

1. cd c:
2. cd /Ruby\ gems (or where ever you put it)
3. ruby setup.rb

Step 6 | Install Rails. Now what you’ve all been waiting for… Ruby on Rails. Rails will come to you as a ‘Gem’. It’s really just a kind of package management, which is really great for keeping things up to date. You can install any gem using the ‘gem’ command and a sequence of parameters.

• gem install rails --include-dependencies

When going through this process, the package management will ask you to install other gems as well. These are OK as Rails has dependencies and we want them included. These should be:

• actionpack
• activerecord
• activeresource
• activesupport
• rake

Step 7 | Install other needed Gems. This may be different for all of you, but since we are using MySQL… we should install the gem that binds rails to it. I will also list some others that I have been using. Please let me know what you start out with in the comment section.

• gem install mysql
• gem install mongrel
• gem install haml (purely preference)
• gem install rspec
• gem install rspec-haml-scaffold (purely preference)

Step 8 | Try it out! Hoping that I didn’t miss anything here… this should work! From now on you’ll be using Cygwin as your command line editor. When you start Cygwin, you should be placed in your ‘home’ directory. I usually make a directory called ‘websites’ or something similar. I recommend this so you don’t have your projects scattered all over your home directory.

• mkdir websites

Now you will want to cd into your ‘websites’ directory so that we can make a new Rails project. Go ahead and make the obligatory test blog using this command.

• rails blog -d mysql

Again, now that Sqlite3 is the default database for Rails… you’ll need to add the ‘-d’ parameter with what database you’d like to use. As previously discussed, we will be using MySQL.

If all works correctly, you should see Rails creating your directory structure and all is well! If not, go ahead and leave a comment on how much I suck at writing tutorials. :-)

Hope this helps the Rails/Windows community and again please let me know if there is anything I can add to this article.

Thanks to Ben Kittrell of Garage Burrito for laying the ground work with his original article.

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Now I know that you would need to take into account for people using screen readers or possibly someone that turns off styles, but for the most part… this method should work. I will be implementing this in my next project and hope to post an update with what I’ve found.

Ned Batchelder also has some useful information on stopping spam bots with a similar method.Similar Posts:

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[amazonify]0596529864::text::::Learning Ruby[/amazonify]

• Author: Michael Fitzgerald
• ISBN 10: 0-596-52986-4
• ISBN 13: 9780596529864
• Reviewer: Matt Polito

Learning Ruby is exactly what the title says. This book offers a great ‘introduction’ to Ruby as a fun, powerful language. Now I would say that as a Ruby user, I’m not quite advanced but not really a beginner. I would have to say that this book is definitely catered to someone very new to the Ruby world. The books author, Michael Fitzgerald, uses a very easy to read style of writing that, to me, made this read far easier than a normal technical book. He uses this same easy to follow/read style in Ruby Pocket Reference and Learning XSLT as well.

Inside you will find small easy to digest chapters that give a quick explanation on what you’ll need to know such as: blocks, arrays, loops, functions. The basic stuff that will lay the groundwork. I believe that the books description may be the most accurate depiction of this book. It does not lie about it’s intent. Going in you will know that this is a book that will show you how to get started and really primes you for other more in-depth books (The Ruby Way).

Personally I didn’t really understand why at the end of the book you get an extremely brief introduction to Rails. The only reason I think is because on the cover you get a tag line of ‘The Language That Powers Rails.’ So they kind of needed to put something in there. That is really the only grief I found with the book. While doing some searching for other reviews of this book… I found that many people didn’t like it, but I truly believe that those people may have already been using Ruby for a bit. Then of course this book would seem like a waste. It is what it is and that’s a beginner’s introduction.

Rated: *** out of 5Similar Posts:

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Update: You can now view the slideshow here, courtesy of Scribd’s own ‘iPaper’.

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Anywho, the article is great because he documented the whole thing with how long it took each task as well as, and more importantly, linked to everywhere that was a great help to him. Even though most of the articles I have already seen… it was nice to see them compiled into something complete.  I enjoyed it and I hope you do as well.Similar Posts:

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