upon "expound"
  thrice.dost_thou do
    speaketh("Hark!")
  verily
  ponder(1..3)
verily

"[Given] two Parliamentary Bill URLs, [it] will show the differences between the two versions." Worthy prizewinner at yesterday's Hack The Government Day.

Well, that's handy. I tried doing this for iPhoto (with limited success), but Aperture is probably a better platform for it. If only Photoshop 5.5 hadn't stripped EXIF out of everything I uploaded from 2001 to 2004...

Tom Taylor on his experiences with Heroku. It's definitely one of the three cloud platforms I'd recommend (the others are GAE (of course) and AppJet). Each has strengths and weakness; Heroku seems to be the one that provides the closest equivalent of EC2 whilst still being a platform, rather than raw metal.

OK, so it looks very clean, and I'm sure it works for Brent, but the generate-flat-pages model really doesn't work for comments (as noted) nor for aggregating your activity (which isn't, but which I think is going to become seen as being really quite important). Still, nice to see the thinking spelt out.

Importing CR2s doesn't generate location metadata, so this chap used AppleEvents via Ruby to persist notes after deleting then reinstalling his photos. Sadly, there's no information here about new AppleScript dictionary methods. I'll have to examine that myself, I suppose.

The old hosted Ruby on Rails site, Heroku, is now setting upa a commercial arm; old free accounts (like mine) ar moving to Heroku Garden. This is what I need to do at some point to keep it working. Edit: the gem is broken, I can't find my repository; it all seems to have gone to seed. Sigh.

"If you've ever needed to produce PDF documents before, in Ruby or another language, you probably know how much it can suck. Prawn takes the pain out of generating beautiful printable documents" If Tom and mattb recommend this, I think I can trust it to work.

Looks interesting, although my geo-using projects are in GAE and I've just discovered geopy, which seems to be working. As you'd expect, over in the Rails world there's a bit more magic involved (like "an option to automatically geocode a model's address field on create").

An interesting rant on the future, or perhaps lack of future, of Ruby. It's interesting he mentions the JavaScript arms race- perhaps the next big thing (if it's not actually JS) will be a specification with competing runtimes, rather than the Perl/Ruby model of a single official intepreter.

"osx-trash manipulates the Mac OS X trash from the command line, just like the Finder does." One to remember to install, and then to remember to use.

I really like the flickraw approach. So much so, I can actually talk about it for twenty minutes. Watch out or I'll buttonhole you...

"i wrote a rails plugin called workling that integrates starling into your rails app. it also lets you swap starling for any other system you might want to offload work to, without needing to change your client code." One to install, I think.

A bunch of Bonjour services to enable offline group development. It's all pretty cool, but not much use if you have Internet access and don't have a lot of local developers. Also, *jour looks a bit like Flame.

Apparently quite a good, introspecting, API library for getting to upcoming.org.

Ruby interface to Processing. More for other people than me, I suspect, but then I'm half expecting to find they've already all seen it.

The most important (for dynamic languages generally), I think, is the one about scaling team sizes. His earlier "Lightweight versus heavyweight" post (two back) is worth a look too.

Tom's at it again, this time with an experimental (Gnome) Dashboard style application to get some sort of personal context around your current item of attention (web page, email, that sort of thing). Nicely done, even if the architecture needs work.

"It basically behaves as the normal Ruby 1.9. For instance, all meaningful tests included in the 1.9 distribution are passing" "a Ruby String object is in fact an Objective-C object of the RBString class." Ulp.

This reminds me that I need to sort out my Ruby linking issues and get one or the other of these working.

RFacebook uses Ruby's equivalent of Perl's autoload mechanism. Chad Fowler explains why his Facebooker library uses explicit code instead. The same problems come up with other languages and APIs, too.

This looks like it could be very handy.

[[Mark Fowler]] produces patches to [[Matt Webb]]'s [[plain text wiki]] so that it can use better links than WikiWords.

MattWebb writes a PlainTextWiki for TextMate

Slides from the talks at RailsConf this year.

Notes on scaling Twitter. I make it ~2 requests per second per Mongrel, and ~100 requests per second per server. No sign of that 11k figure either, funnily enough.

Good article by Matt Neuberg, noting that OSA is still important but that Ruby's probably a better fit for scripting these days. Make sure you don't throw out the first item of type baby with the first item of water of container bath.

Some (web 2.0?) company release a Ruby library for the Nabaztag wifi rabbit. They seem to have gone for the "wrap the API a lot" model.

Ruby library for the wifi rabbit