(SUMMARY) Note : If you end up enjoying this post, you should do two things (I am paying customers for both and get nothing in return). sign up for Pusher and then subscribe to destroy all software screencasts , or vice versa. For those that do not know,...

In the spirit of keeping myself honest, here's what I've touched on open source work over the past week. Most of it isn't spectacular, but I did manage to do something every day in January and I'm happy about that.

• RubyGems Guides - This was where I did most of my work the past week, bringing in a new Contributing page and taking editing passes over a few other pages. Details are in the repo.
• RubyGems - Deprecated the separate contribute repo and retargeted the Contribute link on the RubyGems.org home page to point to the Guides Contributing page instead.
Show me the cookies - Updated the documentation for this Capybara addon.
• What's New in Edge Rails -Finished up #6 in this series.

A few orts to close out the work week.

• Jason - Free JSON viewer and editor for OS X.
• The History of Rubinius - Evan Phoenix offers some insights into the origin and growth of Rubinius.
• Ruby Freelancers - New site featuring a podcast for those interested in getting started.
• Yes, You Should Write Controller Tests! - Argues that as classes, they need test coverage in every method. I find that recently I've been writing a lot more integrations than functionals to achieve that, though.
• Shef Tips and Tricks: Steppiong Through Chef-client Runs with Shef - An introduction to the interactive console for the Chef automated provisioning system.
• Backbone.js: A Roundup for Beginners - Start here with a bunch of links to other resources.
• Customising ActiveRecord's attribute formatting on inspect - Yes, it can be done. And it's useful.
• Unicode Character 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9) - Yes, it's really part of the standard.
• The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources - Yep, you have fun with that.
• StratifiedJS - Another approach to concurrency programming in JavaScript.

Another long day looms.

• Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past - Yeah. Almost. Getting better though. I've got two clients now concentrating on modern browsers, so feeling hopeful.
• List.js - JavaScript to search/sort/filter plain HTML lists.
• Beautiful Docs - Collection of links to well done developer documentation.
• Capybara, Cucumber, and How the Cookie Crumbles - This was helpful in sorting out a testing quandary this morning, though I'm not 100% happy with mocking the CookieJar.
• Rubular - You probably already know this Ruby regex tester. Now it's updated with a choice of ruby versions.
• The Wunderkit beta goes public - Welcome one and all! - New web/iPhone/Mac collaborative project and other stuff management app takes the wraps off.
• iBooks HTML Widget Boilerplate - If the license didn't turn you off, people are building authoring aids for iBooks now.
• CoffeeScript - Interactive reference for iBooks, $4.99. You can read it, or edit and run the examples.
• A Chat with Nick Quaranto About RubyGems.org Internals - Including some notes on how you can help out.

(SUMMARY) Hello again from the Data team! We are excited to start 2012 with a new Beta release: PostgreSQL 9.1 is now in Beta and available in every new environment. Features Here is a short summary of the exciting features of PostgreSQL 9.1; for more...

Software is cool. Health insurance is painful.

• Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0 - Looks like the new iteration of Twitter's UI framework is live.
• The Front Line - If I had any important content on Flickr I'd sure be backing it up elsewhere now. Firing your topline support is a bad sign.
• Compass/Rails Integration in v0.12 - A new gem offers tighter integration of the Compass CSS framework with Rails 2.3+, including the asset pipeline.
• A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB - With some detailed notes on the quirks of the API.
• "Can you solve this program for me on the whiteboard?" - Detailed demolition of interview-by-whiteboard, using a fun little analogy. Not that it'll convince anyone who interviews that way.
• psd.js: You Guessed It - A Photoshop Document Parser in CoffeeScript - Insane but interesting.
• Why Serenade? - Another JavaScript MVC framework hits the streets, with an attempt to return to the original definition of MVC.
• Initializr 2 - HTML5 responsive template generator.
• Zsh is your friend - I supposed some day I'll need to try zsh.

Time to move a few of these browser tabs from my desk to yours.

• CocoaPods - Like Bundler, but for Objective-C.
• Vim for Rails developers - "browse Ruby, RSpec and Rails docs quickly."
• Support Details - Quick sniffing of browser settings to help you troubleshoot customer issues.
• HTML5 Storage Wars - localStorage vs. IndexedDB vs. Web SQL - Summary: it's a mess.
• SQLCipher 2.0 Released - A 256-bit transparent encryption add-on for SQLite.
• Backbone.js 0.9.0 - Here's the changelog.
• I've finally decided that REST is Stupid - It'd be nice if this provoked some discussion. I tend to agree that some of Rails' conventions are senseless.
• Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting - Complete with some recommendations for low-cost hosting.
• DMARC.org - A new standard for more aggressive email authentication. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Mou - Markdown editor for web developers. Currently in free beta.
• The evil unit test - There are some good points in here about writing sensible tests, though overall it's a bit muddled.

(SUMMARY) The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.6.6. Homepage:  http://www.jruby.org/ Download:  http://www.jruby.org/download The primary goal of the 1.6.x series is to round out our 1.9 support by fixing any reported...

Week of January 22-28, 2012

Not so much, really. There were still plenty of cleanup commits during the week, but new features slowed to a trickle.

• c8504b1b deletes ActiveSupport::TestCase#pending. We can all just use skip instead.
• 080bd83d introduces a create_join_table migration helper to easily create HABTM join tables. About time.

(SUMMARY) Jbuilder provides a DSL for generating JSON. It includes a template engine which allows you to create complex responses with helpers and conditions.