Rails rumble 2008, finally manage to finish sheepfit

The 2 projects launch week.

10 Places left for the rails rumble

The rails rumble team inform us (on their blog) that they manage to open more Rails Rumble seat.

There are now 10 seat left. Hurry up.

WiseStamp, an easy way to implement HTML signature in your emails

Are you looking to attach signature on your Gmail / Aol Mail / Hotmail / Yahoo Mail, without pain ?

WiseStamp Firefox Exension is for you.

This little extension will add a new button on the bottom right of your Firefox status bar. You’ll just have to do a right click, edit, and start your new signature creation.

A basic HTML editor (with Bold, Underline, Link, Center, Image … ) and some very useful Instant Messenger and WebServices helpers icons, like Facebook or linkedin, will be at your disposal on the WiseStamp interface.

Once saved, you’re new signature will be automatically sent with your emails.

The only problem is that WiseStamp is only available for Firefox for the moment.

I was looking for a simple solution for a long time now, thanks to Eric from www.presse-citron.net.

Here is my new signature :

Before starting a new project, take a look.

If you’re planning to start a new project, from scratch, Jim Neath, from Fudge, had the good idea to create Bort, your application skeleton to start without pain.

What is Bort ?

      Ruby on Rails popularity brings to it a lot of very good plugins. And it’s that, on 98 % case, when you start a new project from scratch, you’re going to do every times the same thing.

      From starting your test with Rspec to install the lastest version of RESTFUL Authentication, we do all the same thing every time.

      So Bort is just an easy to use starting point, like the scaffolds sometimes.

How can I play with it ?

      Open a terminal and clone Bort git repository : clone git://github.com/fudgestudios/bort.git  (or download it directly from the GitHub )

      Then a Rake db:migrate will do the magic.

What’s inside ?

      At this time, a Bort fresh installation come with :

1. RESTful Authentication and params
2. User Roles
3. Open ID Authentication
4. Will Paginate
5. Rspec & Rspec-rails
6. Exception Notifier
7. Asset Packager
8. Capistrano recipes

       A rake:bort:[plugin name] will help you to an easy install of some useful plugins.

How can you help ?

        On his blog, Jim Neath calls for developers ideas, so give a look and report bugs/ideas here

NBGit, a Git plugin for Netbeans

Use Git and GitHub on Netbeans (image source : http://www.flickr.com/photos/boboroshi/2591305062/ )

For three months now I’ve managed to migrate my project on the Git version control system.

Just found, yesterday night, a Git plug in for Netbeans. It’s the first version, not all the commands are implemented, but, you will have the commit one, the diff one and the update. For the branches and the tag, you will need to wait a little.

Why use a version control :

A version control is a must have for every kind of project development.

A version control will help you to :

• Save your code
• Keep a trace on what you are doing
• Keep a history of the changes
• View the difference between the old version of the file(s) and the local one
• Keep your modification and your code safe when you work in a team
• Tag and branche your code for a better organization

And more and more and more …

The most commonly used in companies are : CVS or his fork Subversion (svn), Mercurial, Git.

You can find a good review about seven different version control systems on Smashing Magazine.

What is Git :

Git is a distributed version control system. It means that every developer of the team own a copy of the repository on their disk.

This is the one chosen by the Ruby on Rails core team development and now a lot of rails plugins (Before it was SVN).

Pro :

• Distributed version
• Quick (very quick)
• Easy to manage
• GitHub
• Open Source

Cons :

• ? I do not see any for the moment

You can find a Git cheat sheet here and the official website is here.

What’s GitHub :

GitHub is an ‘easy to open’ and cheap Git server repository provider.

Instead of managing a repository server (and the data backup/security/cost … who come with) you can open an account with GitHub and manage free public repositories.

If you need to have some private projects, you can sign up for a pay monthly account from 7$ a month.

It’s really easy to use, and if you’ve already used another version control system the ‘learning curve’ will be very short.

Your repository will be on safe hands, and will be backup on two others servers, and pushing code is only allowed if you give them your SSH keys.

So, and this Netbeans Git plugins :

Netbeans 6.5 comes with some source control plugins, but there ISN’T ANY for Git.

This issue is corrected with the NBGit plugin, purposed by Jonas.

You can find the plugin here and the git repository here. The official website is on http://nbgit.org.

For the moment there are only the basic operations like Commit/Update and Diff, but I hope branches and tags will come quickly.

I tried it yesterday night, it worked fine for me. Perhaps this plugins will help me to decide definitively between my Gedit a la Textmate and Netbeans.

Rails Rumble 2008, I’ll participate

After long hesitation, I finally took a place for the Rails Rumble 2008.

What’s the Rails Rumble :

Basically, you have 48 Hours long to build from scratch a deployable Ruby on Rails web application.

Every team will have a virtual seat. The rumble starts on October 18th 2008 at 00:00 GMT and stops on October 19Th 2008 at 23:59 GMT.

Every team can have between 1 and 4 persons.

You’re not allowed to start coding/design before or after the 48 hours.

Your application will be judge during 10 days after the competition.

Who can participate :

Any Ruby on Rails developer with an idea to develop, all levels.

My Project :

I’ll try to have a complete Online Cv builder working.

My Rails Rumble project page is online, with the Sheep’n Geek team name.

If you have some reasonable ideas for it, I’ll take them to consideration

Sponsors and prizes :

You can find on the Rails Rumble blog all the sponsors names, with their contributions.

And now :

I have my day job, my travel planner project, and this contest … Ho, and our anniversary with my peanut. I’m going to be very busy.

Goog luck to all contestants.

Starting a new project ? Need to find a domain name, bustaname

Like a lot of other website, BustAName will help you on the hard task of finding the perfect domain name.

But BustAName has a little something in plus.

The design is good, usability is really good, response time is very good, with the ajax form you’ll be able to try a lot of combinations in a short time.

Basically you have 2 choices :

1. Add some word on a list, and the website will do every combination possible with all words and check if they are free
2. Just check a domain on a .com / .org / .net

Another very good service to bookmark.

Friday fun, bedposted :D

I’m not really sure if my peanut will like this post, but bedpost is clearly an innovating web application.

This web application is a ’sexual performance’ tracker.

Basically, you have access to a calendar were you’ll track, hours by hours, your different partners.

After that, the web 2.0 magic, will let you access to a bed activity analysis with charts and bars for all your data.

It’s not an application that I’ll use, but the idea is very good (I’ll send it to some friends).

What about you, do you know some funny web application like bedpost ?

Typetester.org, the ultimate tool to test your typo on the web

I’ve just discovered the kind of really useful web application, which is really useful.

With Typetester you can test and compare the render of the most used font directly on your browser.

Really easy to use, you can start with a default text (the Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet) and play with fonts size, color, alignment …

3 Columns for 3 different renders will help you decide which font to use on your website.

Easy and useful, Typetester is a very good application to bookmark.