Rails 1.1: Release Candidate 1 available. It’s been roughly three months since the release of the big one-oh. That’s obviously an eternity in Rails time, so its about high time we’re getting ready for the release for 1.1. And boy, is this an exciting upgrade! I do believe this is the biggest upgrade to Rails [...]

Interview with Tobias Lutke of Shopify. The decidedly right-brained Amy Hoy sat down for an interview with with core member and Rails old-timer Tobias Lutke. They talk about Jaded Pixel’s greatly anticipated Shopify as well as its theme builder, Vision. Maybe Amy will start doing interviews like this more often… [Riding Rails]

Hardware setup behind the Robot Co-op. The Robot Co-op’s umbrella of Rails apps, including 43 Things and 43 Places, has become one of the poster children of large scale Rails applications in production. For all those wondering how they are scaling to 2.5 million requests/day, Eric Hodel has posted a breakdown of their hardware setup. [...]

Rails and the Agile book win top honors at Jolt awards. Tonight at the Software Development Jolt Awards, Rails won the best web development tool award while the canonical Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, won for best technical book. They find themselves both in fine company. Both DHH and Dave Thomas share their [...]

I am writing from your future – part 2. In my last post on the subject of separation from the corporate mothership, I was trying to raise awareness that your life in the corporate fast lane, or even in the mail room, is finite. There are solutions, but they all require tough decisions. Jane Chin [...]

Alternating Contrast in HTML using Ruby and Rails. The Rory on Rails site has a quick tip on using the cycle helper method in Rails. This will allow you to alternate background colors per post (for example) in a comment thread window or for a particular news day.  [house of warwick : Steve Kirks]

Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service launched. Amazon has released an off-site backup program called S3, for Simple Storage Service. It is aimed primarily at developers, letting you store up to 100Gb in files for $15 per month, with bandwidth charged at 20 cents per Gb transferred. The only access to file storage and retrieval [...]

Airport Security Failure. At LaGuardia, a man successfully walked through the metal detector, but screeners wanted to check his shoes. (Some reports say that his shoes set off an alarm.) But he didn't wait, and disappeared into the crowd. The entire Delta Airlines terminal had to be evacuated, and between 2,500 and 3,000 people had [...]

Mailroom Manages Small Business Mail. I am constantly looking for new products that will make my own business more efficient and perform better, and while finding a lot of good solutions for key problems, more often I find solutions to problems that I hadn’t really thought of. The latest solution that I am using now [...]

Libraries, residents not on same page, study finds. The Boston Public Library system is underperforming most big city library systems, even though it has a bigger budget, more staff, and more books per capita than most, according to a study performed for the city. [Boston Globe -- Front Page]