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Rails Views,

I thought one or two of you might be in the market for a nice, full-time Rails job, and wouldn’t mind moving out to beautiful Broomfield, CO to do it. On the downside, you’d be working with me ;-)

Here’s the blurb:

RubyForge Theme

Tom Copeland recently brought to light the existence of my RubyForge theme. It’s been around for awhile, but not something we really announced (just a mention on the credits page).

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who’ve elected to use the theme. If you’re in the market for a change of pace, please try out the theme. Your feedback (as always), is welcome.

The Problem with Solutions

If there’s anything that there’s a lot of these days, it’s Javascript.

Seriously, take a look around. It’s everywhere. We’re not talking about the dumb marquee scripts and other “toys” that constituted the Dark Age of Javascript, either– it’s been the Rennaissance of Javascript for a while now– with Web 2.0, smart people are putting spectacular things together with Javascript every day.

Hopscotch

Moved servers and changed stuff around a bit, so things might be hectic for a day or two. I’ll get the feeds working from the old URLs here shortly.

I’d put animated construction banners up just to be nostalgic, but I don’t feel that lame today.

Getting to know Io

Those of you who know me well know that I’m a fan of languages. You could say this is one of my defining characteristics– right next to my addiction to caffeinated beverages

Provided a language meets a small set of criteria (cross platform, free) and has some unique characteristic(s) that catch my attention, I’ll give it a look. To do otherwise would just be narrow-minded (which is the same thing as being self-destructive, as a developer).

A Child is Born (again)

My second child (and son), Jamis Peter Williams, was born at 8:46pm MST yesterday, the 11th of September.

We’re tired, and excited, and happy– and tired. I’ll get back to the grindstone soon, but I’m taking a short break for now.

Hotkey Plugin

Recently I needed to add hotkeys to our application for quick navigation. The result of this work is the Hotkey plugin, which I’m releasing today.

The Hotkey plugin consists of a Javascript file and three helpers that use it. You can add a hotkey using Javascript directly using the Hotkey.add() function in your application.js, or you can use the helpers in your templates. Here’s a few examples of helper usage:

Calling an action remotely:

<%= hotkey_to_remote :d, :url => {:controller=>'some_controller'} %>

Changing browser location:

Rails Views, Upgrade to 1.1.6!

A quick aside, since it’s important:

In case you haven’t already heard the news, make sure you upgrade to 1.1.5 1.1.6 immediately due to a security issue in previous versions of Rails.

If you’re running Edge Rails, you’re okay.

patch-and-other-tidbits

Rails Views, Rails Edge

Recently I accepted an invitation to be a speaker at The Rails Edge, a series of unique Rails-related conferences brought to you by the folks at The Pragmatic Studio. It’s an honor to be included alongside some of the smartest Rubyists/Railers out there.

Buzzwords and Pitchforks

A large portion of my life has been dedicated to the study of language. I studied and worked professionally with Arabic for a number of years, and have picked up little bits and pieces of various other languages as I’ve played around with them. I’m learning Hindi now, though more slowly than I’d like (anyone giving away free Hindi lessons near Boulder, CO?), and I’ll probably continue to tinker with languages until my dying day.

A Cup Full Of Why: 32 Why The Lucky Stiff Links | Rails Fire

A Cup Full Of Why: 32 Why The Lucky Stiff Links

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whymo.pngSince Why The Lucky Stiff's supposed disappearance yesterday, I've been coming across a lot of interesting links with mirrors of his projects, discussions surrounding his disappearance, and lots of other juicy stuff. I think it's worth keeping track of this stuff so I'm kicking off a compilation post dedicated to Why related links.

If you have any useful resources you want to link to, leave a comment and I'll try and include them here so this post can act as a reference point.

Disappearance and Discussion

Where is _why? A Reddit discussion - An epic discussion (443 comments at time of writing) on Reddit about Why's disappearance. The top moderated comment is a little mean: "Why couldn't DHH disappear instead?" Nevertheless, some interesting points come up, including a bit of detective work that resolves whytheluckystiff.net's IP address to the same as that for cewki.com which asks where Why is (Hampton Catlin has a roundup of this line of inquiry).

Who Is Why The Lucky Stiff? - A site that supposedly reveals Why's true identity as "Jonathan Gillette" due to headers in ruby-talk mailings.. but I'm not buying it. A lot of commentators have blamed this site for Why's disappearance though. It's not known who put this site up.

Hacker News: _why is no more - The Hacker News and discussion of Why's disappearance. Somewhat more mature and well meaning than the Reddit discussion.

Where and _why - A discussion about Why's disappearance on MetaFilter (of which Why was a reader). It eventually turns into a discussion about how C# is or isn't turning into Ruby. There's also a thread from July 2004 when Why's book was featured there.

"why the lucky stiff" Vanishes - Heise Online's coverage of Why's disappearance.

Why's Code and Contributions

A GitHub mirror of Why's projects - A user called "whymirror" has been formed on GitHub and features forks and mirrors of Why's projects, including Shoes, The Poignant Guide, Camping, and Hpricot.

Why's most favorited Twitter messages - favstar.fm collates the "most favorited" tweets for Twitter users, and this is a compilation of Why's top tweets. It includes some classics:

trying to reading dhh’s articles on himself, but his website is so drenched in axe body spray that it has more of a tear gas effect.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game. all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive.

An HTML mirror of The Poignant Guide - Courtesy of GitHub Pages, the Poignant Guide is back online in all its former glory.

A PDF mirror of The Poignant Guide - We've put up a mirror of a PDF version of Why's famous Poignant Guide.

ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack - A recent(ish) presentation by Why at the ART && CODE Symposium. This is a great way to see him "in the flesh."

The soundtrack to why's (poignant) guide to ruby - archive.org has a mirror of the soundtrack to the Poignant Guide as performed by Why's band, The Thirsty Cups. 8 MP3s. I find archive.org to be frequently unreliable so if you like these you might want to mirror them yourself.

A screenshot of tryruby.hobix.com - tryruby.hobix.com was a Web version of irb, the interactive Ruby interpreter. While it's down, codepad.org might be useful, though it's not really the same thing.

The Shoebox - A repository of Shoes applications. This Web site was not owned by Why, hence it's still up.

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Commemorations

Eulogy to _why - JavaScript supremo John Resig dedicates a few words to Why's memory.

So long and thanks for all the hoodwinks - Robby Russell of Planet Argon gives a salute to Why's memory.

Why the Lucky Stiff on Twins and Drawing - A video made to some spoken word by Why. A couple of quirky stories.

The Belljar, the Space, and My Daughter's Organ Instructor - A commemorative video by "Raymond" set to Why's music.

A Commemorative Milk Carton for Why

The "Missing why the lucky stiff" Facebook group - Already up to 9 members..

Twitter search for _why - Thousands of tweets commemorating or mentioning Why.

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Why's Still Online.. Sorta

Why hasn't deleted all of his accounts. Others still exist:

His Advogato account - Features a rather intriguing poem as well as 54 blog posts.

The "why the lucky stiff" Wikipedia entry

Why's Reddit account

Why's YouTube account - Features three videos in Why style.

Why's Vimeo account - With only one video - Hello World, the Song.

Photos of Why The Lucky Stiff on Flickr

Added: Supposedly Why was in a band (as his non-psuedonym self) called The Child Who Was A Keyhole and the album art certainly attests to that. So.. perhaps you might want to buy their CD from CDBaby?

Top photo credit: pdcrawley - Licensed as CC 2.0 A-N-SA

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