Musings of a Trained Monkey

Unspace.ca has released some interesting code to the open source community this year. September 13th, 2006 has them unleashing the first Rails plugin code that will make you want to gouge out your own eyes upon viewing the example code.

"The Agony" in the title of this post relates to the release of the HAML plugin. (Somewhat irresponsibly linked to by me, seriously please don't gouge out your eyes) Why, oh why, did they decide to combine white space sensitivity with HTML? Is there a disgruntled postal worker/Python programmer working there or what? Perhaps it is used in some sort of hazing ritual for their new employees.

On the other hand we have "The Ecstasy", the very useful Datagrid. This is an excellent and worthy open source release. It combines functionality with a great example of use. Granted it would be nice if it was packaged as a Rails plugin, but back in March adding routes in a plugin would have been difficult.

Anyway, I am looking forward to see what Unspace.ca will do next, hopefully they will serve up more of "The Ecstasy"

The Black Keys released a new album called Magic Potion today! Rolling Stone reviews the new album and compares them favorably to Led Zeppelin! Go buy it at iTunes now.

Oh, yeah I will resume posting technical stuff soon-ish :-)

Eric Hodel has announced the release of mem_inspect and png gems. Ryan Davis has an excellent movie assembled showing output from these gems. The beauty of the code behind mem_inspect, like looking at the sun, will make your eyes water if you look at it too long. Seriously though everyone should check it out and gain some Ruby I.Q. points. The excellent RubyInline is used internally and there is a rake task that builds a patched version of Ruby from source, wicked cool stuff guys!

I think this should start people thinking about better ways to gain insight into the Ruby memory heap, at least until YARV arrives and changes the playing field altogether.