I was recently wanting to do an Extract Superclass refactoring in a Ruby on Rails solution which uses MongoDB and the glorious MongoMapper. Being somewhat new to MongoDB and MongoMapper, I was a bit scared about this refactoring. I also had collections full of data that I didn’t want to screw up. I knew it would require massaging those documents, and also playing to the way MongoMapper handled inheritance.

As you may know, I love how the Ruby community shares stuff. You see sharing everywhere…

• Radiant CMS Extensions

If you’ve ever used Ruby on Rails you’ll be aware of the goodness that is script/console. The console lets you interact with your domain model from a terminal - no need for dedicated GUI screens or tools.

I’m a big fan of BaseCamp – an online project management tool. BaseCamp also gives you WriteBoards, which are roughly analogous to shared, online MS Word Documents.

I was trying to find a neat way of running background jobs for a Rails app I’m working on.

I was rather pleased to find that this is well trodden ground. There are at least six solutions that can help me. Ah, the wonders of the code n’ share Ruby community…

Ruby on Rails introduced me to some great helpers for for date and time. Rails lets you write code like this:

This is the friendliest console-based-installer I’ve ever used:

Now this is interesting.

Heroku lets you build and deploy Ruby on Rails applications entirely through a web browser, no local installation needed at all.

Well, there it is - the MacBook air was announced within the last hour at MacWorld. I was following the live blog at CNET!

I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited to hear about the new Apple product launches.

I’m personally really hoping that some kind of Slimline MacBook will hit the shelves soon, and that an ace iMac-style docking station will follow soon after, assuming the rumors are correct :)

I’ve been giving NetBeans 6.0 a few hours of usage after downloading it reccently, and thought I’d share my thoughts and findings.

I just downloaded NetBeans 6.0 for use with Ruby on Rails).

I’m really really looking foward to trying out JetBrains IntelliJ with Ruby extensions.

I’ve been wanting to use Rails with a master/slave MySQL setup for years. But the problem we’ve had is that ActiveRecord can’t be told to read from one server, but write to another.

I don't know about you, but I've always wanted a better, sexier shell for Windows. I've messed about with various DOS shell alternatives over the years, without settling on anything. However, today I think I've found something rather promising. It's called Console, it's Open Source, and you can get it at SourceForge.