The git log command is a powerful beast. Combined with a little bit of ruby code, you can quickly run off simple reports to get an understanding of a project in different ways.

First, install gems…

sudo gem install rio curb

Then the script (tweak as needed)….

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

• Radiant CMS Extensions

RubyGems is great for sharing Ruby code libraries.

Just for fun, I thought I’d play with the idea of using rubygems for packaging up .NET libraries. After a few hours of messing about, I finally have this.

Just the other day, I thought I’d try the latest IronRuby to see if I could start using this and Rake in my .NET projects. Low and behold, it’s working great :)

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.

It seems more and more folks are using Rake to automate .NET development tasks. This is great news, and I hope we’ll soon see a community effort to make Rake even more valuable for the .NET developer.

I’m a song-writer, and as any song-writer knows, it’s easy to play the same old chords over and over. To get around this problem, I wrote a Ruby program that generates random songs for me. Well, random chord sequences to be precise. I play the chord sequences on the guitar, and incorporate ones I like into my songs.

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…

I was looking to see if there’s anything like NHibernate in the Ruby world. With Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord is the king of persistence. I thought it would be interesting to poke around at other Ruby ORMS to see what I could find.

I’ve been using with Ruby Rake a few .NET projects (here’s how) for a few weeks now. I’m enjoying it a lot. Here’s why:

I just blogged about setting up Rake with .NET. Based on a few resources online (and some Ruby experience), I’ve cobbled together a quick Rakefile.rb that can build, test and analyze a solution.

Many people have discovered that Rake is a lean, mean, build assisting machine. Even better, some .NET developers enjoying it too. It’s even been praised by some of the industry’s best.

I just blogged about the dire state of code sharing in .NET. The main reason I’ve noticed this is because I have a good reference for comparison - Ruby and Ruby Gems.

Leveraging code written by other developers is a big big deal.

You can ship more features in less time.

PoolParty is a very exciting Rails project.

Imagine being able to set up a ready-to-run cloud VM in 19 LoC? Automatically. From code. In a script. As a nightly batch. Stick it in a for-loop and you could have 30 VMs set up in the cloud in 21 LoC. Amazing.

I’ve been playing with the Git this week.

Trying it locally is all very well, but I now want to try it from various locations and computers. I guess I need a central repository…

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

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.