To install: gem install rak

Rak is useful for searching Rails code through the console. Search results are displayed with the search terms highlighted, which is very useful.

Go ahead, give it a spin!

Kathy Sierra once wrote an excellent post on the addiction to email-checking. The same goes for Campfire, constantly checking it for new messages can drive you insane.

Solution? Tinder.

Install Tinder and run the following ruby script:

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require 'rubygems'
require 'tinder'
campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new 'your_domain'
campfire.login 'your_login', 'your_password'
room = campfire.find_room_by_name 'Development'
def self.knotify title, msg
  # shows message on screen
  system "dcop knotify default notify eventname \'#{title}\' \'#{msg}\' '' '' 16 2"
  # plays alarm sound
  system "dcop knotify default notify eventname \'#{title}\' \'#{msg}\' '/usr/share/sounds/KDE_Error_2.ogg' '' 1 2"
end
room.listen do |m|
  if !m.nil? and m[:message].size > 1
    knotify(m[:person], m[:message].gsub("'",""))# knotify doesn't like this character
  end
end

Note that the script currently works for KDE only, but the knotify method could be replaced with a call to Growl for Apple users. Also, it’s best to use a login name that is already on the channel so the bot doesn’t get kicked out of the chat room after being inactive.

We’ve also used Tinder to hook Campfire up with Subversion, Trac and Capistrano.

Sweet.

The author is a PHP hacker and it was interesting to see that according to him, PHP has had it’s fair share of the same question people keep asking about Rails: “Does it scale?”

The distinction between performance and scalability is made very clearly in the book and a scalable system is defined as one that has thee characteristics:

• It can accommodate increased usage.
• It can accommodate an increased dataset.
• It is maintainable.

Rails passes all these tests for the same reasons PHP does. An increased dataset is accommodated in the database layer, an increased user-base is accommodated though the “share nothing” architecture and as for maintainability, Rails passes with flying colours.

Simon Willisson’s talk on FOWA (slides, video) was an eye opener and OpenID seems close to reaching a tipping point.

David Heinemeier Hansson has recently shown interest, Dan Webb posted the Rails based The No Shit Guide to Supporting OpenID in your Applications and East Media Group have made a plugin available.

Following the Rails community’s reaction to this will be interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if OpenID support becomes native to Rails in the near future.

The hack is basically an IRC bot, called IRCCat (as in cat to IRC), that listens to messages on some port and sends them to an IRC channel the developers are logged onto. This can be used to make commits to Subversion, ticket changes on Trac or any other event in a development environment become part of a chat conversation.

Now that IRCcat has been open sourced, implementing this for Capistrano deploys will be very straight forward.

Extremely useful.