Neato Tools
I have not posted in more than a month. It has been quite a trying month. I have been married, supervised the birth of my 3 children, build a homeless shelter, and peeled an entire bag of potatoes. Oh ho! Quite a month!
You got me; I didn’t do any of those things. If I had, what an excuse for not posting, huh? I mean, that would be a seriously hectic month. One would be hard-pressed to even tweet in the midst of all of the hectic halabaloo.
Despite all of the lack of not doing things, I haven’t taken the time to even write anything substantial. What I do have are a couple of links or blurbs about new(ish) tools that I find neato and/or useful. I hope you are in agreement. If you have any other suggestions of neato and/or useful things of which you think I should know, than please comment immediately!
Wirble
The Ruby Gem Wirble is so awesome yet so easy to overlook. If you haven’t used it, you have no idea what you are missing. If you have used it, you probably are unable to work without it. Wirble is a set of enhancements for Irb. If you ask me, colorized results and tab completion are enough to make the gem indispensable, but there are a few other features as well. Here’s an example:
codepad
The site codepad.org is a web application along the lines of Pastie. It is a simple paste site. At codepad, however, you can also see your code executed (assuming you are pasting one of the supported languages – yes, Ruby is included). I stole an example from Why’s Poignant Guide to demostrate: http://codepad.org/3jtYZfRD.
shell-fu and dotfiles
You may have already heard of dotfiles.org. It is a site which can be used to upload, download, and share your various configuration files. In particular, things like .bashrc, .vimrc, .screenrc, et cetera. It is certainly worth checking out. Also cool is that world famous Rubyists such as topfunky and _why.
I don’t think that shell-fu is all that new, either, but it’s a good site. It lists user-submitted command-line tips, tricks, and other assorted treats. It’s like bash.org, except most of the items actually have something to do with bash, the shell. (You know, as opposed to creepy social commentary by pale basement-dwellers.) Actually, if you have some tips, please add them. That site is in need of some fresh oil, even if it’s not the fancy, expensive, synthetic stuff that they put in Ferraris.
GitHub
Git. You have all heard about it. Even you short, hard-of-hearing folks in the back. You could not have missed it. People have been yelling it into megaphones while standing atop stages (I’m not even positive that’s not true). If you waste too much time reading what other Rubysists and Rails-ists write online (like me), you have also heard about GitHub. GitHub is a Git repository host, with a bit of a social bend, not to mention the pretty display, the RSS feeds, and more.
I just happen to have a GitHub account. If you’d like to see some of my ‘dotfiles’, you can see them in the mileszs-linux-configs repository. (You should be aware, some of them were mostly written by my friend Aaron.) Use all or part of them, as you wish.
GitHub is currently in their beta-testing, invite-only phase. If you need an invite, I have two (only two!) invites left. The first couple interested emails I recieve can have them.
Conclude Already
Neato, huh? Enjoy! Also, tell me what you think I missed, as I’m sure I missed some cool tools.