Meta Bates

Twitter is an incredibly rich source of information. I find out about new libraries, applications, plugins, screen casts, etc… But, there’s a problem with is overwhelming amount of information… keeping track of it all. A lot of time I read Twitter when I’m on my phone. I’ll see a link to an article or website, etc… but I don’t have time to read it then, what do I do? How do I find that tweet later? Or what about that announcement or news link for a new service or application that I saw six months ago? How do I find that again?

Twitter is great but it’s ability to help you find specific tweets that are important to you is almost important. That’s why today I’m happy to announce TweetKO.com. TweetKO solves this problem by using the built ‘favorite’ functionality that Twitter offers. From ANY Twitter client you can simply mark a tweet as a favorite and TweetKO will pull it in and save it for you so you can find it later.

That’s it! It really is that simple. TweetKO is FREE and easy to use. In addition to pulling in your favorite tweets you can tell TweetKO to also pull in any tweets you wrote or retweeted, effectively backing up your Twitter history. A powerful search makes finding those tweets simple and easy. Plus you can save those search queries for later use.

Well, I hope you check out TweetKO.com and find it as useful as I do. Enjoy!

http://tweetko.com - Sign up for Free Now!

For the last few years every project or company I’ve worked for has started the same way, by setting up Basecamp, Lighthouse and Hoptoad (or similar ones anyway). Why? Basecamp  - so we could share documents and todos. Lighthouse – so we could track our issues and bugs. Hoptoad – so we could track the errors our application was generating.

These are all very good applications and have served myself and my clients well, but they’ve suffered from several very big flaws. The first big flaw was the cost. You can easily drop $100 or more a month across these different services. But that wasn’t the biggest flaw or problem I’ve had with these services. The biggest problem was lack of integration.

So what do I mean by lack of integration? Well, when an error comes in I want to easily be able to create a new issue from it. When the issue gets resolved, so should the error. If the error reoccurs it should re-open automatically, and so should the issue. I want to be able to create an issue right from a document or be able to attach issues to a document. I should be able to follow the flow from document to issue to error and back again very easily. Unfortunately, these applications don’t give you that level of integration. They offer some level, but just not enough.

Well, my friends, welcome to the future. Welcome to FluxTracker.com. FluxTracker combines a great issue tracker, a project management system, and an error tracker all in one application. Now you can full integration without any configuration, oh, and you can do it at a fraction of the cost!

We know it isn’t easy to switch to a different application, that’s why we’ve made it easy for you. You can easily import your Lighthouse account. FluxTracker also allows you to easily use the Hoptoad Notifier plugin for your project by just setting a few configuration parameters.

So know you know, you’re life can be easier. And you now know how easy it is to get started! So what are you waiting for? Go and sign up for our Free plan and start living the dream.

Ruby 1.9(.2) is an amazing language to develop applications in. It’s faster, more powerful, cleaner, and a huge improvement over Ruby 1.8.x. Because of those reasons every Ruby developer should move to this exciting new version of our language.

Enter CoverMe.

History

While working on a Ruby 1.9/Rails 3 project, and loving everything about it (except for the lack of RCov), I came across a post by Aaron Patterson (of Nokogiri fame). In this post he quickly outlined a very basic coverage tool using the new built-in Coverage module in Ruby 1.9.

After spending a morning playing with it, I was quickly able to grow the idea into something useful for the project. Later that day the company I was consulting for (BiddingForGood.com), and in particular their chief architect, Stuart Garner, told me to take a day or two and clean it up and release it for the world to use, and so here it is.

Features

Here is a brief overview of the features of CoverMe:

Index Page

• Sortable column headers (File, Lines, Lines of Code, Tested %).
• Searching/filtering by file name.
• Filtering by coverage percent.
• Color coded list of files to quickly see which ones are 100% covered, > 90% covered, or less than 90% covered.
• Large color coded average coverage percent, for quick reference.

Detail Page

• Line by line coverage report
• Color coded lines to quickly see which lines where executed and which ones were not.
• Side by side viewing with the corresponding test/spec file (if one exists).

See the README file for more information on installation and usage.

Thanks

I would just quickly like to give another quick thanks to Aaron Patterson for pointing out the Coverage module in Ruby 1.9 and inspiring this, hopefully, helpful little gem. Also another big thanks to Stuart Garner for pushing me to package this up and release it to the world.

Screenshots

Quite often I get asked why don’t I blog more? Why don’t I tweet more? Why don’t I _fill in the blank_ more. The answer is I’m a busy man. I’m the CTO for a pre-funding startup, www.shortbord.com, the father of two adorable little boys, the lead singer of a Boston-based band, www.myspace.com/colawarvets, and that’s just the big stuff! I have to prioritize what I can spend my time on, and unfortunately some of my open source projects are the first to get the ax.

Why do the open source projects always seem to get the ax? Well, let me start by saying that they don’t always get the ax, but they certainly jump to the top of the list. There are certain libraries I’ve written, cachetastic and configatron, are the two most prominent that I use day in and day out. They will always get the love the deserve. Then there are projects like APN on Rails. I wrote it because I had an iPhone app (no longer available) that I wanted notifications for, and there was nothing else available for Ruby to do the job. The plugin took off like crazy and I was overwhelmed with patches, questions, bugs, etc… That was great, and I was happy to help, for a time, but alas, I haven’t written an iPhone app for ages, and I just don’t have time to maintain a plugin that I wasn’t even using.

A while ago I realized that the best thing for APN on Rails, myself, and for the community was to find someone to take over the project so that it got the love it deserved. I put out the call and the good folks over at PRX (Public Radio Exchange) answered the call. The folks at PRX have written some great iPhone apps, including the very popular “This American Life” app.

So I’m happy to announce that the new official home for APN on Rails is now at: http://github.com/PRX/apn_on_rails. I ask that you continue to show the same support to PRX that you have shown to me over the life of this plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone, and thank you to Rebecca Nesson and the folks over at PRX for picking up the project and giving it renewed life.

About.com became the first, that I know about, to review my book, “Distributed Programming with Ruby”. What a great first review to have as well. They rated the book 5 out of 5 stars! The review can be found here.

“Anyone working with distributed programming in Ruby will want this book.”

The only downside they saw in the book, was that they wanted it to be longer! I have to save something for the 2nd edition, don’t I?

If you haven’t purchased yours yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s on sale at Amazon.com right now.

If you have reviewed the book, or know of a review of the book, please pass it along.