MockSMTP.app bills itself as “smart and simple e-mail testing for new apps and websites on Mac OS X” and works as a non-delivering SMTP server so you can trap and review any emails your application sends. The instructions describe how to set it up for a Rails app but it should be usable in many contexts.

As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story

node.js has been really exciting to watch over the past few months and it’s exciting to see Plurk adopting it to serve up “Instant conversations using Comet.” Apparently they ported from JBoss Netty over to node.js and saw a 10 times memory saving! Also getting a lot of buzz is redis and Mathias Meyer has a nice piece on “When To Redis“. It sounds like Redis 2 is going to adopt a Virtual Memory approach, a detailed write-up of which can be found here.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with jQuery this week and found this source viewer invaluable as a way of navigating the library.

Matthew from Bytemark–who I host numerous sites with–has been getting cross with people claiming libel but failing to supply URLs for the supposed instances, so he engaged Carter Ruck to help him work out an appropriate position. His writeup is well worth reading if you bear any responsibility for online discussion fora.

The tremors following the Apple iPad announcement continue to be felt including the ongoing debate about flash. It’s good to see a number of voices (such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Dorian Ray) pointing out that Adobe are well positioned to build tools to help with HTML5 adoption. That would seem a good way forward for them, specially as video players like this one demonstrate the goodness awaiting us.

Handling recurring payments (for subscriptions and the like) tends to be a pain. Recurly looks an interesting entry into that space and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

And then of course there’s Rails 3, now in beta. The announcement is on the rails blog, the release notes are a good place to start. Having had some deployment/gem version issues lately I’m very glad to see bundler stabilising.

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The usual round of Rails 3 updates: Pratik writes about the new Active Record Query Interface. I’ve had trouble with chaining nested scopes, so am very glad to see a better logic implementation, but the real win is that no queries are executed until the results are needed meaning that fragment caching suddenly gets much easier/more reasonable to use. Also on the new API front, Mikel has a piece on the new ActionMailer API which also seems much improved. Naturally with so many pieces about Rails 3 cropping up, posts are emerging linking as many as possible; Maxim Chernyak’s is the most comprehensive I’ve seen so far (though it’s missing my posts on the topic). If you’ve got a few hours free on February 18th, you may like to check out O’Reilly’s free online conference about Rails 3. And if you can’t wait to get started you might like to look at Jeremy McNally’s rails-upgrade gem that may help you on your way.

Caliper is a hosted version of the metric_fu gem, providing a very simple way to get lots of stats about your ruby app. I’ve had trouble getting metric_fu to run cleanly, so this could be a handy tool, though I’d rather get metric_fu properly integrated into my own Continuous Integration system. Speaking of which, my office mate Matt wrote up his experiences setting up Hudson for CI. I’m using Hudson too (partly thanks to Matt’s recommendations) and would highly recommend it.

I enjoyed reading about Tim Bray’s experience teaching his son and his classmates about blogging. Tim’s approach of having the students start by writing seems a great way to instil a positive vision of the web and also introduce a sense that web content isn’t necessarily to be trusted. On an entirely different note, I also enjoyed Russell’s brief piece “lowering the point point” arguing that:

Playing with something like Gowalla or Foursquare is worth doing – to see if it’s worth doing.

It’s been good to see Rachel Andrew blogging more frequently of late and I’m enjoying her pieces about running a small business. I’m particularly intrigued to see what responses come in to her piece about responding to tenders/RFPs as that’s a topic I’ve been wondering about lately too.

Google Sites suddenly becomes more interesting thanks to the addition of a Data API. On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve been watching Tom release extractomatic and Paul release docent with some interest. It used to be that the potential ongoing work of maintenance was a disincentive to releasing tools that others might use, but things like Google App Engine and heroku really help with that.

Oh yes, Google are phasing out support for IE6. Could this be the move that pushes those last hold-out large institutions to upgrade to browsers created less than eight years ago?

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I’ve got quite a few tech books I never get round to using and I’d rather like to reclaim the shelf space they take up. I’ve tried selling some on amazon, but increasingly the meagre returns don’t seem to warrant the effort they take to ship, so I thought I’d list them here and see if anyone wants them. They’re generally in good shape, there’s the odd dog-eared cover here or there but they’re perfectly usable.

If you’d like one and can collect them from me either at home in South Tottenham or from my office in Shoreditch, I’d be happy to pass them along. While I’d love to be able to offer them to people further afield, the cost and the time involved in posting them isn’t an option right now so collection is a must.

• Professional Plone Development
• Eric Meyer on CSS (Voices (New Riders))
• Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails (Expert’s Voice in Open Source)
• Ajax in Action
• Cocoa: Programming for OS X
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide, Second Edition
• Practical RDF
• Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Expert’s Voice)
• Practical Ruby Gems
• Programming Perl (A Nutshell handbook)
• XForms Essentials

(If you’re an author and you see your book above, please don’t take it as me slighting your book, a number of them have been very useful in the past)

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The last week of January’s here already and it seems like I’m still trying to sign off on the same projects I’ve been on all month. It’s not all that bad, really, and the budgets are working out fine (I’m very glad that one of these projects in particular wasn’t a fixed quote). But I’m feeling very ready to move on. Maybe this week will see some pieces being signed off?

The week will once again be about getting things signed off and trying to pin other things down. There are two or three meetings: one to review the work so far on the Greenbelt Programming/Scheduling Database and work out next steps; another to train a client on the CMS I knocked together with CodeIgniter (which I’ve grown to rather like); and a third to kick off the JLL project I mentioned last week.

One of the key reasons I’m keen to get these projects wrapped is the number of exciting ideas floating around the TCO team for building apps of our own. Based on experiences with clients and with our own processes we seem to have a nice list of product ideas. With lots of little projects on the go, sparing attention to work on any of those doesn’t seem realistic, but if we can bring the focus down to just a couple of pieces then maybe it’ll be easier to mark off time to work on our own stuff.

The new office seems to be working well. We’ve begun to meet our neighbours, we have a phone line (DSL should be active by the end of the week). And it’s really quite warm in there–we’re enjoying the novelty of occasionally being too warm. Ben’s been busy furnishing the space with bookshelves, angle poise lamps and other bits and pieces and it’s heading towards being presentable. We’ve still got space for two more regular tenants, and should also have space for people who are just looking for a space occasionally. Drop me a line if you’re interested.

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So perhaps calling these Friday Links was overly ambitious. From now on they’ll be weekend links, which allows me at least a little more flexibility.

This week youtube bought the rights to broadcast Indian cricket. This could be a very big deal.

The jQuery team really have done a marvellous job producing content and getting attention the past few weeks. Here John Resig talks about getting organised, with the new jQuery organisation and a few plans including a conference in London. Also on javascript I stumbled across this round up of progress on bringing ECMAscript 5 features to webkit. Quite a few changes that could be very handy – I’ve always wondered why there was no Object.keys available. And for debugging JS it was very good to see that Firebug 1.5 (with Firefox 3.6 support) appeared shortly before the launch of Firefox 3.6.

There’s continued to be a stream of Rails 3 focussed blog entries. José Valim has a good round up of links regarding generators in Rails 3 – it looks like they and templates (now merged) could be much more useful than they have been in the past. There’s also a nice detailed walk through the changes to the stack in Rails 3 on omgbloglol.com. Over on rails-core there’s been some discussion of how things stand with gem plugins in Rails 3, and Yehuda Katz has continued his excellent exploration of Rails 3 with a walk-through the new Railties approach.

I’m not using solr for search any more, but if I were I’d want to switch to sunspot (I wish I’d found it before diving into acts_as_solr…)

For some entertainment, I enjoyed tinker.it’s “making of” video to go with their space hopper project for Sony Ericsson – control space hoppers via twitter (via mattb) and the Living Craigslist project could be entertaining.

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