links for 2008-09-24

Ruby alternative, keep an eye on Aman Gupta's recent project: em-mysql. An EventMachine wrapper around MySQLPlus, it is already showing very promising results:

For Rubyists ready to play with BOSS, Jay Pignata has developed BOSSMan, a library for interacting with the Yahoo! BOSS Web service

Configatron is a new Ruby library that makes it easy to have persistently accessible configuration data available through your Ruby application.

here are several barebones Rails apps that might provide a good base for your own template.

specify that the engine find blog posts, microblog posts, bookmarks, comments, events, images, links from social news websites, or videos.

if you care about replication latency you must not have any long running updates. Queries or transactions containing multiple update queries which add up to long time.

Everything you need to know to build a smoking-fast, no-compromises, gaming PC

The goal of a design document for your manager is to make sure that your manager understands what the main entities of the system are, what the benefits are and, most importantly, what the risks are. The document is your chance to show that you understand the requirements and that you have come up with a plan to meet those requirements.

Apple recently announced it is blocking developers' abilities to distribute iPhone applications outside of iTunes.

EventVue creates social networks based on conferences and events. Because networking is such a valuable component of these conferences, many people would like to see who else will be attending. Users can tag themselves with their companies, job titles, and other criteria, which can help facilitate personal interaction once the conference arrives.

Devver offers a suite of development tools in the cloud that allows developers to run time intensive processes on remote server farms, which it says can improve productivity by 75%. The company is currently focused on the Ruby programming language and automated testing tools (which is says have a multi-billion dollar market), and plans to expand to more lanugages and applications.

Gbridge is a free software that lets you sync folders, share files, chat and VNC securely and easily. It extends Google's gtalk service to a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that connects your computers and your close friends' computers directly and securely. Gbridge has many unique features.

All it does is ask you for a user name, and then pings about 45 services so it can return to you "taken" or "available" for each one.

That’s roughly $765,000 over a few years off roughly the same content. Insight and ideas about how we run our business. Blog entries, PDF, paperback, and conferences.