Last RORO Sydney meetup I did a talk on DRYing up your views.

I was very pleased with how it went – this really does get easier with practice! The first couple of slides were dropped, but you didn’t miss much of note :)

We’re really starting to refine the workflow for recording talks and I’m planning a write up of our experiences so far.

Big thanks to Tim Lucas for putting this months’ ‘casts together.

The Rails log is a very valuable resource. It contains a lot of information and its relatively easy to read.

However, I find that It doesn’t take long to get pretty sick of scrolling around, visually decoding, not to mention that the ansi covered SQL is a pain.

Logeye is my itch-scratcher to make it better and more useful. You point it at either your RAILS_ROOT or directly at a log file, and watch the requests flow past as you develop your app.

Download

Logeye 0.3.6

Features and problems

• In the open dialog you select RAILS_ROOT, not the log file itself.
• Double click a log entry to open the corresponding controller file in your editor (set in preferences)
• You can set window alpha, and make the windows float above other apps (set in preferences)
• The zoom + does something useful.

Upcoming Features

• filtering, searching
• smarter opening.
• refined log details view with visual distinction for each kind of line.
• easy copying of SQL.
• easy opening of files referred to in backtraces.
• backtrace filtering.

update 1 2007/08/19

Released Logeye 0.3

changes:

• refined look
• ability to open log files directly
• parsing of intra-request fluff

update 2 2007/08/19

Released Logeye 0.3.5

changes:

• now opens nested controllers
• it remembers which logs it was tailing last time you had it open and reopens them
• more looks

Logeye 0.3.6 is a minor bugfix

A while back I gave a talk at the Sydney Rails Group about Hornsby, my plugin for example based modeling. I always meant to release it, but as it got a work out it never really gave me the satisfaction I craved.

Recently, there was an Err post about layering a DSL over fixture scenarios. The idea of an expressive DSL for setting up test or spec data was super, but I had trouble getting it to work with RSpec. Oh and fixtures? Why cling to these much maligned giblets of yaml?

So here’s Hornsby, reborn: A Scenario Builder without the fixture pain.

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On the 18th of August I hosted a RoRo Hax day. 13 people turned up bright and early (for a Saturday) and got hacking on diverse Rails and Ruby stuff.

Lone baked up a storm all day, fueling some great work.

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Well whaddaya know? The second roro Sydney July presentation video has dropped. This time it’s Patrick Crowley from SD Ruby, San Diego talking about his two latest plugins, Headliner and Styler

“Phat models & skinny controllers” is the new catch-phrase of RESTful rails. Of course, in the name of small corèdness, there’s no default implementation of the aforementioned skinny controller, their monotonous commonality notwithstanding.

Camping’s controllers are willfully simpler than rails.

Luke Redpath’s restful_exposure provides a flexible implementation for skinny controllers. The implementation however, gives me the chills. I feel that its willfully complex.

Airbed is my response to these problems, for camping.

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This last Wednesday I did a presentation on Hornsby, at RoRA Sydney’s Ales on Rails night.

It went very well, crashes and lack of polish notwithstanding.