April 15, 2010: The Library of Congress Recommends the Following Tweets
Top Story
As part of the Chirp conference, Twitter and the Library of Congress jointly announced that the Library will be storing Twitter’s entire public archive.
I’m sure your expecting an easy joke about how many sandwiches the LoC now knows about in their archive, or about how scholarly papers about the archive will be limited to 140 characters. (Or, for a more academic joke, limited to 140 authors…) All that aside, though, I think archiving and making all this available is pretty neat.
Book Status
Still messing with Capybara and Webrat. Somewhat hampered by the fact that most of the usage of these tools is via Cucumber, so there’s not a lot of documentation on them as standalone tools (particularly Capybara). Muddling through, though.
Also, the prags announced the beta release of the fourth edition of Agile Web Development with Rails.
Tab Dump
Rails Dispatch has their second post, which is another overview of Bundler and library management.
Two Ruby tip articles caught my eye. This one, by Alan Skorkin, is a complete overview serializing objects with Ruby. And here’s a small tip from Ruby Quick tips about ensuring that an incoming option hash has only certain keys. I think the benefit of doing that is as much in revealing intention as anything else.
In our Agile section, we’ve go Nicolas Alpi reviewing what it is like to pair program. I have a half-written post on pairing floating around MarsEdit here… I’m still ambivalent about it even after largely pairing for the last six months. I think some of that is a personality thing, but I also think the idea that pairs do a better job of staying on track has been a little oversold – it happens, but there are other offsetting issues. I really should finish that other post.
Also, part two of Kent Beck unedited and screencasting about testing. I admit I haven’t watched this part yet.
And Finally,
Don’t take your iPad to Israel (insert holy tablet joke here), as of a couple of days ago, the Israeli government has been blocking them at customs pending approval of their WiFi and security standards. In the meantime, those people who tried are being charged for every day the iPads sit in customs, and also agreed to pay a 16% Value Added Tax according to Israeli law.