Noel Rappin Writes Here

Top Story and Book Update I have sample cover designs. I don’t think I can show them yet, but I’ve got ‘em, I like them, and hopefully we’ll have picked one to show shortly. Tab dump Not a whole lot today: Here’s a look at the current status of using a non-blocking MySQL driver with Rails. The promise here is for significantly faster database access. Two stories that are related to projects that I worked on back in my EdTech days:

Book Status Not much new to report. Still in the webrat and capybara space. It does look like April 21 will actually be the beta date really and for true. Top Story Well, it’s got to be Joss Whedon possibly directing the Avengers movie, right? The Internet would never lie to me about Joss. It’s not like there’s a collective internet freakout any time some rumor about a Whedon project comes through.

Top Story iPads. Lots of them popping up in and around work. Probably some more coherent impressions coming later. Wait, once again, Twitter has a big announcement after I start writing this. This time, they are going to start placing ads in the Twitter stream in various ways to be announced today. My quick reactions: a) I long suspected this day was coming, b) if the ads in clients are any guide, they aren’t particularly burdensome, c) implementation details will decide how irritating this is.

Top Story For a while, it looked like the top story was going to be Apple’s new developer Rule 3.3.1, described here by John Gruber. More on that in a second. But the real top story is the news that Twitter has bought Tweetie, intending to rebrand it as Twitter for iPhone, and dropping the price to a low, low, free. Eventually, it will be the core of Twitter for iPad.

Book Update Not much to report. Still messing with the integration test chapter. Also still waiting for cover possibilities. Tab Dump Continuing the RailsEnvy story from yesterday, today Jason Seifer posts some more details. This essay is more personal. I wish Jason nothing but good things. In a somewhat ironic counterpoint to Gregg and Jason writing about Rails envy, it was widely reported today that Justin Long thinks the “I’m a Mac” ads, of which he is the right-hand half, are over and done.

Book Status Did a read-through of the integration testing chapter, mostly for grammar and clarity, there haven’t been any technical changes in the material that I have been able to discover. Next up is Webrat/Capybara, which will have some changes. Other Got my RailsConf non-approval, which is disappointing but, you know, I also probably could have put a bit more effort into polishing my proposals. Tab Dump Gregg Pollack gives a brief history of RailsEnvy.

Book Status Phone call with Colleen (the book’s editor) confirms what I had posted yesterday. We should know shortly when the beta actually will begin for real. Started looking at the integration and Webrat chapters. I’ll be adding Capybara to the mix as well. Also started putting together the Rails 3 version of the sample code, which quickly foundered because there isn’t an official Rails 3 version of Authlogic. There are a couple of forks that claim compatibility, though, so I think one of them will serve as a shortcut.

Book Status The initial beta release of Rails Test Prescriptions has been pushed back at least a week. It’s not anybody’s fault, just a traffic jam of books all coming into the system at the same time (including, I assume, the new iPad book). Hoping to see a cover and other details in time for next week. In the meantime, I’m continuing on as if we’re in the beta, which means I’m now revisiting the section on integration testing.