What have I been up too lately? Well primary working my butt off in my day job and after that, I just finished a week of vacation. As an aside, I need to disconnect more often, my vacation was very relaxing. But what's more relaxing that doing things in the fresh outdoors? Well learning another programming language of course.

That is why this week I have seriously started learning Objective-C and iPhone application development. In fact I just got my approval today from Apple that I am a registered developer, see that pretty icon in the right column? So do you want to do the same? Below is a list of resources that I have found helpful to me. Let me explain something first, I am very tangential in my learning methods. Basically that means I take frequent breaks from my main course to learn deep details. For instance my main course is the iPhone SDK Development book. But I have found it very helpful to break early on and watch the Becoming Productive In Xcode videos. Knowing keyboard bindings and customizing my, dare I say it... IDE, just helps me get business done! Stay tuned for some updates.

Resources

• iPhone SDK Development
• Writing Your First iPhone Application
• Becoming Productive In Xcode
• Coding In Objective-C 2.0

Want a list of the users and the number of commits they made? Git makes it really really easy, while I could not find such an easy method on Subversion. Here they are.

Git

git log | git shortlog -n -s

Ruby 1.9.1, the stable release, is just around the corner and if your like me, maybe you want to start playing around with it and perhaps test a few projects using 1.9 with edge rails 2.3. If so, and your on a Mac, then perhaps this installation method might appeal to you. I'll break this article up in two parts, the first will be on installing multiple versions of ruby and how to switch between them while the other will be some things I noticed when testing ruby 1.9 with edge rails on my favorite pet project HomeMarks.

Based on my previous article Using Autotest For Rails Plugin Development, Brennan Dunn wrote a ZSH function that helps him with his eager rails plugin work. Testing plugins is simply the most fun you will ever have. It's nice to test in isolation and easy to make a plugin test multiple rails versions, etc. Typically plugin testing is very fast to because you are not burdened with excessive tests in a big app that might use it. Just the ones needed to test the plugin. Enjoy this ZSH function.

function autotestify () {
  git clone git://github.com/metaskills/autotest_railsplugin.git
  rm -rf ./autotest_railsplugin/.git
  mv ./autotest_railsplugin ./autotest
}

I got a chance to meet Gregg Pollack at this years RubyConf, a great guy. In fact I seem to owe him alot. Not only did I get 3 mentions lately on the main rubyonrails.org site, but it appears I got one of my 2.2 additions mentioned in their new envycast that covers rails 2.2. Sweet!

So now it is my duty to help the Rails Envy guys to bank it Grossenbach-style. If you have not done so, go check out envycasts.com and put $9 down on one or two of their great vids! This stuff is a great resource for any ruby/rails'ist. Put it on your TV and imagine your in your own little Orlando user group.

So that about sums up what I've been doing for the past 4 weeks. A total rewrite of the SQL Server Adapter for Rails. On top of passing all the Rails 2.2.2 tests, which is MAJOR news, it includes tons of new features. Unicode column support, pessimistic locking, date/time column casting, DDL transactions and way more.

On top of that. It was nice being mentioned on the rubyonrails.org website not for my first, second, but a THIRD time. Thanks Gregg!

• UPDATE: I just got a nod from David's twitter. Thanks!

While reading the The Unofficial Apple Weblog today I noticed this sweet little Jack-O-Lantern screensaver for OS X. After some feedback on the 757.rb group, I decided to make some Code-O-Lanterns.

Follow the instructions for the Jack-O-Lantern screensaver on where to put the carving files. If you are not on a Mac, I have taken some screen shots that you can use for desktop pictures. If you would like to see a code o lantern that is not up... just ask for one, providing it has a logo!