For sixty more days (actually 59 days and 17 hours as of Time.now, or if you prefer to speak Javaish rather than Rubyish, new java.util.Date()) you will be able to download free PDF version of the book by Patrick Lenz Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications - courtesy of nice guys of Sitepoint. The book download page is here, no strings attached - all it will cost you is disclosing an email address (book download link will be emailed to you) and bandwidth to get the 20 MB PDF.

There is - after all - a Petstore implementation for Ruby. Somebody asked a question at the DZone and the response posted by Raphael Valyi was: Re: Is there a Pet Store in Grails/Rails? I'm speaking here for the Rails (JRuby) side: there is actually a petstore, it can be found there: http://viewvc.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/cgi/viewvc.cgi/?root=tw-commons Some guys used it to compare C-Ruby vs JRuby performance: http://www.nabble.com/JRuby-vs-MRI---Petstore-shootout-t4289470.html

According to the TIOBE Programming Community index (which gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages), Ruby jumped 3 places and made it to top ten. Congratulations ! If you look closely on the trends down on the page, the dynamically languages popularity has risen over 3.6% during year period. Which is A Good Thing (TM). Should I make my personal Top Ten of the programming languages, ordering languages by my degree of comfort of using the language, the language beauty (which is, in the eye of the beholder ;-)).

From Scott Guthrie's interview on .NET futures SG: We’ve seen demand for an MVC framework on two fronts. One is for even more testability, having the ability to completely mock-up a request. We’ve also always seen with ASP.NET that some people like having the server control, postback model; some people say, “I just want absolute control.” The MVC framework we’re coming up with is a fairly simple MVC model, it’s very clean, it’s a front controller model, and it integrates very well into ASP.

If you live on week cycles, it is quite nice to see the week number in your calendar. It is not (yet) provided as standard feature in the user settings for my calendar solution of choice. An obvious solution is to run user script in the browser that will decorate the calendar page - using the fabulous Grease Monkey. The user script to install (after installing the plugin) is here.