Thrudb - faster, cheaper than SimpleDB. create a scalable distributed datastore with memcache and this disk+S3 storage solution. uses facebook’s thrift as well. tobi has a post on getting this setup on OSX.

Beanstalk Messaging Queue | Ruby on Rails for Newbies. a simple message queue example with rails using beanstalkd.

RubyGems 1.0.0 Released. and ‘require_gem’ is no longer supported.

uTest Gets $1.7M for Crowd-Sourced Quality Assurance. Looks like an interesting product as full-time QA staff isn’t viable for a lot of small/medium-size companies.

Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust - New York Times. on the problems of programming on multi-core processors and the people microsoft hired to work on the problem.

Amazon SimpleDB. It’s like a big-ass queryable hash table in the cloud. basic idea is to map keys with meta-data to S3 objects.

Developer’s Guide - Google Chart API. google API for making charts. generates images. too bad they didn’t bundle some of that cool google finance flash stuff. via paul.

Ruby Web-Services with Facebook’s Thrift - igvita.com. intro to using thrift in ruby. looks nicer than soap or corba. though that’s not saying much.

jQuery BlockUI Plugin. let’s you do modal dialogs and block-off page elements (like grey out a form once it’s submitted). not as simple as thickbox but uses jQuery.ajax so you have access to success/error/etc callbacks.

jRails - jQuery on Rails. plugin to replace prototype with jquery in rails. Don’t know if I’d actually use this or stick with the standard unobtrusive jQuery style.

DataMapper is an ORM written in Ruby which is fast, thread-safe and feature rich.. some interesting ideas in there. via ram.

make_resourceful 0.2.0. Nathan writes up on the features (and deprecations) for make_resourceful 0.2, a handy plugin for rails.

A Funkaoshi Production :: Git. ram talks about setting up and using Git, a source control system that functions pretty differently from cvs and svn.

RDDB: RESTful Ruby Document-Oriented Database. pure Ruby version of CouchDB and it can use S3 as it’s datastore (latencies must be nuts but whatever).

Digital Web Magazine - jQuery Crash Course. nice little “airplane seat selector” demo. via ram.

eigenclass - Changes in Ruby 1.9. a detailed list of changes currently pending in ruby 1.9.

Long running tasks in Rails: Backgroundrb - Warpspire. setting up scheduled backgroundrb tasks and integrating with rails events.

Firebug Tutorial - Logging, Profiling and CommandLine. advanced features for heavy javascript dev.

Rails 2.0: Preview Release. info on what’s new and how to get it.

Fun With the Y Combinator in Ruby : Nex3. Nathan is easily the smartest 17 year old I’ve ever met.