Just picked up a great book on Rails coming from a PHP background called Rails for PHP Developers. The examples in the book call for Rails version 2.0.2. I ran rails -v and lo-and-behold, the version of rails that is packaged with Leopard is pretty old.

Rails uses a program called RubyGems for installation (as well as the installation of numerous other Ruby-related plugins and app). First I needed to verify that I had a current version of Ruby gems:

gem -v
# 1.0.1

Maxrox (who happens to sit next to me at work) has released Oomph his badass, lightweight, AS3 animation package to the general public. I’ve used it on numerous projects and it’s totally lovely. You should download it and learn to love it because it’ll save you loads of animating time. Send him some feedback too because I know he has huge plans for the package.

Recently I’ve been using CakePHP’s Bake tool to create quick MVC skeletons based on a predefined database structure. While the Bake itself is quite buggy and leaves a lot to be desired, it’s still definitely pretty amazing for (at the very least) creating Models and the associations they have with other models.

Because you can set MAMP to use specific ports, you may have to let your system know where MySQL is (Bake will throw that ugly where the heck is mysql.sock error). This is the same issue I’ve had when I’ve done custom MySQL installs on Mac and one of the reasons I love MAMP so. Quite simply, you just create a symbolic link (ln) from where Bake is “looking” for it to where MAMP is. Here’s what I ended up running in the terminal:

ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock 

You might also have to create the /var/mysql directory to link them if this doesn’t work. Then navigate to where your cake installation is and inside of that head to /cake/scripts/ and:

php bake.php

I’d bet that the majority of TextMate users are super savvy, but did you know that you can blog from TextMate? Most major blogging services/installations use XML-RPC for posting content from locations other than your blogging admin tools (such as Flickr’s “post to blog” feature) and TextMate’s Blogging bundle uses a Ruby library (written and maintained by Brad Choate) to leverage this. Here’s a short how-to on how to set up the Blogging bundle to be able to post, edit, and perform a few other simple actions on your blog - all while writing your markup/post in TextMate.

Had a couple people suggest that I do a write up on how one might create a simple Last.fm widget with PHP. I’ll walk you through how I created the badge on typeoneerror. First of all, start by heading over to Audoscrobbler’s web services listings. Here you’ll find the XML files you need to get your playlist information. I’m currently pulling “recenttracks” so we’ll use that as an example. Under User Profile Data, click the XML link for “Recent Tracks.” To get your feed, just replace the user name with your last.fm username:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/YOUR_USER_NAME/recenttracks.xml