Starting with Merb: a collection of links
Merb homepage.
Ruby Enterprise Edition. Apparently Ruby plus tcmalloc. All the cool kids are using it.
Phusion Passenger. The Apache module formerly known as mod_rails. Version 2.0 has support for Rack. Rack is a good idea:
Rack provides a minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks.
The Merb docs on deploying with Passenger.
Merb is ORM agnostic so grab DataMapper too. Or maybe Sequel.
Merb focusing on controler logic rather than shoving down developers throat a particular, bloated ORM engine is a very refreshing change from current trends in web frameworks. And it continues with its choice of a view rendering policy. There is none.
Merb is not yet 1.0 and still very much on active development. Grab it from from git.
If you choose DataMapper you may want to live on the edge.
Or just follow and easy, short tutorial to get started faster.
Haml is interesting too.
Ever wonder why very smart people are dropping years of Java EE experience and embracing alternative languages and frameworks like Rails and Django? This is why.
Trying to get video on mobile gadgets can be frustrating. First you need to find an encoder with the right mix of container and codec support, and then you have to suffer the looong encoding times and pray the final file is actually compatible with your device.
Today NVIDIA unveiled a new driver with support for GPU physics and CUDA. Bundled with the driver is an impressive array of demos but a little gem caught my eye: a CUDA accelerated H264/AVC enconder!
It's named Badaboom and, at least on my PC, it's anywhere from 3 to 5 times faster than any other transcoder, on the same videos. And I have one of the slowest supported GPUs (a GeForce 8800GTS). Not only that, but it actually had zero problems with most of the videos I tried to encode. It only choked on an admitely obscure test file (MOV with MPEG2 video), but it failed with a clear error message, instead of hanging or producing an unplayable file. Definitely a sure purchase if you often transcode videos for your gadgets.
Make sure to add the Crystal Methodology to your resume:
Process makes us strong. Process enables us to achieve highly metric-driven quality levels. Process allows us to attend meetings throughout every day, ensuring that any coding time we get will be that much more intense because it is necessarily so short and focused. And finally, process allows us to draw pretty charts and graphs on endless presentations.