I got a Dell 2007WFP Ultrasharp 20″ LCD monitor this week using BINalert.com.

First, about the monitor and setup. It is a great monitor, nice and bright! My friend, Matt, encouraged me to spend a little more and get the Ultrasharp. I am glad I did (although I didn’t pay much more, see below). I REALLY love the portrait mode. In the picture I have Mailplane, Pyro, Skype, and Twitterific all stacked nicely. And it doesn’t feel crowded. I use VirtueDesktops and keep all my work on the another virtual desktop. On the “work” desktop I put Textmate and can see lots of lines of code. Plus I still have room to keep open console windows at the bottom to see autotest results, server logs, etc. My browser can stay open on the laptop for easy inspection of whatever I am developing.

Now about BINalert.com. (Disclosure: I built this site with a friend and I do make money with it.) BINalert lets you setup up alerts so you can get notifications on new Buy-It-Now auctions on eBay. There are lots of items listed with Buy-It-Now prices that are REALLY good deals. For example, this monitor. I setup an alert to watch for Dell 2007WFP Ultrasharp monitors with a Buy-It-Now price of $250 or less. As soon as this one was listed, I got an email letting me know. I went and checked it out (it was used but in great condition), and a week later I have my new monitor (or at least it’s new to me). And I saved about $150 in the process.

photo by anyoungkevin

We are doing lightning talks at this month’s dallas.rb meeting. I decided to give the group some choice of what I would present.

I will do a short one on “Why Firefox Makes Me Look Good” or “Better Web App Development using Firefox and a Buttload of Extensions”

I can also do one “JQuery: I Don’t Know Much, But I Know I Love You ”

And since neither of those are Ruby related, I will throw another one out there: “Tighter Abs: XML Situps Made Easy With Ruby”

I’ll let everyone decide which ones you want to hear more about.

Update

I only did the JQuery presentation and here are the slides (although they were much more interesting in person).

Because my friend Matt was so impressed with a Firefox extension I showed him, I thought I would share some of my other favorites.

photo by longhorndave

What Extensions I Am Using Right Now

• Web Developer Toolbar - Just about everything you could want to do HTML and CSS, plus I can edit AND save the CSS changes I was playing around with.
• Firebug - So much goodness. Especially debugging JavaScript and looking over AJAX requests and responses.
• View Source Chart - Makes looking at HTML source bearable.
• ColorZilla - a color picker for pulling colors off of web pages.
• HTMLValidator - because it is too easy to miss a closing tag somewhere that messes everything up.
• DummyLipsum - when you need some filler content.
• SeleniumIDE - great little utility for helping to write Selenium tests for functional testing.

photo by meshmar2

Not to mention

• Adblock - no more ads.
• Adblock Filterset.G - no more ads just got easier.
• GTDInbox - for when I think that I am Getting Things Done
• Foxmarks - because I have too many computers and too many bookmarks.

Got a favorite? I’d like to hear about it.

photo by zruvalcaba

After my last post, I thought I would share what I use for developing on Ubuntu.

Editor

I have always been a hands-on kinda guy, so I don’t use any of the fancy IDEs. Right now, I am using SciTE for two reasons. It feels lightweight and it is available for Linux and Windows. Since my laptop does not have a lot of memory, a lightweight editor is a must. I tried Eclipse, but it chewed up all my memory and slowed things to a crawl. So SciTE with some additional plugins (and information on getting them going) powers the development at McKinney Station.

Ruby and Rails

I am using the latest Ruby and Rails for all new development. For testing I am using RSpec, which seems a lot more intuitive to me. Other gems I have installed include:

• FasterCSV - parsing CSV files
• starfish - simple Ruby Map/Reduce
• mongrel - lightweight Ruby web server
• hpricot - Ruby HTML parser

Database

I love starting all of my development projects with SQLite. It is so easy to get up and running. As the project matures, I am able to quickly switch development over to a MySQL database with a change in the application’s database configuration and a quick rake db:migrate.

Version Control

All source code versioning is done with Subversion. With this quick little script, I can get a Rails project committed and started in minutes.

Conclusion

I am always looking for ways to speed up my development process, but so far this is working for me. And it is very enjoyable.