Developer

freelanceswitch.com lists the 12 most useful Firefox extensions for web developers. Here's a summary (just in case the page disappears).

1. FireFTP
2. ColorZilla
3. IE Tab

"Tersely put, SimpleDB is hugely disruptive. It will take some time to evolve the new thinking patterns and new design disciplines that this technology forces us to consider. To do so, consider this breakdown of the similarities and differences between SimpleDB and conventional relational databases..." Full article: Amazon SimpleDB 101 & Why It Matters

Here are some tips for removing those troublesome carriage return characters from Mac OS text files:

Using perl

perl -pi -e 's/\r/\n/g' <filename>

Full article: Basic User Authentication in Rails.

Full article: 10 Steps I Took to Learn Ruby on Rails.

Chapter 1: Quick Introduction to Linux Chapter 2: Getting started with Shell Programming Chapter 3: Shells (bash) structured Language Constructs Chapter 4: Advanced Shell Scripting Commands Chapter 5: Essential Utilities for Power User

"Over the last few months I have analyzed a number of Rails applications w.r.t. performance problems ... . The applications targeted a variety of domains, which resulted in enough differences to make each performance improvement task challenging. However, there were enough commonalities that made it possible to extract a number of areas where each of these applications fell short of achieving good performance." Full article: A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails.