The core Ruby on Rails development team uses TextMate, a MacOSX (only) programming text editor that is apparently the greatest thing ever. A quick Google search reveals countless blog and forum posts devoted to finding something with similar functionality on Linux and Windows.

I am starting to develop with Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu and three of the suggested alternatives looked attractive to me. If you are planning to develop exclusively in Ruby/Ruby on Rails and want the lightest weight solution that is probably closest to the TextMate experience, Gedit is a good alternative. But if you want a fuller experience, or if you develop in multiple languages, jEdit and Eclipse are (I would argue) the two best options.

Like many software developers, Joel Spolsky’s blog “Joel on Software” has been in my RSS aggregator for several years now. I don’t always agree with what he says, but I always appreciate the thoughtfulness that goes into his posts, and many of his posts are just plain classics.

I was intrigued by a recent entry, “Learning from Dave Winer” in which he suggests that low quality, often anonymous comments on blog posts add noise to the general discussion, and that responding on your own blog is preferable to leaving comments.

Now, its probably not a good idea to publicly disagree with two technology gurus, but I have to say that my experiences with blog comments, both as a reader and as a blogger have been quite different.

So, I’m sitting here learning Ruby and Rails, and a thought starts to emerge: I wonder if I could use things like ActiveRecord separate from Rails for writing command line database maintenance scripts in Ruby, for example? Then I start to see other Rails features that also might be very useful outside of a Web application, and then I start wondering if Rails could be used not just as a Web application framework, but as a general application framework, in the way that some people have used (or at least suggested using) Struts and Spring in the Java world.

I recently began designing a generalized front-end to Fedora, with the goal of allowing domain experts to easily input, share and re-use digital content while at the same time allowing information specialists to design the metadata framework used for those digital objects. In other words, the system can be thought of as a digital asset management system for faculty, facilitated by librarians.

Within the system, digital objects are complex, composed of a set of metadata and one or more files of various types. A digital object can belong to more than one collection, and a basic set of Dublic Core (DC) metadata can be assumed for every digital object, along with one or more metadata profiles, or templates that are defined by collection.

The metadata profiles will be designed by librarians and implemented with the help of developers informed by the needs of the faculty populating the collection. These metadata profiles will be designed to accommodate an arbitrary number of fields of arbitrary types, so the structure of any collection’s metadata can’t be known at (system) design time, as specifying this structure is a function of the system itself. Designing the data model for this aspect of the system began as an interesting puzzle that as I unraveled it, started to look like an increasingly elaborate version of the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model…

I have released ZoomifyImage 1.3, which fixes a significant bug and adds two new contributions.