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Another meeting of the rosy dynamic language lovers of Minnesota was held tonight at the Loring Park Dunn Bros.. This time out we had, 30, quite a few Rubyists in attendance. I forgot to count heads but I believe it may have been a few more than last month. A good turn out!

Three excellent presenters made the trip worth it. First, Chris Carter gave a great overview of Ruport. He has two great articles on his website. Tonight’s presentation summarized them for those of you that missed ‘em. Go, check them out, they’re short (but very informative), I’ll wait…

Ah, now then. Ross Niemi gave a presentation on Continuous Integration and its effects on marine plantlife. Not really, but it was about Continuous Integration (CI for those of us in the know). Pretty cool. I’ve never seen it so Ross’ live demos were pretty impressive. Head on over to his blog for more info; he promised to post his material. (for a quick sneak peek, have a look at the live demo of CruiseControl.rb).

Finally, Jon Dahl’s presentation entitled “Mortgage Driven Development” was pretty funny. Jon started by showing us examples from Dan’s code repository. Ha. What’s a dev to do when her web framework makes her too efficient? Nice tips on how to “speed up” you web app when your client complains. Actually this talk sparked a great discussion on how to market yourself a a Rails/Ruby contractor or consultant. Good stuff.

You should really join us next month.

I have a couple of rails sites running on an Xserve at work. There are ways to rotate rails logs using Logger. While it would be nice to just let rails take care of it, it seems that that technique will fail when you’re running a cluster of mongrels. Those puppies write to the same log, so if you pull it out from under them it will surely result in dreaded 500 errors. That’s embarrassing.

Mongrel FAQ advises us to use something like logrotate. That’s a Debian package and it does not come with OS X. I spent way too much time looking for a binary to use. If you’re not a sysadmin this dark art of rotating logs can be deucedly tricky to nail down. In the end, MacPorts to the rescue (again). I <heart> MacPorts. BONUS: I can use it to rotate my Apache logs too.

As you know, table based layout are bad news. Well, personally, I came to this game late and never used table-based layouts. As a former prepress guy accustomed to Quark and Photoshop (GUI’s) the avalanche of <table> tags in much of the HTML I viewed in 1994 scared me off. Yikes! Fast-forward 10 years or so or so and I found myself back in school learning how to write basic HTML. Much to my surprise those damn <table> tags were still prevalent. Drat!

One of the requirements of the “Hello World” page for class was to use Cascading Style Sheets to spec fonts and colors. So I did a little googling and it turns out one can use CSS to layout the page too. Seemed like the way to go, no more deeply nested <table> tags… I was excited. That semester was an exercise in pain-management. As you might guess, bending CSS to my will was not easy. Lots of reading and lots of trial and error. And lots of requests to my instructor to use Firefox when viewing my assignments!

Over then next few years I built many pages and layouts and always battled against CSS. I had amassed a boatload of links to descriptions of how to do fluid, hybrid, and fixed layouts. Arcane information about browser incompatibilities and “hacks” littler my skull. Each time I started a project I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the CSS – which structure, how to name selectors, and on. Makes me tired just thinking about it.

A few months ago I finally found the answer: Yahoo! UI Library. According to the site:

All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

The library has a bunch of javascript utilities and controls. I use Ruby on Rails primarily so most of that is taken care of by Rails and it’s integration with prototype and script.aculo.us. My interest lies in their CSS tools. But, oh, the CSS!

The key ingredient for page layout is YUI Grids CSS. Pretty amazing. Simply follow the conventions describe in the code (as well as the excellent documentaiton) and you’re ready to go. They even provide a nice interactive builder page to generate the basic structure. No more trial and error, fluid, fixed, this just works. The other two sheets help with the finer points. Reset CSS provides a nice foundation for predictable cross browser rendering and Fonts CSS helps make font size look consistent.

So if you don’t don’t wear black turtlenecks and berets, take a look. If you do, well, take a look anyway. Really. While not an example of beautiful design, I was able to remove the “just scaffolded” look of the Ruby Users of Minnesota website using it. And now, if we find someone more artistically inclined maybe they can spend time making it look good and less time rasslin’ with CSS.