Amazon AWS: Calculate your monthly costs on Amazon S3, EC2 and SQS

"its' 0.3 cents per hour, this is 0.32 cents per request"
So how can we get the subtotal cost of an AWS Cloud application?
Simple, use the Amazon Cloud Services Cost Calculator.
note: i tried it with my own parameters, and it's showed a little above what i actually pay (5$ more).

Noupe: 15+ Incredibly Useful Mac Apps For Freelance Web Designers

Noupe: 15+ Incredibly Useful Mac Apps For Freelance Web Designers . <== This is a great blog, don't dare not to subscribe to their RSS Feed.

1. Espresso

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Extremely powerful web development tool, created by the minds behind CSSEdit. Providing a powerful editing, sleek projects, live preview, real publishing and synchronization tools.
Espresso features an immensely powerful rule-based syntax engine, CoreSyntax, that transforms your text documents into semantic structure. Espresso has an extensible Navigator that’s best compared to the CSSEdit styles list.

2. CSSEdit

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CSSEdit’s unique focus is on style sheets, it offers a wide range of features for any level of expertise. Starting out? Selector Builder, advanced visual editors, Live Preview, intelligent source environment and a powerful X-Ray web page inspector for an unbeatable CSS debugging suite.

3. Pixelmator

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Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. Pixelmator is a layer-based image editor. You can quickly create layers from your photos, other pictures, from selections or even your iSight. Pixelmator can add a layer to your composition directly from your Mac’s little camera. With Pixelmator’s powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images to edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures.

4. Coda

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Panic Coda is a great all-in-one Web development environment tool, keeping many of your commonly used tools in separate tabs. Tools include: text-editor, css editor, file transfer, svn, terminal & smart Spelling. All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text.

5. Lineform

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Lineform is an ideal Mac app for vector art, diagrams and illustrations. Lineform has all of the most popular tools, including everything from freeform gradients to compositing effects, enabling you to create the designs you want without getting in your way with superfluous “features” you don’t need.

6. Fontcase

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Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant and powerful workflow to help you organise the fonts you have installed on your system. Designed to be an iTunes for your fonts, Fontcase has a powerful tagging system, which is designed to let you control your fonts like you control your music.

7. Deep- Image Search

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Deep calculates the range of colors used in each of your images by analyzing the pixels and calculating the most popular colors. This is what makes the palettes in Deep powerful, you can find images that have similar colors, which is great when you are looking for the perfect picture to go on your web site. In fact, just drag any image on to Deep and it will find and rank all the images on your computer that are similar.

8. Cyberduck

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Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Mosso Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks.

9. Flow

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Flow is another file transfer coming in style. Flow brings the best of the Mac to your server’s files and folders. Put simply, Flow makes working remotely every bit as intuitive and natural as working locally with the Finder. With Flow, you can edit files directly on your server, connect to (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and MobileMe iDisk servers), Quickly Upload Without UI and many other features.

10. Sequel Pro

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Sequel Pro is a Mac OS X MySQL Database Management app. Sequel Pro gives you direct access to your MySQL databases on local and remote servers with support for importing and exporting data from popular files including SQL, CSV and XML.

11. Things

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Task management has never been this easy. Organize your to-dos with Projects and Areas of Responsibility. Features include: A smart Today list automatically gathers all you need to look at, Repeating To Dos, Every list can easily be filtered and sorted by due date, iPhone Sync and many other features.

12. xscope

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xScope is a powerful set of tools that are ideal for measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts. Quickly available via the Mac OS X menu bar, xScope’s flexible tools float above desktop windows and UI elements making measuring a breeze.

13. KeyCue

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KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts.

14. TextExpander

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TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings, code snippets and images.

15. OnTheJob

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On The Job has a lot of power under the hood but maintains it’s reputation as the easiest to use time and expense tracking solution available for Mac OS X. On The Job offers flexible invoice creation. Create invoices for specific date ranges, covering a single job, or spanning multiple jobs.

Other Mac Apps you will find interesting

- TextMate

- Billings

- Littlesnapper

- MAMP

- Inkscape

- Picturesque

- Layers

UML for Rails applications

UML is a Graphical language for visualizing, specifying and constructing the artifacts of a software-intensive system. The Unified Modeling Language offers a standard way to write a system's blueprints, including conceptual components such as business processes and system functions as well as concrete things such as programming language statements, database schemas, and reusable software components.[1] UML combines the best practice from data modeling concepts such as entity relationship diagrams, business modeling (work flow), object modeling and component modeling. It can be used with all processes, throughout the software development life cycle, and across different implementation technologies.
As the strategic value of software increases for many companies, the industry looks for techniques to automate the production of software and to improve quality and reduce cost and time-to-market.
These techniques include component technology, visual programming, patterns and frameworks. Businesses also seek techniques to manage the complexity of systems as they increase in scope and scale. In particular, they recognize the need to solve recurring architectural problems, such as physical distribution, concurrency, replication, security, load balancing and fault tolerance. Additionally, the development for the World Wide Web, while making some things simpler, has exacerbated these architectural problems. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was designed to respond to these needs and to supply the programmers and the project managers with a visual application state and layout.
There isn't a clear why to implement the usage of UML for rails development, but here are the tools i did find.

• RailsRoad is a RailRoad is a class diagrams generator for Ruby on Rails applications. It's a Ruby script that loads the application classes and analyzes its properties (attributes, methods) and relationships (inheritance, model associations like has_many, etc.) The output is a graph description in the DOT language, suitable to be handled with tools like Graphviz. Last tested on old rails versions!
• A visual paradigm plugin for generating ruby (yap, not rails)
• ruby-uml, couldn't find any documentations.
  
• The generate_from_uml plugin does the oppsite and enerates rails models from a UML schema, i didn't see how advanced relations are handled though (:has_many :through for example)

Deploying Ruby on Rails on EC2 - Deploying Oracle

Well, generally i use Oracle for my large scale applications.
Some people might say that it's not too-competible with Rails, but using the oracle_enhanced_adapter didn't pop up any special issues (it even supports Oracle's bind variables technique).
The Oracle Cloud Deployment tutorials on Oracle's website contains explanations, PDFs, tutorials and demos on how and when to deploy Oracle DB in the cloud.
Extra guides include backup and recovery practices.

Web Base SQL schema design

This amazing online SQL design (ERD) tool called wwwsqldesigner, is a great solution for those of us who get too troubled by designing simple apps database layouts. (NOTE: you should always hire a professional DBA)

Checkout the Homepage on GoogleCode, and Live demo.

Deploying Ruby on Rails on EC2 - Update

Tom Mornini, the Founder and CTO of EngineYard, introduced me their latest announcement, Solo.
Solo is an inexpensive, web-based platform for on-demand management of your Ruby on Rails web application on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. Manage your web application from development to deployment. You get Engine Yard’s Ruby on Rails deployment expertise wrapped in an easy-to-use interface.
Solo removes a lot of the hassles and provides a battle tested Rails stack and many tools required to create reliable and manageable deployment atop Amazon's wonderful AWS offerings.

Tom also mentions that using my Deploying on Ruby on Rails on EC2 guide is not recommended for production stages and that users on AWS should always keep in mind that in case of a crash or reboot of the environment will result in lost data (without proper countermeasures, like EngineYard offers)

So your setup scenario as i suggested, should be used for development only, and carefully even in that case and keep in mind the non-persistence state of EC2 instance disks.

Beautiful Javascript Date Pickers

Source: Woork! - Beautiful Javascript Date Pickers
Great list of Date Picker plugins and scripts, for several Javascript frameworks.

Woork: 10 Javascript UI Libraries

Source: Woork!

Are you looking for any interesting and beautiful Web User Interface libraries for your next web site or Rich Internet Application ? Take a look at this list with ten WUI I suggest you to try in order to simplify your work and develope faster beautiful and usable user interfaces.

1. IT Mill Toolkit
IT Mill Toolkit is an open-source framework, providing widgets and tools for the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Deliver web applications without worrying about incompatibilities of web browsers, DOM or JavaScript by using standard Java tools.

2. LivePipe UI
LivePipe UI is a suite of high quality widgets and controls for web 2.0 applications built using the Prototype JavaScript Framework. Each control is well tested, highly extensible, fully documented and degrades gracefully for non JavaScript enabled browsers where possible

3. Iwebkit iPhone/iPod touch framework
Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod touch websites in a few minutes. In the first 4 months of it's existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!

4. Jitsu
Jitsu contains an integrated set of tools to enable developers to build and deploy sophisticated user interfaces for web applications. These include an Xml markup language, page compiler, data binding engine, JavaScript runtime, control library, runtime inspector, animation engine, cross-platform library, Ajax, and back button support.

5. MochaUI
MochaUI is a web applications user interface library built on the Mootools JavaScript framework.Uses: web applications, web desktops, web sites, widgets, standalone windows and modal dialogs.

6. Echo Web Framework
Echo is an open-source framework for developing rich web applications. From the developer's perspective, Echo behaves as a user interface toolkit--like Swing or Eclipse SWT. AJAX technology is employed to deliver a user experience to web clients that approaches that of desktop-based applications.

7. The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)
The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses.

8. Sigma Ajax UI builder
Written in javascript and PHP, SigmaVisual is web based visual AJAX UI builder for professional developers. Developers save their time in building up prototype as well as real web applications. TreeBar, TreeGrid, Layout, Menu are supported.

9. WUI Web UI Framework
WUI (Web User Interface) is an MVC framework for writing web UIs in a single language: Java. Write web apps with components, widgets & events, not JSPs. Runs in any servlet 2.3 container. Similar to Model 2 / Struts, only better. Apache-style license.

10. Butterfly Web UI
Butterfly Web UI is a component oriented web framework for Java, like Wicket or Tapestry. The main advantage compared to these frameworks is that Butterfly Web UI integrates naturally with Butterfly DI Container, giving you a state-of-the-art dependency injection container to help you structure and decouple the internal components of your web applications.

Yet another Framwork: Pylons

Pylons combines the very best ideas from the worlds of Ruby, Python and Perl, providing a structured but extremely flexible Python web framework. It's also one of the first projects to leverage the emerging WSGI standard, which allows extensive re-use and flexibility — but only if you need it. Out of the box, Pylons aims to make web development fast, flexible and easy

Looks like a fun language, after reading the Pylon book for a few days now, it looks very interesting.

This framework is based on Paste and allows some extended python usage, templating, modeling and basically a full MVC application development interface (even CouchDB).

What i can say about it, is that it's some kind of another Rails-ish framwork ("paster" for "generate" for example), these frameworks are popping like mushrooms these days (Currently reviewing the PHP Akelos framework as well)

The pylons web site offers general information, a link to the online book and some screencasts.

Browser Security Hand book

The Browser Security Handbook is a free and no-nonsense guide to the security concepts in today's main browsers. It covers all security features, explains why and in which browsers certain attack methods work and talks about experimental security mechanisms in browsers. It's a recommended read for everyone who creates web applications.

Important read, i remember reading a similar article a few years back (FF1 vs. IE6) and i learned some good stuff.
Get it here

Rails 2 i18n: Globalize2 plugin for Rails

A while ago i posted a post about a Globalize plugin bug in Rails 2.x. Eventually i found a solution but i was still waiting for a real solution for Rails 2.x to supersede my monkey patching.

Well, it's here.


note for the Hebrew natives: check out the examples :)



Globalize2 is the successor of Globalize for Rails.

It is compatible with and builds on the new I18n api in Ruby on Rails. and adds model translations as well as a bunch of other useful features, such as Locale fallbacks (RFC4647 compliant) and automatic loading of Locale data from defined directory/file locations.

Globalize2 is much more lightweight and modular than its predecessor was. Content translations in Globalize2 use default ActiveRecord features and do not limit any functionality any more.

All features and tools in Globalize2 are implemented in the most unobstrusive and loosely-coupled way possible, so you can pick whatever features or tools you need for your application and combine them with other tools from other libraries or plugins.


Get it from joshmh Github Repo

Elliott Kember: Sexy Page Curl JQuery plugin

Just one of those fun-and-no-real-use things you might want to put in your blog/personal-homepage.
Elliott Kember created this Page Curl plugin for JQuery which shows a page curl on the corner of your website, with the option to set an image below it.
Check the demos.

Rails Migrations - Running a Single Migration

We all know the good old

rake db:migrate

And we all know the Rails 2.x

rake db:migrate:rollback

to go back in time and fix what we did.
Now, in Rails 2.x you can specify a single migration by specifing one of the each

rake db:migrate:up VERSION=<migration_timestamp> # Runs the self.up
rake db:migrate:down VERSION=<migration_timestamp> # Runs the self.down

Note that migrations are meant to be concurrent and that's the most basic purpose in which they are there for, executing an out of line migration may cause you problems in the future, so try to stay as clean as possible when dealing with migrations

CSS Sprites: onilne sprite generator

The CSS sprites technique is basically a technique that reduces the CSS requests when dealing with background images.
Example: Lets say you have 2 selectors in your CSS,

div#first
{
  background: url(first_bg.png);
}  

div#second
{
  background: url(second_bg.png);
}

when loading your CSS file will preform 2 requests, one for each image you specified as background, so when dealing with a complete design, you are probably talking about 40-50+ image requests as such.

CSS sprites solves this problem by loading only one image, that contains all the images you will use on your site within, and displaying the correct image by playing with a combination of a background offset (background-position CSS attribute) and the size of the element.
This technique can be very effective for improving site performance, particularly in situations where many small images, such as menu icons, are used. The Yahoo! home page, for example, employs the technique for exactly this.
Examples and full explanation can be found here at the CSS Tricks.com - CSS Sprites: HowTo or here at the List Apart: Image Slicing's kiss of death article.

Today, i found a Sprite image generator that actually generates this Sprite image file from a zip file you upload and containing all the images, and produces the image as said before, but also the output CSS statements.
very useful.

Firefox vs. Explorer: the power of free will

During the past 2 days, I've been struggling with someone on one of the web development forums i am participating in. Swords were drown when someone else asked 'why should someone choose not to use IE?'.

First i have to clear the background. In Israel, like every other place in the world, IE still rules. The problem in Israel is that there is not enough exposure for other browsers, and even to other OS besides windows. People are not familiar with Ubuntu (almost) at all, and the Macs are pretty expensive in Israel, relatively a lot more than it is elsewhere.
This causes some serious problems in the Israeli online experience, government and other public service provider websites can not be viewed in other browsers except IE, and the web developer community is in a consistant battle to explain to some low-level yet common development firms, why you should implement web standards and support other browsers.
Courses and training programs are more than often don't approach standards and semantic HTML issues, but there are numerous which hold ActiveX in their syllabuses

Back to business, that guy explained that
"People who don't use IE are a minority and if they choose to handicap themselves, it's not my or the government responsibility to enable the support for other browsers".
What can you say about that?

Putting a side everything i have against Microsoft as a corporation, i think that IE is the handicaped browser, not Firefox/Opera/every other browser.
Handicap is not a plugin and extenstion enabled browser, it's the browser that can't support 40% of the W3C Standard for example.
You can find too many hits on why you should dump IE(#2, #3 so on..) and i don't think it's the Firefox hype talking, it's simply the people who had enough with their browser doing stuff he shouldn't do, and not what they want or asked it to do.

BTW, i ended that discussion with that guy... you can't argue with someone that can't understand the meaning of the things you say, just like one of the other forum users said: "Arguing the benefits of Firefox over IE with an iE user is like arguing the advantages of a flashlight with a caveman carrying a torch."