jRails - Seamlessly Redefines Rails Helpers to Use jQuery Instead of Prototype

jRails is an intriguing Rails plugin that makes it extremely easy to switch from using the Prototype JavaScript library that comes with Rails to the increasingly more popular jQuery. From most of the reports I've seen, jQuery is faster and I've seen several blog posts just in the last week that emphasize just how much easier and concise jQuery code is (it's not hard to find these reports, if you're interested). The only downside to jQuery is that all of Rails' helpers are written to use Prototype.. but jRails solves that by redefining how they work so that they work with jQuery instead! Talk about rocking the boat!

RailsCamp 2.0 - A Totally Bonzer Weekend for Rails Coders

RailsCamp is an informal Rails camp (literally, you're in bunk style accommodation) in Australia for Rails coders. The next one is running from this Friday, November 23rd through to Monday, November 26th, so unless you're local to Melbourne, it might be too late to sign up. Organizer Pat Allan wants to build up more knowledge of the event, however, so check out their site and follow their progress if you want to attend a future event. Previous events look like they were fun, with much evidence of coding and goofing off.

Using Ruby to Monitor Your Amazon EC2 Instances

James Knowlton and PJ Cabrera have put together a great tutorial on how to use Ruby to monitor and maintain Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) instances.

LiveConsole - Run IRB Sessions On Remote, Running Ruby Applications

I'll let them do the talking.. "LiveConsole is a library for providing IRB over a TCP connection. If you add it to your application, you can run arbitrary code against your application. For example, you can: Inspect the state of a running application, Change the state of the application, Patch code on the fly, without a restart [...]"

Droid Sans Mono - A New Coding Font

Not directly Ruby related, but Droid Sans Mono is a new coding font that seems to have gathered quite a few fans in the last few weeks. Might be worth a try in your editor of choice (if you want to recommend any other coding fonts, however, leave a comment here.. quite a few people read them!)