I’ll not be posting much on this blog anymore. Instead, I’ll be posting on my new business venture’s site, FACollective (http://www.facollective.com). FACollective is owned by John Moorhead, Jake Stutzman and myself.

We will actively be posting articles talking about design, development and entrepreneurship. Some of the things we will talk about will pertain to client projects and how we manage them, how we actively build our client base, design decisions, and development practices and code tutorials.

We are getting ready to start a series on our next internal project that we are starting on where we will share our ideas, our methodologies, and even our screw-ups. We believe in being as transparent as we can. So, if you like those posts that 37Signals will do when developing an application, then stop on by and pick up a subscription to our RSS feed. If you are a subscriber of my blog here, I ask that you take a moment and subscribe to FAC’s blog as well. We have a lot to share and I have a lot of interesting code tips and pieces to share as well.

When you do pick up our RSS feed, please leave us a comment on any of our posts letting us know what you’d like to learn more about and hear from FAC. I know it’s easier to not comment, but we really do want to get to know our readers. So this is me calling you out to leave a comment – at least just say ‘Hi’. Cheers!

This is a post over on my new company site that I did about some techniques that we employee for rapid development. Check it out! http://facollective.com/2009/05/28/10-ways-to-rapid-development/

Today, Site Remark opens for Beta. It has been a while coming that has had many roadblocks in the way. You see, we were suppose to release this a month ago, but then life happened.

My daughter, who is 3 years old, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and we were in Children’s hospital for a week – she was at critical levels. It’s amazing how your whole world can change in a matter of a few moments. It took us some time to adjust to the new schedules, 4-6 times a day of checking blood sugar levels and 2-3 insulin shots within a period of 1 day, everyday for now on.

At the same time, my wife was really sick and pregnant with twins. A few weeks later, a possible threat of miscarrying both babies, she was put on bed rest and I became Mom and Dad while trying to keep up my work and new ventures. Then we got news that her mom has somethings on her lungs that could be cancer. We then later get news that my father-in-law’s brother does have cancer. We lost two family members last year to cancer.

At this point, we are all starting to feel a little like Job – perhaps a lot less righteous. There are a few other things that also caused a great deal of strain on our budget, but when it rains, it pours as I’m sure many of you know all to well.

This doesn’t even include the trials that both my partners, John and Jake, have been going through as well. It’s actually a great achievement for us that we are able to release Site Remark now.

If you’ve seen my very seldom tweets these are the reasons why Site Remark’s beta release has been pushed back. John Moorhead, Jake Stutzman and myself are really excited to finally get our first project out the door.

Even through all of these things that have been happening in all of our lives, we have not been without our Blessings. We’ve been blessed to have been brought together to work on such a project and to form a new company Free Air Collective where we help companies build their vision.

We have three more products currently in the works, one of which we’re hoping to release to beta in the next few weeks. We’re calling it Tandem Task and you’ll have to stay tooned!

I wanted to send out a special thanks to the guys at Silicon Prairie News for doing a a blog post on Site Remark and FACollective. They’ve got a great conference happening out in Omaha, Nebraska that I wish I was able to attend. You should really check it out as they have a great program and speakers!

Lastly, if you are looking to sign-up and use Site Remark or just want to take it for a test spin, send us an email at info [at] facollective [dot] com and we can get you a beta code to test ’er out.

Last time I blogged I talked about a way of managing git submodules in your Rails applications. While it was an OK start, it wasn’t a viable solution. I don’t really want to have to keep editing a rake file and would rather offload most of the work something else.

To scratch this itch, I wrote a little gem called Gitools. Gitools runs off a single YAML file that specifies what git submodules you want to manage and from what git repo you want to manage them from.

Gitools comes with a couple of commands that either add or update your git submodules as well as handling a fresh project checkout from git where it will do the init and update for you. It will also create a sample YAML file for you to get started.

Gitools has made git submodules a breeze to work with. Check it.

I’ve started work on a new project called Travel & Gather, where I am a co-founder partnering with two other great guys, Jake Stutzman and John Moorhead. We’ll be releasing a beta in a few months and if you follow the link, you can sign up to be notified when it releases and be part of our beta testing.

While setting up the base of this project, which is going to be written in Ruby on Rails, I needed a way to manage git submodules easier than cd-ing into the directory and doing a git remote update and then merging with the master branch. Writing a rake task was the first thing I thought of, but if I wanted to add another plugin, or remove a plugin, then I have some tasks to edit – because I have task :all in there as well.

Each task, for the plugins, shares the same functionality, so to DRY things up, I’ve added a hash stored in @plugins. This hash defines the name and directory filename for the plugin. I then iterate through the hash to define each task on the fly and for the all task I setup a normal rake task that iterates through the hash installing each plugin. Each rake task uses a method to do the cd-ing, update, and merging. Pretty simple and DRY’s up the code pretty nicely while still being readable.

The code is hosted over at github Github using their gist pastie system.

The Ruby Phrasebook was published several months ago. I’m pretty excited about this book because it is the first book that I served as the Technical Editor.

If you haven’t checked it out, take a peek. It can be a great resource for the beginning and intermediate Ruby developer.

I've been working on some encryption methods lately for an application that I'm developing. One type uses PGP encryption and another uses the SHA family style encryption. After doing some research on the various levels of encryption within the the SHA family, I saw that three years ago that 3 Chinese Researchers were able to break SHA-1.

The rise of distributed computing greatly decreases the time it takes to find such collisions. For example, the collision found in the SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations. This is much less than a brute-force attack, which is about 2**80 operations. This was based on an attack using distributed systems, which is only going to get better in the future.

Bruce Schneier has been warning people to move away from SHA-1 for quite a while now (months before the collisions where found, over 3 years ago!) however, people are still using it. My advice is move to something more secure, specifically SHA-256 or SHA-512 (both are government standards). These two are better options for now until NIST comes up with a new standard. Currently they have an open competition for a new New Hash Algorithm.

For your Ruby applications, you can require 'digest/sha2' instead of 'digest/sha1' and you can do something like:

1   require 'digest/sha2'
2   
3   Digest::SHA512.hexdigest(data)

Implementing this now, will get you ahead of the curve, especially if you are working on higher level of security applications. For some applications, you may not need to worry too much about using SHA-1, but it's better to know what's going on, then not.

Over the weekend I put together a new company site for Code Wranglers, a simple one pager that I'm pretty happy with. I used Nathan Smith's 960 CSS Framework, which was fantastic to work with. I literally had the site done in less than an hour, which isn't a huge accomplishment, but I had no real design idea before I started - for me, that's fast!

I have many more screenshots of projects I've worked on that I need to get up as well as a few other things. The most important aspect for me was to get this up as quickly as possible. Also, this blog with be used as my main blog. I'll be switching over http://robertrevans.com to point to this blog, as I push to further brand Code Wranglers with my work.

Another move, another blog. This time, I'll be staying with this setup: 1) running my blog off of my company site and 2) using Webby for the blog.

I've found that I don't really like taking the time to go to a site and login, to write something. I'm much more comfortable in a text editor writing, since that is where I spend most of my days anyways, writing code.

For those who don't know, Code Wranglers, Inc. is my company where I do my freelance work out of. This will serve as my only blog for personal and company stuff.