When you need to toggle the odd or even class names to stripe your table rows, or any similar functionality, you can skip using a counter and checking if its divisible evenly and instead use the Ruby on Rails helper called cycle. It cycles through whatever values are in the supplied argument list each time its called, so it can also be used in other situations. Here is an example for marking your table rows with odd and even classes:

cycle('odd', 'even')

I am a very visual person. I like to see graphical representations of large sets of data and complex problems, structures, or processes. This includes application databases, so I was immediately drawn to a new Rails plugin, written by Tom ten Thij, called Schema Browser. It’s as easy as pulling it from git, and running a generate command. The screenshot below is from Tom’s mephisto blog and it illustrates the very nice schema graphic produced from the plugin. Installation instructions on Tom’s blog post, Rails schema browser plugin: proof of concept.

I can definitely see uses for this, including having one browser running for the project site I’m working on (from Fluid):

Using Fluid, you can create [site specific browsers] to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many other goodies.