Saturday this weekend my family and I was at a party. We left about 3 PM unknowing of what would meet us when we got home. We got back to our house about 11 PM and didn’t suspect anything at first. The light in my room didn’t work at the time, so when I got up I only noticed a silhouette of a cardboard box that had been torn apart lying on the floor. I wanted to turn on my old laptop but as I reached for the On button in the dark I discovered it wasn’t there.

“Someone’s taken my laptop,” I yelled and when I got down in the living room my mother said that her jewelry was gone. “The curtains are down.” “Half of our Xbox games are gone.” Someone had broken into our house and stolen things worth well over $5000 in total. Besides the jewelry, laptop, and Xbox games he’d taken a Canon EOS camera, a school bag, and many other things. The school bag, which was mine, contained my wallet (which contained my Social Security card) and our house keys.

We called the police and they inspected the house the next morning. As it turns out the same thing has happened to 17 other houses during the last three weeks, up until now, and the police reckon the same people are behind. The worst part was that my laptop was in fact backed up, but it was on two USB keys which were also in my school bag. Every tiny aspect of that laptop was configured to my needs, it contained the projects I work on (including work that had not yet been pushed to GitHub), family pictures, films, books, important legal and school-related documents, and many, many other things. It’s all gone and it makes me sad.

I’m going to spare you guys for even more depressing details, but what I’m going to do to prevent a similar situation in the future is to have Time Machine back up my new Mac on an external harddrive and hide that in a very safe place plus use an online service as extra security. If you’re out there thinking “that will never happen to me” I say to you: I thought too. But now it has and my life collapsed for a few days which is why I haven’t had time to tweet about this.

• Creating a Rails authentication system on Mongoid, part 1, part 2, and part 3
• Faye, “a set of tools for dirt-simple publish-subscribe messaging between web clients”
• vim-markdown, you know the rest
• Encryptor, “A simple wrapper for the standard ruby OpenSSL library”
• MiniFB, “a small, lightweight Ruby library for interacting with the Facebook API”
• Vagrant, “a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments”
• Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired, another post from Giles’ blog – one of the most entertaining of its kind
• Bundler: Oh the fail I know.
• ShowFor
• Ruby Driver GridFS API Now Cleaner and Faster
• Models with js-model
• data_miner, “Download and import XLS, ODS, XML, CSV, etc. into your ActiveRecord models”
• Testing email delivery in Rails with Gmail & HTTParty
• LightMongo
• Mac Performance Guide
• GemInstaller, “Automated Gem installation, activation, and much more!”
• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash!, from the author of script.aculo.us
• hub + zsh
• Custom Shoulda macros — a tutorial
• Rails 3, a 1-hour presentation from Yehuda Katz
• Getting started with automated testing in Rails

• Tilt, “Generic interface to multiple Ruby template engines”
• Frank, “Frank lets you build static sites using your favorite libs, painlessly”
• Rails 3: Let ActiveRecord Manage Your Translations
• Testing Facebook
• Jasmine for JavaScript Testing: It’s Screw.Unit++
• Put your mailer where the action is!, no, by “action” he does not necessarily mean controller action
• Ambitious Query Indexer, “Pain-free indexing to speed up your Rails app”
• Rapid prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby
• BlueGreenDeployment, clever
• Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie
• validates_timeliness, “Date and time validation plugin for Rails 2.x and allows custom date/time formats”
• Breakneck, simple gem for serving static files on your development machine
• Performance Tuning for Phusion Passenger
• A quick RVM rundown
• 47 Amazing CSS3 Animation Demos
• SEOChecker, “check your website if it is seo”
• Jasmine, “DOM-less simple JavaScript testing framework” from Pivotal Labs
• The Ruby Standard Wiki, online version of the Ruby ISO standard draft
• #gemsday, “Share your favorite new RubyGems weekly”
• Rubex, “A simple copy cat of Rubular” – the real version has supposedly been acting up lately
• Write Fewer Regular Expressions, yay
• lambda { foo }.should run_in(1.second), useful RSpec matcher from Ryan Bigg

• Is Rails 3.0 a Game Changer?
• Rails 3.0: Beta release
• Rails 3 Beta is Out — A Retrospective
• The Path to Rails 3: Greenfielding new apps with the Rails 3 beta
• Five Things You Can Do Today to Make Your App Ready For Ruby on Rails 3
• Signed and Permanent cookies in Rails 3
• The Rails Module (in Rails 3), that provides you with the root, env, and logger class methods
• Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources To Get You Going, in which my Rails 3 generator guide is included!
• Is Your Plugin Ready For Rails 3?, also included in the collection above but this is worth highlighting
• Bundle me some Rails, things to keep in mind while using Bundler

Un-related to the release:

• A Note on the Recent Outages, GitHub had three major outages this week – this is why
• Web Translate It, “sync your translations between your Rails app and Web Translate It”
• EventCalendar, “Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows”
• script/migrator for navigating migrations
• Trunks, “simple, developer focused source control at spouse-friendly prices” (and they’re free until they go out of beta!)
• Watch your self, brittle title but the article talks about blocks + instance_eval gotchas
• jQuery 1.4, MooTools 1.2 Compared
• Free Rails 3 upgrade screencast, and it’s live coding!