There is Good Agile and Bad Agile. I so agree, XP just sounded too crazy too me, but I'm a big fan of agility in programming. Good article.

Blessings:

The body is always changing. Time is always changing.
The teachings are changeless. Changeless is the real.

...Babaji

Links for fun!

Lisp on Rails
Is Functional Programming Going Mainstream? - Oh yeah baby! Oh yeah!
Even on the ground, space elevators may have uses - Can I please have a space elevator? Now?
12 lessons about CSS standards - Some good information in here. I especially appreciated the descendant selectors information. I use some descendant selectors, and am trying to do it more.
positioniseverything.com - How to work around browser bugs
Missing the point - A good article, with the following amazing quote:

Companies with pure hearts will trump companies with money in the end.

I'm a hippie 2.0. I have eternal faith in karma. You will never convince me otherwise.

JSS - JSSoundKit: Super-Easy Sound API - I can't help but think of the Jet Set Show when I hear JSS.
Wow, the sweetest little Flash Audio Player in the world.
Add Audio to your webpage
Playing MP3's with an embedded Flash player
Web 2.0 for Designers

When we engage every moment without the cares and fears of the beyond, we are able to harness the spirit of sadhana, and every moment is filled with Divinity.
Swamini Mayatitananda Saraswati, spiritual head of Wise Earth Monastery and Mother Om Mission, Candler, North Carolina

Links:

quicktime_helper - A way to embed Quicktime in Rails views
Gmail - Mark As Read Button - A Greasemonkey plugin to add a "Mark As Read" button to Gmail.
Gmail Extended - Extensions for Gmail
Become a Gmail Master
Gmail Macros
Gmail Keys
Simplicity blog
Humanized - Weblog
Fall and Winter Planting Guide
Selenium on Rails
sudo man page
Application Archetypes
Javascript closures for Dummies
Scope in Javascript
addicted_to_caching - A great plugin for Ruby on Rails that allows you to cache all your pages, and then delete the cached files when certain models are changed
whitelist - A plugin for Ruby on Rails that sanitizes variables before you put them on webpages
Rails Conf Europe Notes: Reusing RJS
Rails Conf Europe Notes: Localizing Rails
HAML: RoR's new templating engine
IE + JavaScript Performance Recommendations - Part 1
simply_helpful - A very interesting looking new Rails plugin for simplifying things like render :partial
8 steps to serving better (X)HTML
Debugging Rails Applications

Thank you for your attention and attentiveness.

Fall Navaratri links:

The different forms of Durga
Babaji.net multimedia
Navaratri - Festival of Renewal
THE FESTIVAL OF NAVARATR-VIJAYA DASAMI
Navaratri
Fall Navaratri
Navarathri
Holy Nights : Navaratri
DURGA PUJA OR NAVARATRI

How to run both IE6 and IE7 at the same time. Usually Internet Explorer 7 RC1 replaces IE6 completely. I need to test my sites with both IE6 and IE7, and with this, I can run both of them side by side.

Links!

acts_as_cached - Oh, so sweet, the ability to store any ActiveRecord object in memcached. Very nice.
FormTagHelper - Where I learned about "image_submit_tag", which lets you use an image as the submit button for a form.
nginx - A very nice lightweight front end webserver for mongrel_cluster. It's really small and fast, I'm thinking of using it, since I have such a small memory footprint to live inside on my webservers.
Setting up nginx with Rails and mongrel_cluster
Improving Javascript Performance
Capistrano 1.2.0 is released
Capistrano shell - I love shells. No, I *really* love shells. My new shell, since spring this year, is zsh, and it's so amazing, so powerful. This new capistrano shell sounds very neat, I can see myself running inside Emacs with M-x shell
simply_helpful - A new feature in Rails.
The Capistrano Manual
better XHTML
Ruby Internals Guide
acts_as_sluggable - Really nice and lightweight way to make beautiful URLs that will help search engines. mmm.
Debugging Rails Applications
RSS Extensions
lsof - A Linux uber tool.
Rails Migration Cheat Sheet
installing MySQL on Fedora Core 4
A live datagrid - Pretty nice.
xml-sitemaps - Looks interesting.
Treemap on Rails
Fighting Spam with Postfix
CSS Beauty

I have these really cool glow-in-the-dark devil duckies. I recently took some shots of them, with a cute trick I learned to make it look like they're on an infinite white background: Take a big piece of white paper, put it against the wall so that it is curved, and illuminate evenly. Neato!

Me with one of the huge sunflowers in my garden this year.

Links!!!

JavaScript control of throbber - Great way to have a nice little page loading throbber in the corner of the page with Javascript
Web Based Session Management - Some great basic information about how to do sessions on the web
Rails Session Management
RSpec
cheat for :has_one - From a great site that has a whole bunch of cheat sheets for Rails. Essential.
Developing a Rails model using BDD and RSpec, Part 1
Low Pro - Unobtrusive scripting for Prototype. Goes great with Rails.
Things you shouldn't be doing in Rails - I now use the excellent deprecated plugin which checks these all for you automatically. Highly recommended.
ActiveRecord Extensions - Very interesting, some extensions to ActiveRecord.
CSS Box model - Essential reading. Really.
Some really excellent Drawing Tutorials

REST is the latest hot thing in the Ruby on Rails community. I've never been quite so sure about it myself, but there was recently a lecture in
SecondLife on it, and I might be coming around to it.

I just don't know about how cute and tricky to make things, after many years in computers, I think that the simpler way is the right way, and the REST trickyness just seems a little too obscure to me. This is my main problem with Ruby on Rails, I consider myself a Ruby on Rails programmer now, but I constantly come up against things where things magically happen correctly, and while this is nice, when those magical things break, or when you need to do something a little more magical, finding the origin of the magic is sometimes tricky. I'm going to start writing some articles on how to find the magic bits in Rails and make them a little more clear.

A nice little free Ruby on Rails tutorial.

Another neat hack from the GMail hacks is the gmail filesystem for Linux.

It uses FUSE, libgmail, gallina and a python script to turn your GMail account into a Linux filesystem. So neat.

Some great GMail hacks/tips.

The best one is:

#2 - Encrypt all GMail traffic:

This is just a simple tip allowing you to encrypt your whole session. When you go to GMail.com only the login is encrypted. When you go to GMail.com. At https://gmail.google.com the whole session is encrypted.

And some more funny quotations about programming. Funny because they're true.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

Donald Knuth

UJS - Unobtrusive Javascript for Ruby on Rails is a very interesting new plugin for Rails that lets you put behaviours right in your Rails code.

I was starting to use the behaviour javascript library for behaviours, basically what this lets you do is to assign behaviours to HTML elements using CSS selectors, but this new UJS looks like it might be a little more straightforward. Instead of having to add the behaviours by hand to an external Javascript file, you can just add them to your Rails views and UJS will make the Javascript file for you.

I'm torn, I kind of like the control that writing your own Javascript file gives you, but on a recent project to write a website that allowed an artist to arrange her photos by dragging them around, I switched from writing my own .js file with calls to Scriptaculous to using the Rails helper "sortable_element".
Using sortable_element took 30 lines of Javascript code down to 3 lines of Ruby code, which was pretty sweet.

Advanced Drag and Drop with Scriptaculous - A really good little resource that gives you working example Scriptaculous code and some good explanations.

Clustered Mongrel in a Shared Environment

Senses - A good internet resource about common and uncommon senses.

Linux MIDI howto
Some code examples for MIDI on Linux.
OSS MIDI Programming