Noobkit is a seriously awesome resource for Rails developers — a searchable archive of all the various pieces of Rails (ActionPack, ActionMailer, ActiveRecord, etc) as well as a variety of popular Gems — like Hpricot and pdf-writer. Probably won’t end up being a replacement for using ‘gem server’ on your local machine when you need to, but the Rails docs and the Del.icio.us link roll are making this site kind of a first stop for me when looking for new Rails knowledge.

I’ve even wrapped it in a site-specific browser using the very cool Fluid tool for creating small, web-kit based browsers for your favorite sites. At this point, I’ve got one for our company’s instance of Trac, one for my personal projects on Lighthouse, and one each for Basecamp and Campfire. For icons, there’s a big set on Flickr.

It begins — this is the first pebble announcing the avalanche from Google, the thing that will make everyone realize what kind of doo-doo shorts outfit Facebook really is:

Google has opened up a sandbox for developers where they can try building some new types of iGoogle apps not available to the general iGoogle user population. Most significantly, they can add activity streams (i.e., updates) and friends lists in new navigation panes on the page. Any change in a third-party iGoogle widget will be able to be reflected in the updates pane. (This has actually been a long time coming, since adding activity streams was always part of the OpenSocial plan). And they can also play around with larger “canvas” pages that users can click through to from each widget for a full-page experience. How very Facebook of them.

I’ve written on this before. If I hadn’t had a bottle of vinho verde along with a sweet, sweet chicken dinner tonight, I’d probably write more. But for right now, all I’ve got to say is that I welcome our benevolent masters in this arena even more than I have in others.

Mark Penn, psuedo-Svengali of the Clinton campaign, has stepped down because of the fallout over his hamfisted lobbying efforts on behalf of the Colombian government. The piece the Times has up right now is pretty small—no doubt a placeholder for a longer one to come later this evening or with tomorrow morning’s paper.

I’ve never heard anything good about Penn. The several people I know who’ve had encounters with him professionally found the experience to be extremely unpleasant, and it seems like most of the HRC campaign’s woes this cycle have come from his epic misreading of the national political landscape. But I doubt this flameout will keep him from feeding greedily at the DC slop trough for as long as he cares to—there’s no business like American politics for rewarding mediocrity and malfeasance with increased status and extra cash.

Josh Marshall is, as ever, the first big political blogger to pick this story up. He’s got a couple funny tidbits:

Note to self: Write separate post on the craziness of having Mark Penn both run message and polling when his polling is so legendary for cherry picking data to confirm his preferred political strategies and messages.

Note to self, two: Make effort to work in fact that Penn earlier tried to argue that he was never part of the Clinton campaign in the first place.

Not sure what he’s referring to with the second one, but it sounds like vintage Penn. I’m sure we’ll get to read more about this mess in the coming days.

Jose Saramago’s incredible, disturbing novel “Blindness” is being made into a movie by Brazilian phenom Fernando Meirelles, the director of “City of God“

I’ve always thought Blindness would make a great movie. I’m just disappointed to have to wait until October 3rd to see it. The one thing that gives me pause is the apparent inclusion of Sandra Oh as some kind of Health Minister or other authority figure. I guess maybe people are used to thinking of her as a medical expert after several seasons of Gray’s Anatomy, but it still seems like a massive leap.