Sometimes, it’s the little things. A few niceties deployed recently:

• The code editor UI now has a liquid layout. If you’re a life hacking / GTD type like me, you’ll especially enjoy this in combination with Firefox’s fullscreen mode. (FF for OS X doesn’t have fullscreen, unfortunately; try this instead.)
• Download files from the context menu. You can use this in conjunction with upload to edit in your local editor, load an image into your photopaint program, etc.
• Speaking of images, if you click on an image, it will display it in the editor pane.
• There’s a link to update your account password on the My Apps page. (Shocked this wasn’t there before?...

We’ve been working our tails off over the past few weeks to process all the feedback you guys have been sending (or that we’ve gleaned from the system logs). I think that this photo of the trashcan under Orion’s desk tells the story pretty well:

He bought that case of Rockstar at Costco last week, and consumed it all as part of our mad dash to squash bugs exposed by our sudden surge of users. Bad for Orion’s health, but good for Heroku’s backend stability. :)

One major area we’ve been dealing with in this past week is the issue of failed mongrel starts. That is, exceptions that occur while the Rails framework is booting, rather than on a page request....

One of the many benefits of Rails is database independence. Migrations are particularly nice in this regard; and the easy-to-read / Rubyified display of your schema (via rake db:schema:dump) in schema.rb is icing on the cake.

But what about data? For import and export of the actual data, we’re stuck with mysqldump (or pg_dump, if you’re so inclined). Further, these dump formats are not terribly readable, contain lots of information you may or may not want to copy (like permissions, schema settings, views, triggers…you know, database features that Rails users are supposed to avoid).

Worst of all, ddata dumps are vendor specific, so you can’t move data between...