I recently read a post about a gym called Gym Jones. What caught my interest is that I recently saw the movie “300″, in which the Spartans had near perfect human physiques. I’ve always been fascinated by men and women that have the pure determination and discipline to attain such beautiful bodies.

Curious to learn more about the gym used as a medium to sculpt such beauty, I visited the site and my curiosity turned to awe. Watching the videos and reading the site’s content, you are left with nothing but respect for Mark Twight, the founder, and the “disciples”.

Here’s a taste of the “300″ workout:

25x Pull-up +
50x Deadlift @ 135# +
50x Push-up +
50x Box Jump @ 24” box +
50x Floor Wiper @ 135# (one-count) +
50x KB Clean and Press @ 36# (KB must touch floor between reps) +
25x Pull-up
300 reps total

I have to say I’m impressed unimpressed with this new eclipse-based IDE, 3rdRail, from CodeGear.

Update: As I’ve actually started to use the editor I’ve encountered several exceptions that seem to be related to the code completion feature. The exceptions (followed by a nagging popup window) are so frequent that I’ve gone back to using Netbeans for my Ruby editing.

Update: (see comments below for a workaround to the exception I refer to above.

I’ve just finished watching the “Tour of the 3rdRail IDE” video and I invite you to do the same. Below I outline some of the features available but I was surprised to see one specific feature missing, a debugger? In fact 3rdRail joins the majority of Ruby editors that don’t sport a debugger. The only exception I’ve seen is the Netbeans Ruby editor. Anyway, you can check it out yourself by downloading a 30 day free trial from the CodeGear.com website.

Here are the features:

• Available on Macintosh, Red Hat Linux, Windows XP and Windows Vista
• Support for latest Ruby (1.8.5), Rails (1.2.3) and all databases
• Project Commander, a powerful in-IDE command shell (you have the choice of using this command shell or using several wizards that are also available
• Ruby and Ruby on Rails Code Completion
• Key Refactorings for rename Controller, Action and View
• Live Dependencies View for Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects with file linking and project navigation features
• Embedded Ruby console (IRB) with Code Completion
• Rails Project and File Creation Wizards
• DOM Inspector
• Regular Expression Builder
• Subversion integration
• XML HTTP Request Monitor

Here are some visual snapshots of some of the features:

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