intertwingly

It’s just data

Men in Suits


Geir Magnusson Jr: Given that fact that the statements contained in [link] are given by a Sun employee identifying himself in his job role, can I assume that Sun is interested in taking this discussion public? I think that is a really healthy approach. I think there is confusion about the basic facts and I think clarification will be useful for the community as a whole.

Simon Phipps: The lesson to be learned is that the best way to get Java everywhere was to work with the community rather than expect the community to work with Sun. Let’s hope that lesson sticks and spreads.

There is a discussion going on.  At the moment, it appears to be between Sun and the press.

It is the right discussion to be having.  Let’s just make sure that the right people have every opportunity to participate.

Beta 1.1


B1.1 of Agile Web Development with Rails, 3rd Edition is out.  Unless you have an deep interest in the migration function, there isn’t much new content here — the primary focus on this update is addressing the errata and forum comments received to date.

This effort has turned out to be both harder and more rewarding than I would have ever anticipated.

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Open Standards


Paul Fremantle: For me the core difference between Open Standards and Open Source is this: Open Standards enable companies to compete in a structured way, Open Source projects enable people or companies to collaborate in a structured way

I think Paul may be onto something.  It is rapidly becoming the case that this more than this is becoming the exemplar for open standards.  While it is popular to malign the JCP, it is worth noting that many (most?) JSRs have TCKs which actively promote the idea of multiple, independent, interoperable implementations.

Word Of Mouth


danah boyd: I decided to go with a Scion xD because it was the right combination of small, cheap, quirky, practical, and dependable. I feel a little guilty because it’s painfully clear that Scion is targeted directly at people like me and I hate ending up fitting into a stereotype, but, well... it is nice to have an iPod jack built in standard and have a design aesthetic meant for hipster 20-30somethings.

danah deserves a commission.

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VMWare Workstation, Hardy Heron, VMWare Tools


Norman Walsh: In case you haven’t found it yet, here’s a pointer to the instructions for building VMWare Tools under Ubuntu 8.04, “Hardy Heron”.

The above instructions (originally for VMWare Fusion) also work for VMWare Workstation.

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Just add scaling!


Ola Bini: I still haven’t found anyone who knows how you implement Scaling in a language, so I guess that LRM will never have it... Anyone who care to enlighten me, please send me a detailed email with an implementation of Scaling. I really feel the need to know how this thing works.

Job Posting


Henry Work: TechCrunch seeks two Rails programmers to join the company as interns this summer.

License-Free Spec


Mike Melanson: the previous restriction that anyone who looks at the spec technically isn’t allowed to create an independent SWF decoder (if documentation EULAs are to be believed) was a point of contention among many open source types.

I would agree that the ability to create a license-free, independent open source implementation is an important aspect of an open standard.

Sleep Quirks — Debugged!


David Goodlad: the existing article on the Ubuntu wiki for the T61 says to modify /etc/default/acpi-support, which is only valid for Gutsy. gnome-power-manager in Hardy seems to use the data from the hal-info package instead, now, which is contained in a bunch of xml files in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm*.

This hint lead me to Sleep Quirk Debugger.

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modrails: easy (if you are root)


Took a look modrails.  First impressions: easy to set up; not sure what the target market is for this.  There already are plenty of options available to people with root access to their servers.  What I would think would be most useful is something that targeted Apache shared hosts.  I should be able to put something in my /home/rubys/public_html/.htaccess (or /home/rubys/Sites/.htaccess on a Mac) to say that the depot directory is a Rails application, and access it as http://localhost/~rubys/depot/. ...

Passing on Ubuntu 804


For the last two months, I’ve been running XP with CYGWIN.  Mostly the SSH client, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin.  I’m increasingly using my server (via SSH) for development where I used to use my laptop.

Clearly, if I’m willing to run XP, I would be willing to try restricted video drivers.  The restricted video drivers, either installed directly or via envyng-gtk do address all of the problems listed above, but introduce one new problem.  Suspend works.  Resume doesn’t.  Unfortunately, for me, that is a complete show-stopper.

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Third Edition


Pragmatic Programmers: Rails just keeps on changing. Rails 2, released in 2008, brings hundreds of improvements, including new support for RESTful applications, new generator options, and so on. And, as importantly, we’ve all learned a lot more about writing Rails applications in the last few years.  So here’s the Third Edition of the Jolt Award winning book that shows you a new approach to web development, updated for Rails 2.

Ingrates


Martin Atkins: it is impossible to use Yadis in this way while having a conforming HTML 5 document. The current ethos for HTML 5 seems to be to remove any mechanism by which it can be extended in any way without going through the HTML working group and changing the core spec.

Just because YADIS didn’t have the foresight to use the officially sanctioned way to embed custom non-visible data is no reason to complain.

HTML5 -= SVG


Ian Hickson: I have removed SVG support from the HTML parser specification as per your request. (I have left MathML support in the specification.)  Hat tip: Shelley Powers.

SVG and MathML Annexes to HTML5


As Anne previewed, HTML5 has recently added support for data attributes and MathML and SVG vocabularies.  The latter is of more interest to me.  It isn’t full distributed extensibility, nor is it entirely consistent with the direction that IE8 says they are going, but it is substantial progress. ...

Damaged in Transit


Ciaran Gultnieks: How do you make web browsing faster on a GPRS connection? The answer seems to be by injecting huge blocks of javascript into pages, turning 6KB of well-formed XHTML into 23KB of junk that refuses to render because it’s invalid.

CSS Naked Day


Once again, it is CSS Naked Day.  Due to the way the Universal Feed Parser strips object tags, the SVG icons on entries from this weblog will display in full screen on Planet Intertwingly.  This can more easily be addressed in the Mars codebase.

SEC Feeds


Dominic Jones: In a move that portends dramatic changes in how disclosures are disseminated online, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has added news feeds for every issuer and reporting person who files with the commission’s EDGAR database [via Charles Hoffman]

It would be nice if somebody could introduce the SEC to the validator.

Mars on GitHub


David Heinemeier Hansson: Killer apps makes or breaks any platform. With Github, I think the Git hub just scored one. Rails is going to be hosted there for the launch. Capistrano, Prototype, and Scriptaculous already moved there.

Within the past week, I’ve started receiving patches for Mars via GitHub.

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Ruby 1.9 at OSCON 2008


I’m scheduled to present on Ruby 1.9 at this year’s OSCON.  My plans are to expand on this and report on both the excitement and ennui.

My tentative conclusion at this point based on observations of efforts to get products like Rails working on Ruby 1.9: the biggest obstacle to Ruby 1.9’s adoption is the sheer number of mostly working but essentially unmaintained gems that virtually everybody in the Ruby community depends on.