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. Harder in that Rails has changed so much, there has been so much to learn (in terms of Rails 2.0, SQLite3, and also in terms of working with a different publisher, operating system, and toolset). But I can’t begin to express how much I like the beta books program — the readers that this book has attracted so far have been great and their comments, questions, and feedback have been most appreciated.
Also, while this book has always had ample source code provided, I’m continuing to look for ways to both expand and automate. Rerunning the code on rails edge, for example is now something I can repeatedly do in a matter of minutes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*.
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/. ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Steve Vinoski: if you’re writing dynamic RESTful web services, then Yaws is definitely worth exploring. In this article, I’ll relate some of my experiences with using Yaws and Erlang for web services development.
This otherwise excellent article fails my ETag test.