intertwingly

It’s just data

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, which enabled me to produce:

<match key="system.hardware.product" string="6457B51">
  <!-- Proprietary nVidia driver quirks -->
  <merge key="power_management.quirk.s3_mode" type="bool">true</merge>
  <merge key="power_management.quirk.s3_bios" type="bool">false</merge>
  <merge key="power_management.quirk.save_pci" type="bool">true</merge>
  <merge key="power_management.quirk.vbemode_restore" type="bool">false</merge>
</match>

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.

...

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.

...

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.