It’s just data
Anthony Laforge: The Dev channel has been updated to 5.0.317.0 for Google Chrome Frame.
This release addresses the issue I reported in September. Accordingly, I have set these pages to opt-in to the use of Google Chrome Frame if the User Agent header indicates that this is supported.
David Heinemeier Hansson: You thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith. Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over. It’s surely not perfect yet, but we were out of blockers on the list, so here we go. Please give it a run around the block, try to update some old applications, try to start some new ones, and report back all the issues you find.
For those who have purchased (or who have yet to purchase) Agile Web Development with Rails, Edition 3, I’ve begun a page which details the differences that affect what is described in the book.
Jim Stogdill: The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that’s how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics.
Randall Munroe: HAHA, CLEANING VIRUSES? MAN, WHAT A BLAST FROM THE PAST!
How timely. Within the past week, both my sister-in-law and my wife’s netbooks got hit by viruses. I spent yesterday wiping and reinstalling my wife’s machine. While many of the details have changed, the overall process was very familiar.
Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick, and C. Michael Pilato: You need only append an at sign to the end of the path, such as news@11@
But only for versions of svn >= 1.5. Very annoying. Especially if you have a script that works for everything you throw at it, until it comes across a file with name containing an ‘@’. So you dutifully add the ‘@’ as others have done, find that the code passes all of your tests and then fails on a co-worker’s machine who is running a different version of svn.
Darrel Miller: Was the idea to call the REST workshop WS-REST designed to be as inflammatory as possible? http://www.ws-rest.org [via Don Box]
Oh, cool, a conference with a topic I’m interested in in my back yard!
It’s a shame it is too late to submit a talk proposal. Guess I’ll get to enjoy it as a civilian.
Joe Armstrong: After a small amount of experimentation I was able to make Erlang talk to a web page using pure asynchronous message passing. I think this means the death of the following technologies:
I see the appeal for a single node Erlang or Eventmachine or node.js server. (Can sockets be passed between servers?)
I’m less clear about how this could work with request/response servers like PHP or Rails. Event loops on the server are not typically application patterns for applications using such frameworks — shared nothing is more of the norm.
Damien Katz: I, Jan, and Chris are building a startup around Apache CouchDB
CouchDB crossed my radar just over two years ago, a few months later, Damien was at IBM, it entered incubation at the ASF a little over a month later. It has been an exciting project to watch.
My role was simply as a catalyst at a few junctures.
Jacques Distler: To borrow a phrase from Samuel Johnson, “… like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Jacques has a way with words. It does seem to me that collaboratively editing complex formulas and simple diagrams would be one of the use cases for Google Wave, yet I can see the vast number of separate problems that need to be solved in order for this to be addressed ubiquitously (i.e. using only the browser that the user happens to have in front of them at the time).
Simon Phipps: Your browser doesn’t seem to support HTML 5 (or perhaps the Ogg Theora standards) so you’re missing the embedded video here.
Excellent presentation (and excellent means of delivery via the web) by Simon. His thesis is that a license is a necessary but not sufficient indicator of openness in a community. (Related: Mark Wielaard points out a contemporary example [via Dims]). In my opinion, whether Simon’s got all of the details right isn’t the point, the point is to start a conversation on this important topic.
Incidentally, I was cameraman for this particular video, a task which entailed my pushing a single button and then holding a flip video recorder for approximately a half hour.
X3Dom works today in nightly builds of FireFox 3.7, and makes use of a namepsace and mixed case element and attribute names in XHTML. We will be discussing this tomorrow.
CollabNet: The CollabNet-sponsored Subversion project and The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that the award-winning Open Source project has formally submitted itself to the Apache Incubator in order to become part of the Foundation’s efforts.
Noah Mendelsohn: This is the presentation I will be giving on 4 November 2009 at the W3C Technical Plenary session on Decentralized Extensibility
Liam Quin: Automatic XML namespaces
Tony Ross: Distributed Extensibility Submission from Microsoft
Mark Pilgrim: Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
I strongly agree with Mark’s statement. Furthermore, I believe that it is a useful predictor of which parts of HTML will ultimately succeed and which parts will ultimately fail.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
With apologies to Joe Gregorio.
Bradley M. Kuhn: judge the freedom of your codebase not only on its license, but also on the diversity of the community that contributes to it.
+1 insightful. Lots of good stuff in that post. Copyright assignment is a community smell.
It isn’t surprising that Brad believes that the GPL while retaining copyright is the best way to build a diverse community, my experience is that the Apache License is often more effective at being able to attract from a larger pool of developers. Either way, we agree that the goal is a diverse community, the license chosen is but one of many factors that may help you get there.
Brad’s observations also apply to standards, politics, and pretty much any context where any group of people are treated as “more equal” than an other group.
Chris Casciano: CSS properties box-shadow and rgba() and others like text-shadow are absolutely usable in the wild right now.
Works fine on elements that are position: fixed (example: my nav bar). When I try to put it on either my articles or my section h2s, scrolling becomes jerky on Firefox 3.5.3, but remains smooth on Chrome 4.0.222.5. Primary environment is Ubuntu 9.04, but I see similar things on Windows XP.
Michael Koziarski: Switch to on-by-default XSS escaping for rails.:
For existing applications, the changes needed will tend to be small and easily spotted. The biggest impact will be to books and tutorials. For new applications, this is all goodness. Edition 4 will be updated to reflect this change.
Brad Neuberg: View Source Tutorial: Fancy Web Page Using HTML5, CSS, and SVG [via Tim Strehle]
Not only is it a thing of beauty (both visually and from a view source perspective), it also nearly validates... and furthermore the validation errors are useful. This is hopefully an indicator of the way the web is heading.
With a little content negotiation and with this bug fixed, perhaps it could even work on IE.
Lowell McAdam: Either you have an open device or not, This will be open.
Bravo.
Depending on what’s offered, sometime next year I’ll seriously consider an out-of-cycle (i.e., non-subsidized) upgrade.