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Blogs » Archive for May, 2008
Rubinius runs Rails
There was a short note today, that the Rubinius development team has successfully run Rails on their virtual machine. Although isn’t anywhere new production ready yet, it is a significant step forward in getting a faster Rails.
I covered some of the alternate Ruby implementations previously.
Congratulations to the team!
.NET on the Net May 8-15 : It’s full of stars
The release of Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope was easily the biggest thing out of Redmond this week. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it’s pretty amazing. Imagine Live Maps for space with lots of neat filters. The level of detail is pretty amazing and it’s interesting to see Microsoft’s take on something a little less business focused.
This week there were also some interesting developments in the ongoing saga of Microsoft and Yahoo. While Microsoft has decided that they’re no longer interested in Yahoo, at least publicly, there is a key investor at Yahoo looking to put a new board in place to take another shot at the Microhoo merger.
For any open-source fans, you might be intested that the Mono team has released the first source code of Moonlight. At the moment, you have to build it with your own video codecs and it only supports SilverLight 1.0, but it’s a critical step towards SilverLight support on Linux. Miguel’s blog also proves that Linux developer’s blogs are just as ugly as the Microsoft guys.
Those MIX 08 videos I mentioned last week have already been updated. New versions have been posted with a nifty SilverLight player that …
Web Directions UX: Making Your Users Feel Special
Andy Budd kicked off the Web Directions User Experience conference this morning with some terrific insight into what makes a site that really works so memorable for the site’s users.
The core message of Andy’s presentation was that other industries have long understood the importance of a positive user experience, and the Web can learn a lot from this.
His presentation gave lots of tips, with plenty of rich examples:
- First impressions count: Hoteliers understand this, hence good hotels offer smiling greeters in the lobby, chocolates and written notes on your pillow.
- Attention to detail gets noticed: Apple are a company that realize the difference that attention to detail can make — consider the effort that has been put into the packaging of their products, which results in customers actually photographing the unboxing of their iPod. From the sound of the door closing on a new BMW to the rubbish bins at Disney theme parks being themed, people notice this stuff.
- Personalisation and customisation matters: Starbucks allows its customers to customise their coffees, and the Nintendo Wii and other games let users create their own characters. Second life takes this to a new level to accommodate people’s needs to assert their …
The Week in ColdFusion: 7-13 May: Community and Open Source are where it’s at
From the Adobe camp
This week saw the beginning of the Adobe Community Summit, a briefing event for Adobe Community Experts and user group managers. According to Aaron West’s Day 1 summary post, there are over 150 attendees this year, catching up on the latest in Adobe tech and giving feedback on the various community programs they are involved in. Aaron also revealed that Rachel Luxemburg was introduced as the new user group manager, replacing Ed Sullivan who many people involved in their local user groups would have had contact with over the past few years.
Adam Lehman, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, released his set of demo ColdFusion applications, covering the Ajax, Flex, PDF and presentation features of ColdFusion 8 (amongst others). The quick and dirty demos are designed to work with the standard cfartgallery sample database, an Apache Derby embedded database that gets installed with CF if you choose to include the samples, so if you’ve got a development server handy and you haven’t had a chance to try all the new features, check Adam’s demos out.
Also from the Adobe camp, briefly:
- Russell Brown has a controversial request for ColdFusion 9: drop the built-in Ajax and JavaScript libraries. …
Rails 2.1 release candidate 1 is on its way
Word out on the wire is that Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged in the repository, so the gems should be available shortly. Being a point release, the changes aren’t major - mainly bug fixes and some performance improvements, but there are still some new features that will make it worth a look.
Updated timezone support
Timezones will finally become a first class citizen in Rails. You will be able to set the timezone, and all subsequent time calls will be with in that zone.
Time.zone = “Australia/Perth”
Time.zone.now # will return something like Wed, 24 May 2008 22:56:00 WST +08:00
Better Gem dependencies
If you rely on gems in any of your projects (and why wouldn’t you? Code re-use and all that), you may have come across the pain of gem versioning. Rails 2.1 will allow you to stipulate what versions of each gem you need.
config.gem “chronic”, :version => ‘0.2.3′
It also adds a rake task that will automatically install the right gems for you.
rake gems:unpack
Improved caching
Previously, the only caching options Rails developers had was based around file fragments, which is fine for single server setups - but scaling that up to multiple servers could cause synchronisation issues, causing your cache to go stale. …
FREE PDF Download: The Photoshop Anthology
With thanks to 99designs, we’re very pleased to announce that for the next 30 days our book, The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques, is free to download (normally worth $29.95).
That’s right, the entire 278 page book, yours to keep, forever!
The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques is the ultimate Photoshop compendium for web designers.
It’s brimming with tried and tested real-world Photoshop solutions that will add impact to your next web design project. If you’ve ever been stuck for inspiration, have puzzled over just how to create a shiny aqua-style button, or wanted to create that seamlessly tiling background image you saw on a site recently, you need to download this book.
This book is free to download thanks to the generous support of 99designs. If you’re looking for a place to give your new-found Photoshop skills a run, why not earn some extra cash along the way?
The team at 99designs are giving away a shiny new MacBook for the best logo design or web design, so be sure to check them out.
Building The Matrix - Notes from The Architect
Matt Magain’s recent blog post about constructing the new SitePoint Book Matrix raised a couple of interesting questions, which I’m going to try to answer, since it was me who built it.
When is a table not a table?
When its data isn’t really tabular; in other words, when the data it represents isn’t really two-dimensional. What we have here is visually two-dimensional, hence at first glance it might seem reasonable to represent it as tabular data; but the data itself isn’t really two-dimensional at all, it’s linear.
A two-dimensional data set has two axes, each representing a different range or set of values, so we should be able to plot axes against the data and be able to make meaningful cross-references. But as the illustration below shows, we can’t:
Sure we can plot those lines and create that reference point, but they don’t mean anything, because the x and y axes both represent the same scale (skill level).
Before we can implement the design we need to decide how the data should be marked up, and that’s why it’s so crucial to …
JavaScript MIME Type: Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t!
In an article he posted a little while back, Alex Walker mentioned some trouble he had with <script> tags when trying to add the type attribute. The Google script Alex was embedding had no type attribute but wouldn’t work when he added one. Douglas Crockford has suggested in his Advanced JavaScript videos that we drop the type attribute altogether since browsers default to JavaScript anyway. The problem is under HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 the type attribute is required. So if you care about validation, like Alex does, then you’ll want to add it.
But, what is the correct type value for JavaScript? The other reason Mr Crockford provides for dropping the attribute is that that the value most people use, text/javascript, is wrong! It’s obsolete, according to rfc4329. This is also confirmed by Anne van Kesteren who has covered this issue already (way back in May of 2006 - yes Anne is one of the gurus and I am not), as well as the SitePoint HTML Reference.
The correct type value for JavaScript is actually application/javascript. But wouldn’t you know it, Internet Explorer will not execute the code if you use that …
Freelancing: Handling the Midnight Client Call
One point that came up from my last post (3 Golden Rules For Working From Home) was; how to handle phone calls during and after normal business hours, whilst working from home. There are three basic scenarios:
1. Client call during work hours
Pick up the phone. Using voice mail has its place after hours, but during work hours: pick up the phone. An answering machine says to a client – I’m not here and that (in a client’s mind) can translated to, you being unreliable and you don’t care about their business. Think of it this way: a client takes an extra (perceived) risk using you — a freelancer — as you are not as ‘safe’ to use as a company. Therefore, it is vital that the client ‘feels the love’ and can speak to you during business hours. This helps to reassure them that their business is safe in your hands and you are not some ‘fly by night’ amateur.
2. Personal calls during Work hours
It is pretty standard for your mates or family to call you during work hours at home, and it is an issue you will need to deal with sooner, rather than later. Friends and …
cf.Objective Conference Wrap-up
cf.Objective() 2008, the third instalment of the “enterprise engineering conference for ColdFusion MX Programmers” run by Jared Rypka-Hauer, is now over for another year. cf.Objective() is unique in the conference circuit in that it concentrates almost solely on advanced topics. It also seems to generate a huge buzz in the community, and attracts attendees from around the world to Minneapolis.
It seems most delegates have arrived back home and updated their blogs, so I figure it’s time to see what they all learnt over the three days…
Brian Rinaldi wrote a comprehensive wrap-up for Fusion Authority. He noted that as the CF community continues to mature, developers are looking to the more advanced tools available to them to solve problems, namely Java, and this was evident in a number of session topics. He also noted that Flex was a hot topic, with so many sessions that a developer could spend the entire conference focused solely on Flex. Brian also reviewed several sessions in detail: Selling Professional Development in a Hostile Shop by Terrence Ryan; Leveraging Code Generation by Brian Kotek; Mate Flex Framework by Laura Arguello; Transfer Caching Mechanisms by Mark Mandel; and Flex: …
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