Firefox

I keep hearing about REST and RESTful stuff in Rails, but I don’t really understand. Is it about serving different types of content (HTML, RSS, XML) depending on the device that’s requesting the data?

Hmm… maybe I should run back to bittorrent before I get use to the unlimited cost… oups. I mean Unlimited Service.

More tightly integrated with its owner, that is. I’ve always wondered how Writely was supposed to make any money. Today’s email brings a clue. New users or the users you invite to collaborate on documents will need to get themselves a gmail/gcalendar/gpersonalised account to participate. Good move, I think. Writely is a cool tool, but it’s a poor vehicle for advertising. If it starts to pull its weight by drawing more people into the Google empire, then it will remain free and a focus for development for a bit longer.

I started this blog to put on the modern equivalent of paper some of the practical challenges about running a church website from an an intersted non-professional. Now Google search for “example of good church website design ” gives a link to David’s blog at churchblogger as its first on page 1 where cambray’s site is under the wordpress sites on the page. (I have only found 3 in the uk from a google search for wordress church uk or some such search) , it was only when sitemeter.com started to see links from churchblogger, (see my blogroll for link ) I thought what is going on? Flattering, but I have seen many, many better sites than cambray.org site.

For the last few months I’ve began receiving spam in my GMail account that has been getting through the normally outstanding spam blockers. These have been getting through because the text is embedded in a GIF file that shows up embedded in the body of the e-mail. So there is no actual text for the spam blockers to sort through, thus it gets straight to my e-mail. I’ve been getting at least a few of these each day and it has been quite aggrevating.

FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.

Joel Spolsky has a post today titled Language Wars where he makes some statements about selecting a platform for web development. He says the standard things you've heard a dozen times before and makes the (very) reasonable case for selecting a mainstream platform (basically Java or .Net and maybe PHP or even Python) for your enterprise development. He did take some shots at Ruby on Rails which provoked this from DHH the creator of Rails: Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky.

On a tech note, I have been playing around with web browsers of late. I was using Safari but, alas, the WYSIWYG text editors on the Content Management Systems that I use did not work with it (Apple: take note!); so, dissatisfied with Firefox's speed (although they are building a Mac OS Cocoa version, codenamed Minefield, which appears to be a little swifter), I then swapped to the Mozilla-based Mac OS 10-only browser Camino.