Firefox

Check out the latest version of Software As She's Developed where Michael Mahemoff interviews me - or am I interviewing him :) - on Ajax Diagnosis And Testing Patterns.

Now there are plenty of these types of apps available online but I fell for HiTask’s great use of ajax. This is one of those web apps which makes you feel like you’re using a desktop application.

Después he instalado Ruby On Rails (RoR) para aprender un poco. Es bastante sencilla su instalación con las RubyGems.

Are you accepting sensitive user data? Passwords, credit card numbers, etc. By default, Rails stores all submitted parameters in plain text in the logs. This episode will show you how to filter this sensitive input so it doesn’t show up in the log file.

The best example of this emerging, and rapidly developing, marketing need is the online word processing and document battles. The most publicized part of this trend is the battle between Google’s (formerly Writely) online Docs and Spreadsheets platform and Microsoft’s offline (but with a few online features) Outlook. However, there are other serious competitors in this space such as Zoho, who are gaining momentum and followings. For Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets and Zoho to seriously compete, or gain sustainable adoption, the need to move word processing and spreadsheet data offline is paramount.

When I started programming Ruby on Rails applications, I was afraid I would be up against a similar beast. Was I wrong or what!!! Here is how you do it in RoR.

Eyal and Benjamin gave us a nice internal demo today of their explorer for SIOC forums. It’s written using Ruby on Rails and their ActiveRDF / SWORD Semantic Web application framework for Rails. From the SIOC explorer page:

This blogger details out a simple way to use Xen for webmaster's using VPS. You can start up your own ISP that way!

But how about Windows Live Writer? I found this Harrison Hoffman LiveSide podcast interview with J.J. Allaire, the architect of Windows Live Writer and founder of Onfolio. So I learned that Live Writer came with Microsoft’s acquisition of Onfolio. They had already started developing Writer as a web publishing tool to compliment their other products prior to the acquisition. J.J. explains that their vision was to extend Onfolio from collecting and acquiring information in to publishing.

Adobe announced the public alpha of its Apollo development framework that allows developers to build cross-platform hybrid web/desktop applications using Flash and Ajax. The tech blogosphere responded mostly positively, looking forward to the era of so-called rich Internet applications that’s been predicted for some time and to the possibility of web applications used offline.

Sun Web Developer Pack (SWDP) is a new integrated toolkit from Sun Microsystems that consists of a collection of Web 2.0 technologies that enable next generation Web application development. The toolkit consists of binaries, tutorial, documentation, samples (including source) to build your Web 2.0 applications and deploy them on industry-grade containers. It includes support for building rich user interface using Ajax technologies with Project jMaki & Project Dynamic Faces, light-weight Web services with Atom / REST APIs / WADL and server side scripting with Project Phobos.

Ok, enough of the Biblical references. Point is, I wrote about Google Docs about a year or so ago, while they were still Writely and not owned by Google. I made the point that, yeah, it was a good enough service for basic word processing needs, but that was about it. Formatting quality left a lot to be desired. If you were looking for a better alternative to Microsoft Office, there was always OpenOffice.org that didn’t cost anything.

Since my main geographically related projects are both now based on plugins that I’m pretty happy with and which suit them well, I decided to resuscitate an old sample piece. A few months back I wrote about scraping the Grand Rapids bus routes site and put up a toy application utilising the resource features in then-edge Rails. I’ve been meaning to return to that project to test out some features in ActiveResource, but in the meantime it seemed like it might be useful to be able to search for the nearest bus stop.

I was at the 2nd WebSG (Web Standards Group Singapore) meetup on Wednesday (28 Feb 2007) where I hosted a short session on some Firefox tips. It’s all thanks the urgings and encouragement of Lucian (the organizer) that I finally got down to publicly sharing my Firefox knowledge ever since I wrote Firefox Secrets.

If you work on any WordPress blogs/sites that are written in any language that has accented characters and happen to be on DreamHost, you have probably noticed character encoding problems. For instance, the new auto-save feature in WordPress or the Ajax categories add field in the category list, can display improperly encoded characters.

I don't know why, but some days my blog seems to be a spam target. Of course, it's mostly bots of some kind hitting it, so the best defense seems to be automated spam blockers. Here's all of the spam that AKismet caught this morning (up to the time of this post).

Eric Engler was up next, talking to us about how to design a web site. Web sites, in this context, are collections of pages with a common data layer, a common code/deployment model, some common UI elements, some common plumbing, and more. Starting with the data layer, Eric discussed the differences between a traditional ntier architecture and the ORM approach. Eric displayed favoritism toward the ORM approach and the Olymars tool specifically.

I created a regex to grab the words following “I love” and “I hate” through Google blogsearch in PHP. I’m combining this with my AJAX midterm and hope to create a visual representation similar to this: http://phasetwo.org/post/a-better-tag-cloud.html