intertwingly

It’s just data

CSS3 box-shadow

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.


Mountain Home

Having completed his tech training, my son is now stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho.  In between, he took some leave, visited home and friends in NC and Virginia.  Having a number of possessions he needed to get to his new base, including a car, he opted to drive.  It is a tough trip, and doing so alone would have made it tougher, so I surveyed my options and decided to take the opportunity travel with him.  I’m glad I did.

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XSS Protection by Default in Rails 3.0

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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.

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View Source Tutorial

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.


I Hear That

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.


ARMs Race

Aditya Bansod: We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application.


Four Credits

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582331: The course is based on the course book: Agile Web Development with Rails, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Third Edition, 2009 (Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Hansson) (original)

The course is taught by Matti Paksula, who was a co-presenter at SVG Open, where he shared this juicy tidbit.

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Background SVG Images in Opera

Erik Dahlström: something like ".footer { background: url(my.svg); }"

Eric uses this technique on his site, unfortunately this demonstrates a limitation in the ability of CSS to define fallbacks for browsers which do not support SVG as background images — Firefox and Chrome, for example, show white text on a white background.

I’ve implemented this on my web site, but instead of browser sniffing, I sniff the URI.

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SVG Open Keynote

SVG Open Slides.

Despite bringing my Windows laptop.  Despite setting my display to 1024x768.  Despite arriving early.  Despite testing my laptop with the presentation equipment.  Despite all of that, I still couldn’t present from my laptop when my time came.  Brad was kind enough to swap time slots to allow me an opportunity to regroup, and further nice enough to let me use his laptop when I still could not present from my laptop despite a total and cold reboot.

That just sucks.

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Inflight

I’m on flight AA 179 accessing the internet via gogo inflight internetAgain.

This doesn’t get old.  Next up: SVG Open.


Distributed Extensibility Submission

Tony Ross: A Distributed Extensibility model for standard HTML is desirable because it means that user agents from different vendors that adhere to the standard can be assured of correctly processing mark-up that contains extensions without destroying the integrity of the document.


Favorites

Muppet Show: Java
Tracey Ullman Show: City of Strangers


Chromie Don’t Play That

Alex Russell: Right now, we aren’t supporting the HTTP header (although we do support a separate MIME type, application/chromeframe)

Current tally: Google Chrome Frame violates HTML 4 by using http-equiv to specify something other than an HTTP header, it violates HTML 5 by using an unenumerated value for http-equiv, and violates RFC 2616 by not specifying the correct ACCEPT header.

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Chromie

Amit Joshi, Alex Russell and Mike Smith: To start using Google Chrome Frame, all developers need to do is to add a single tag:

<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

That’s just so wrong on so many levels.  What’s on the web site doesn’t even match the videoInstant legacy!


Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.0

Much to my surprise, it looks like these two will be ready for each other.  The latest release is Ruby 1.9.2 Preview 1, and blows up and spills its entrails the first time you try to generate scaffolding.  But undaunted, I tried the latest Ruby head against the latest Rails head.  The only failure you see is the same one that I get with Rails head and Ruby 1.8.7 and the subject of this ticket.

After a bit of work, I have managed to produce a single scenario with some minor “if” checks that works any combination of Ruby 1.8.7 or 1.9.2 with Rails 2.3.4 or Rails 3.0.  I’m now making the working assumption that Edition 4 of Agile Web Development with Rails will target Ruby 1.9.2 (which if tradition holds, will be available at Christmas 2009), but will work with only minor differences noted in the book with Ruby 1.8.7.

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Microsoft Sponsors SVG Open

Brad Neuberg: Microsoft just announced they are a sponsor for SVG Open! They join IBM as a Gold Sponsor

SVGOpen is October 2 to 4 2009 in Mountain View, California.  I’m one of the keynote speakers.  It is not too late to register.


Gorp

Primarily due to the help of wycats and nzkoz, I’ve got a decent feedback loop going between ongoing book development and ongoing Rails development.  The root problem is that given the rate of change of Rails, every single tutorial and book out there is atrophying due to either intentional or unintentional changes to Rails.

My, admittedly selfish, goal is to be aware of any such change that affects either the current edition of AWDwR, or the one under development.

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RVM for Ubuntu Tip

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libreadline5-dev

Do the above before installing any VM’s.  If you don’t it isn’t too late.

With that out of the way, rvm is highly recommended.


Codeplex Foundation

codeplex.org: Our contribution agreement. This serves as a template for how companies or individuals may make intellectual property cntributions[sic] to the Foundation.

If Microsoft’s goal was to be at arm’s length, I would have recommended that they follow Eclipse’s or Apache’s model.  Copyright assignment may provide benefits down the road, and can work for obviously independent organizations like the FSF, but in this case I’m concerned that this may prevent a successful and sustainable bootstrap.

Update: Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft.  I did’t see that one coming.


Venus Updates

I’ve updated planet Venus.  Summary of the changes:

While I’m dog-fooding this myself, it might be wise to wait a few days to see what bugs shake out before upgrading.  When the bugs are shaken out the result should be more secure (example: HTML5lib will sanitize URI schemes), and should also fix Mozilla bug 514534 without the need to resort to the application/xhtml+xml mime type, which causes other problems.

Bug reports should go to the mailing list.