So I just discovered that Leopard comes with a version of Ruby on Rails (RoR) pre-installed. The only problem is its a bit dated but there is a command-line one-liner to update it all no sweat with RubyGem (the Ruby package manager):
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I was looking at the PHP5 (no this is not about PHP) Reflection API and came across a post talking about the “Dynamic Proxy” design pattern. As I didn’t know what it was about I did a quick search and found that the design pattern had a US Patent on it! I was disgusted and appalled that design patterns could be patented. This is like putting a patent on a certain English sentence grammar.
Obviously the guys at the US Patent office don’t understand what they are allowing to happen. Imagine if 90% of all programming was patented, which can be done fairly easily, it would completely retard innovation and an sort of progress. Fortunately is this impossible to enforce in closed source code software but Open Source [OS] is another story. This could be the biggest legal threat to OS so far. Large companies who have the budget, could have teams that sift thought their OS competition looking for patent infringements and shutting them down. An ugly thought which would gain them only hatred from the developer community. Lets hope that’s enough of a disincentive…

Pictured (from left): Tobias aka klipstein (München), Norman aka matsuri (Berlin), Victoria & Nikolai aka nonken (Amsterdam) and Wolfram aka mccain (München) [note: aka’s are IRC names
Yesterday I meet some Dojo developers in Berlin for the dojo.beer() which was announced on the Dojo website last week. It was a sunny day and we hit one of Berlins many beaches next to the Spree.
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I just completed another site called ‘Picture Your Rights‘ for the Dutch NGO Loesje whose international HQ is now in Berlin. Its a Photo & Slogan completion about Human Rights and anyone can upload a picture or post a slogan. There will be 4 rounds each with a different theme.
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The Webbys were just on and Erika was a jduge and attended the ceremony. If you want win a webby award you have to try and scrore high the following:
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Semantics in regard to HTML markup is a murky water. This is because web pages are usually not an essay style document, which HTML was designed to markup, and contain information that is not actually relevant to what the page is about. Examples would be: menus, shopping cart information, summaries of forum activity, and the other half of HTML design: user/human interfaces. To say or even think that HTML can encapsulate all the “meanings” that human language structures can come up with (which are actually infinite), not to mention the non-language structures found on web systems representing a computer system interface, is naive. It is also an assumption that has never been backed up by any standards body in argument and thats because its simply wrong. The Microformat standard and now POSH process seem to be unwittingly dealing with the problem without understanding it. This is actually an applied philosophy problem!
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Categories: work Tags: accessibility, browsers, development, Google, HTML, language, markup, meaning, microformats, philosophy, rant, semantics, SEO, web
Here a quick list of things to remember when trying to debug Apache on Mac OS X (10.4.8 anyway):
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Its a hard problem and not many people are tacking it in the web development world. Heres some research into presenting content in different languages via HTML.
To frame the problem here is a good break down of the three technical issues:
There are three considerations for presenting HTML in non-English languages. First, that the document is delivered in the desired natural language (such as English, French, etc.) and dialect (US, British, etc.). Second, that the document is presented in the correct character set. This is a requirement for most Eastern languages (Russian, Japanese, etc.). Third, that the document is presented in the correct directionality. This is a consideration for languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese that are customarily written right-to-left or top-to-bottom.
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Aim
I have about 6 different Wordpress installs on my host. One for me, one for my company TSD and 3-4 for friends and family on sub domains. The issues I have with it are:
- Upgrading is a pain
- Sharing plugin-ins is a pain
- Gets worse for every new blog I install
So I tried to modify the WP code so that it could be installed (and upgraded) in one place and then used for many blogs on the same server. I found out that as it stands WP’s design doesn’t scale very well. I guess it wasn’t meant to, but when you work with it you get the feeling it could…
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