24 posts tagged “sam-ruby”
2009
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law. Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.
2008
Sunsetting Quirks Mode. Apparently proper standards support in IE (or at least the IE8 renderer) will be triggered by the HTML5 doctype, providing an alternative to those who don’t wish to pollute their markup with an IE-specific meta tag.
2007
Sam Ruby: Ruby 1.9 Strings—Updated. A follow up to yesterday’s post: Sam’s principle complaints about Ruby 1.9’s character encoding support were down to a bug which has now been fixed.
I definitely like Python 3K's Unicode support better [...] In fact, I think I prefer Ruby 1.8's non-support for Unicode over Ruby 1.9's "support". The problem is one that is all to familiar to Python programmers. You can have a fully unit tested library and have somebody pass you a bad string, and you will fall over.
— Sam Ruby
Email addresses your OpenID via DNS. Sam Ruby has warmed to the idea of making e-mail addresses usable as OpenIDs via a DNS SRV record.
calendar.timegm() (via) An “unrelated but handy function” that converts a time.gmtime() in to a corresponding Unix timestamp. I’ve been hand-rolling this one for years; never thought to look in calendar.
Sam Ruby: 2to3. Sam’s report on an attempt to port the Universal Feed Parser to Python 3.0. The 2to3 tool does most of the work, but it seems the unicode changes can be pretty tricky.
Inline SVG in MSIE. Sam Ruby has a neat proof of concept that converts inline SVG (currently only the path element) to the Silverlight equivalent.
OpenID for non-SuperUsers. Sam Ruby explains the key concepts of OpenID that many first-time users tend to miss.
2006
Unobtrusive OpenID. Sam’s implementation passes association data in the URL rather than using sessions. I need to do that here.
Sam Ruby: REXML on Expat. Sam does something frighteningly clever with continuations.
2005
Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery. How Sam’s funky referral tracking works. I talked to Ping about a similar system at SxSW.
Wiki Spam Update. Sam Ruby suggests blocking changes that add 10 or more new links.
2004
Sam Ruby: Copy and Paste. This character encoding glitch has bitten me more times than I care to say.
Sam Ruby: Electronic Forgery. A nice, simple explanation of the collision in MD5.
Sam Ruby: Détente. Absolute required reading for anyone with an interest in syndication.
2003
Sam Ruby: Learning to Rest. Every time Sam talks about Rest my eyes begin to cross over
The Verbosity of Echo
Sam Ruby has called for people to start experimenting with the current (very early) Echo example feeds, and the response has been pretty impressive; check out these feeds from Joel Spolsky, Phil Ringnalda and Mark Pilgrim. Now that Echo has progressed to a stage where there are concrete feeds to examine, I have some serious concerns over the verbosity of the format. As they stand, Echo feeds contain a lot of duplicated information. Considering that the default behaviour of aggregators is to poll a feed for updates once an hour, any unnecessary information in the feed itself is going to have a very real monetary cost in terms of burnt bandwidth.
[... 257 words]Lively discussion on SOAP
If you get the basic idea of web services but are still looking to get your head around SOAP (I know I am) the lively discussion currently taking place in Sam Ruby’s comment section looks like a great place to start.
Spell check in web applications
Sam Ruby has enabled spell checking for the preview comment tool on his blog. I wonder how it works... I’ve lost track of the scripting language Sam uses for Intertwingly (PHP? Python? Perl?) but I know PHP can be compiled with support for the Pspell module.
[... 204 words]Python power
Sam Ruby’s ultra-simple 3-paned aggregator is a great example of the power of high level scripting languages. Using the wxPython cross-platform GUI toolkit and Mark Pilgrim’s ultra-liberal RSS Parser it provides a full application in a mere 107 lines of (highly readable and maintainable) code.
[... 127 words]You know me
Dave Winer: The “You Know Me” Button. Dave hates posting comments on blogs and then having to check back constantly to see if anyone has replied (I do too). Sam Ruby’s solution is to provide the comments as a separate RSS feed for each of his entries, but Dave wants something more automatic that won’t clog up his aggregator. Dave’s new proposal is intruiging to say the least. When you sign up for an account with a discussion forum you have the option of configuring a link to an “identity server” able to respond to a specific protocol. Once this has been done, the discussion software “pings” your identity server with your username and a message whenever someone responds to one of your posts.
[... 402 words]