On Browsers

I read f055's "Google phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6.0 and what does it mean?" today and started to reply. As I went allong it became somewhat of a blog post. So this is the reply.

I think ignorance is the greatest factor in keeping IE6 around. When you put an icon of a globe with the word 'Internet' below on the middle of an otherwise clean desktop everybody will use that for browsing the internet.

People dont care what their browser is (only webdevelopers and the [...]

Get connected

In Rails, the database connection hides behind an adapter. This adapter allows you to execute queries, but you cannot bind variables in a safe manner where the database driver does the escaping for you. Not something you want in a web-application where SQL injection should be on the top of your list of concerns.

Here's a little snippet of code to put in lib/adapter_connection.rb of your RAILS_ROOT to be able to obtain the true connection and start binding and escaping.

Effigy

I was browsing through my lost tweets and found this tweet by Mojombo, promoting this wonderful idea called Effigy.

I am wonderfully amazed by the simplicity of the concept and wonder why I it hasn't been done before (although Wicket does something similar). It gives true power to the View as seen as part of an MVC framework. The view tends to clutter with Control stuffs, but Effigy might have a good chance of stopping that.

I had to try it immediatly; and hooray! It works!

Oracle to consume MySQL

This morning a tweet alerted me to the fact that Oracle is to acquire Sun and with it MySQL. It led to the blog of Monty (Micheal Widenius, creator of MySQL) where a doom scenario is laid out for the future of MySQL.

It explains how Oracle has been proven unworthy of OpenSource projects by the way they have treated InnoDB and it also explains that the European Commission (EC) has second thoughts about the deal.

Playfull morning

Was out early this morning (or rather the kids where up and it was Jenny's turn to keep the bed warm) and as they where multitasking between playing and watching Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends I was having a critical second look at the new me (or rather the business presentation of me called website).

I fixed some stuff (see http://github.com/coffeeaddict/simplic.it/commits/master) and am still amazed with the ease the Rails run.

Easy Auth

...that was the goal.

I had a glance over at this lil' comparison when I was looking for a good authentication plugin (I like plugins, they save me code writing) and I gloomed.

All I wanted was something to authenticate a user with. Something that has knowledge of a username and password and can combine the two together so that you can say; "That girl at the other end is Alice after all".

One Train Working

I can't figure out why the Rails core team hasn't fixed this yet...

The form_authentication_token is composed of Base64 and it kills some Internet Explorer non-Browsers when the Base64 contains '=', '+' or '/' (which happens with Base64 sometimes).

The token is generated using ActiveSupport::SecureRandom. It hands out a method called base64(). And, here is the surprise, it also hands out a method called hex(). Why the core team hasn't changed the base64(32) to hex(32) some odd releases of Rails ago is beyond me.

Time for a tech blog

I wrote on my personal blog, which gets heavily abused for tech stuff, it was time for a tech blog. I wrote that about a year ago.

So, I guess now is the time for a tech blog. Rolled my own (as I do with my cigarettes) as I needed less then anything and wanted to do it with Rails (As I love Ruby and like to write code).