Cookies with Internet Explorer 6 SP2

December 17th, 2005 at 6:50 am (Software Development)

Just recently, I’ve had the unenviable pleasure of trying to find out why IE6 SP2 would not save session cookies set by a PHP based web application. This had the implication of having users being unable to login to the application to do some useful stuff. i had initially tested it against Firefox only and I was alerted to the issue by a co-worker.

After some googling, it turned out that the subdomain that the application is being served from contains an underscore in its name, and that was making IE choke. So the application was moved to a subdomain without any underscores. Voila! it works in IE now. I suppose that browser compatibility issues will never go away and the responsibility lies on the developer to be aware of things like this. However, I don’t particularly relish the prospect of spending 2-3 hours trying to please Internet Explorer’s quirks and inconsistencies when that time could have been used for other more meaningful work.

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Ruby and Python

December 8th, 2005 at 6:05 am (Ruby)

Tim O’Reilly writes that sales for Ruby books have increased a mind-blowing 1552% over the last 2 years while Python managed an jump of around 20% in the same period. What’s particularly significant is that the big spike in the sales graph for Ruby occurred slightly after the time Ruby on Rails hit the mainstream. Tim postulates that RoR has been the primary driving force behind the meteoric rise of Ruby among developers/geeks and I fully agree with him.

I think part of the reason for the mass adoption as put across by a comment, rightfully pointed out the influence Martin Fowler, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have on the general programmer populace. Not to take anything away from either Ruby or RoR, the mindshare that these 3 Agile Leaders command is quite considerable. After all, I was intrigued enough by Fowler’s lovenotes for Ruby to check it out.

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