singapore.rb meeting
singapore.rb aka Singapore Ruby Brigade is meeting next wednesday, 6th Sept 2006. We’ll be at the City Hall Starbucks joint around 7pm, so drop by and say hello if you’re in the area.
Is IE7 finally going to play nice?
According to Markus Mielke, the Program Manager for Internet Explorer 7, the development team has improved aka corrected implementation for CSS2. It remains to be seen whether the browser will finally end years of frustration for web developers who have had to grapple with years of rendering bugs on Internet Explorer. Chris Wilson has pointedly stated that while IE7 will not be ACID2 compliant, the product team is trying to remove the problems people have with IE. A year after Paul Thurott’s very public shaming of the IE7 Beta, he has changed his stance to a more conciliatory one, albeit still critical.
I have personally tried using IE7 on a Windows XP machine, the Vista interface looked out of place and it didn’t as intuitive as Firefox. I would imagine that it would be more pleasurable to interact with on Windows Vista (when it finally ships in 2030). I think the real test of standards compliance for IE7 would be after its release, when developers start to test against for real websites. Till then, given Microsoft’s track record for internet browsers, I’m not holding my breath.
Lesson in application interface design
In the sneak preview for OS X Leopard, Apple unveiled a backup system called Time Machine. Going from the preview, it’s shaping up to be another exemplar product from the Cupertino giant. Interacting with Time Machine is intuitive and integration with Finder means that users will not have to relearn another set of skills or terminology.
Software developers who make use of version control systems(if you are develop software and DO NOT have VCS for your projects, starting using it NOW.) would find how Time Machine performs its backups vaguely familiar. Backups are performed incrementally and built on top of the previous revision. This usually saves disk space as only the parts that changed between revisions are stored.
Users simply fire up Time Machine from Finder and use a stylish 3D interface to browse their system backups using time as a familiar metaphor. Once they find what what they want, select the files or folders to restore, and voila! Your content is resurrected from the past.
Brilliant.
Have full disclosure for code vulnerabilities
The Rails core team released 1.1.6 of the framework today, a day after 1.1.5 was released. This was to fix a serious vulnerability in the Routes module. The core team has been extremely prompt in publicising the hole and in releasing fixes.
However(you know there had to be one), I take issue with how the first fix release (1.1.5) was handled. It appears that this release did not fully rectify the problem, hence the need for 1.1.6. While DHH revealed the reasons for 1.1.5, he did not detail exactly what was wrong, opting for a security through obscurity approach.
In retrospect, a full disclosure policy would have been a better move. This would have given developers more information in deciding whether to shut down their sites, in view of the implications(data loss/theft et al) of having it compromised.
That said, if you’re running a rails web application in the wild, UPGRADE NOW.
EDIT: mixed up my rails versions, doh!