Writing Archive

Yeah! Finally… The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown Moving the world off Internet Explorer 6

10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.” (Source: ie6countdown.com)

The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown

Do your part to get IE6 to 0%:

  1. JOIN THE CAUSE
  2. EDUCATE OTHERS

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HTML5 – and why should we all care?

Sweet! Flash enthusiasts might not 100% agree to all contra Flash aspects – but overall, nice job/ summary.

 

HTML5 - and why should we all care? (by littlepixer)

See large version on littlepixr’s Flickr.

(via swissmiss)

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HTML5 – we’re moving

… and definitely into the right direction – love it!!

HTML5Readiness_com-20100527.jpg

Source: html5readiness.com

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Recipe: How-to install Pandoc on OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard)

In case you wonder how-to install Pandoc, the “universal document converter” on OS X Snow Leopard…

… the secret sauce: go for Haskell Platform installer instead of following your standard (assumption!) installation approach using MacPorts.

The steps:

  1. First install Haskell Platform.
  2. cabal update
  3. cabal install cabal-install
  4. cabal install pandoc
  5. Update your ~/.profile file with export PATH=/Users/[USERNAME]/.cabal/bin:$PATH and read in with source ~/.profile.

What is Pandoc? Great you asked! ;)

Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages, and S5 HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.
– Source and more details: johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc

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Recipe: How-to install CouchDB 0.11.0 from source on OS X

Prerequisite: MacPorts installed and SVN client at hand – I prefer a UI and therefore use Versions.

  • sudo port install autoconf automake libtool
  • sudo port install icu erlang spidermonkey curl
  • svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/tags/0.11.0 couchdb-0.11.0-src
  • cd couchdb-0.11.0-src
  • ./bootstrap
  • ./configure
    >> You have configured Apache CouchDB, time to relax.
  • make && sudo make install
    >> You have installed Apache CouchDB, time to relax.
  • Start the CouchDB server by running: sudo -i couchdb -b
    >> Apache CouchDB has started, time to relax.
  • To check that everything has worked, point your web browser to: http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/index.html

Usefull resources:

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CouchDB, finally relaxing!!

The other day(s) I found myself relaxing while coding away a pet project (a tiny schemaless personal project, activity and knowledge management web application) leveraging CouchDB and jQuery.

“CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript [...] provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests [...] is written in Erlang [...]”
(Source: couchdb.apache.org)

Check out CouchApp in order to write CouchDB applications by using just JavaScript and HTML.

“CouchApp is designed to structure standalone CouchDB application development for maximum application portability. CouchApp is a set of scripts and a jQuery plugin designed to bring clarity and order to the freedom of CouchDB’s document-based approach.”
(Source: CouchApp)

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How-to Install Rails 3.0 Beta on OS 10.5.8 Leopard

While I did most of my recent web dev projects in PHP5 I still follow the development of Ruby on Rails …on it’s path to a stable version 3.0 release.

So no wonder that I had to get my hands dirty with the just recently released Rails 3.0 Beta.

While I still own a 12″ PowerBook with OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (latest OS X PPC release) I needed to get rails-3.0.0.beta running on this machine – of course ;-)

Finder.png

1. Upgrade to Ruby 1.8.7 with RubyGems

As at least Ruby 1.8.7 is required by Rails 3.0 I decided to use MacPorts (prerequisite!) to upgrade Ruby version 1.8.6 as shipped with OS X Leopard.

sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems

sudo gem update --system

source ~/.profile

Satellit:~ matthias$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [powerpc-darwin9]

2. Install Rails 3.0 Beta (rails-3.0.0.beta) along with the required dependencies

sudo gem install i18n tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler sqlite3-ruby

sudo gem install rails --pre

3. Create Rails app. and start the server

Satellit:~ matthias$ rails rails3beta-test

Satellit:~ matthias$ cd rails3beta-test

Satellit:~ matthias$ rails server

Inspired by Silumesii Maboshe.

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moodya! moodya! Read more »
Semantic Web: schnell+kompakt (deutsch) Semantic Web: schnell+kompakt (deutsch) Read more »

Google did it again: Google Wave Rocks!

This is truly amazingly hot stuff! … and – again – incredibly well engineered!! Honestly, I can’t wait to get my hands on Google Wave!

Google Wave Screenshot

Actually I should say: Weaving and Surfing Waves! :-)

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.
(Source: Google Wave Preview)

Resources

Update: Meanwhile I managed to “play” at least a little bit with the Wave Sandbox – using the 2nd test account of a generous colleague (thx M.!) – while still waiting for my Wave Developer Account request to be processed.
Pretty impressed by the Wave UI but also wondering what the transformation management strategy of Google will look like when Wave hits the average users, as Wave clearly requires quite some rethinking…

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