Why the world is ready for the Semantic Web.

Improving performance of Rails apps.

From the article:

• choosing a slow session container


• doing things on a per request basis, which could have been done once at startup


• repeating identical computations during request processing


• reading too often and too much from the database (especially in conjunction with associations)


• relying too much on inefficient helper methods

Pretty and Accessible Forms.

Some good information in here, they suggest using the fieldset tag to group related members on a form, and then present ways to style these forms with CSS.

Links, links, links;

CSS Play
Onotology + Wikipedia = fun
Proxy access with Apache
mod_proxy
gravity waves
web design. simple == good
Blogging Rails
Understanding XForms - Finally, HTML forms done right.
acts_as_rateable - I wrote my own rating engine, will have to check this out and see if I should refactor it to use this instead. Mine has really cute stars.
Hosting Rails apps with Mongrel and Debian
A grown up Rails server with Mongrel - Essential reading. I'm using FCGI right now with Apache, and it really sucks. Mongrel sounds very neat, especially for a very small memory footprint virtual dedicated server, like I get from the most excellent quantact.com
Mongrel - A very fast and excellent Rails webserver written by Zed Shaw.
Mongrel HOWTO

Lighttpd links:

Rails and Lighttpd
Lighttpd documentation
Lighttpd snippets
More Lighttpd snippets
Lighttpd installation


url_column:
url_column for rails - This is really cool. Instead of having the database ID of the object in your URL, instead have the contents of another field, like the title of the journal entry. This is great to make for more human-friendly URLs, like on some recent blogs.

Links:

CSS Bloom - Great examples of web design
RoutingNavigator - A plugin for RoR that shows all routes at the bottom of all pages in development mode only.
AssetPackage - Wrap up all stylesheets and CSS into one file, making load times quicker for your users.
Accessible Image Replacement - For screen reader software.
Zooming both text and images - For sites where you want the users to be able to choose different font sizes and have both the text and images with text on them resize.
CSS Zooming
5 steps to build better websites

During this week, the following astrological influences become exact.

Sun opposite Pluto
Mars conjunct Saturn
Mars square Jupiter
Jupiter square Saturn
Uranus stationary retrograde

In creating this universe God revealed two aspects: the masculine or
fatherly, and the feminine or motherly. If you close your eyes and
visualize vast, illimitable space, you become overwhelmed and
enthralled--you feel naught but pure wisdom. That hidden, infinite
sphere wherein there is no creation, no stars or planets--only pure
wisdom--is the Father.
--Paramahansa Yogananda, "Man's Eternal Quest"

THE INSTALLATION OF NEW CONSCIOUSNESS
The Lord has come to give us true knowledge, but to understand knowledge is beyond human capacity. The sins of thousands of years are destroyed when He has made us to do pranams to Him and when He gives His Holy Touch.
The moving of stones from one place to another is for your concentration and spiritual growth. When the insentient stones which are lying here become moved, Babaji installs in them a new consciousness. The stones are not lying here without purpose; they are also doing penance. By touching these stones, we receive a vibration of Higher Consciousness. We don't see anything outwardly, but this contact changes our body, mind and spirit.

He is the the Lord of the Universe. He enters into people's hearts and changes their thoughts. All changes taking place not are due to a simple motion of His finger. Whenever he goes He puts a new consciousness in people and brings spiritual change. Otherwise, He has no need to go from place to place.
March 25, 1982

Being is state, such as being happy. You cannot explain state, nor can you do a state. You can only be a state. You cannot do happiness; you can only be happiness or be happy.

Bliss is within us.
There's no journey about it.
You have to realize it.
How?
Reject the things
which are barriers
and impositions upon Bliss:
the worries of the past
and the plannings
of the future.

If you want true Bliss
forgive and forget
everything, without exception,
any sin, even to the extent of
'Forgive them, Father
for they do not know
what they are doing.'
If you can do that
then only can you hope for Bliss;
not otherwise.

- Swami Amar Jyoti

Lots more links:

Validations in Ruby on Rails
GPS course plotting with Google Maps and Linux
Hacking Google Maps
Neat web apps that use Google Maps
Pairins Wine and Microformats - Some of the work they are doing with microformats of XML on the corkd.com website
Storing dates in a database
Pwning Second Life
How to Test ActionMailers and Controllers
ActionMailer and ActionController interactions
How to test ActionMailer in Ruby on Rails
RoR manual talking about ActionMailer testing
Testing Controllers
RoR extensions to the Time class
Mixing in class methods in Ruby
Assertions in Ruby on Rails
PostGres vs MySQL in Ruby on Rails
Tests in RoR
Funky new things you can do with Emacs 22
The power of Prototype.js
Design Patterns
Designing Tag Clouds
Performance benchmark a web server
AJAX edit in place with Prototype.js
Not your old GRASS anymore - Open Source Geographic Information System
Advances in GIS in Canada
Object oriented Javascript
RoR at Apple
Rails 1.1 cheatsheet
Ruby on Rails Associations - Difficult topic, partly because :belongs_to and :has_one are poor choices of names for these relationships.
More has_one and belongs_to problems
RoR model conventions
Ruby on Rails belongs_to
High Performance WebBrick - Server for RoR
Robot Co-op libraries
Robot Co-op tools
Wikipedia definition of a Closure in programming languages
gmail keys
XHTML media types

Lots more links:

SQL Where - How to use == != and other operators in SQL
Datetime in Postgres
Datatype Datetime in Postgres
Modules in Ruby - A tutorial
Ruby Talk on Modules - Need to call the mixin module with the module name and a dot, like CommonMethods.lala
The fine structure of the Milky Way - Think about that sometime: You live in a galaxy with billions of stars, perhaps a trillion stars.
Ruby on Rails documentation - Outertrack - An interesting API reference
Ruby API documentation - Also on Outertrack
Ruby on Rails Manual
Ruby Manual
RWB - RWB provides a performance/load testing framework for webservers. It allows a great deal of flexiblility in how tests are configured, run, and reported on.
It will get better - Agile programming
Web 2.0 and businesses
Test Driven Development News
Introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD)
Test Driven Development on Wikipedia
Test::Unit - Unit Testing with Ruby
Fixtures - A way to setup data for tests in Ruby on Rails
ActsAsTaggable Plugin for Ruby on Rails - Cool... Tagging in a plugin.
More ActsAsTaggable Plugin
Subversion Book
GeoRuby - Map plugin for Ruby on Rails with Postgres and MySQL
Ruby on Rails plugin list
ActionView::Base

That TinyMCE plugin installs much easier if you have your project under Subversion, so I'm joining the modern world and leaving CVS. Here's some links:

How to Use Rails with Subversion
Put your homedirectiory under Subversion - I heard about this guy years ago when he was talking about doing the same thing with CVS.
Subversion Book - For version 1.1 of Subversion
External Definitions with Subversion

A picture of Earth, taken by one of the Mars rovers, from the surface of Mars.

Oh, this looks really cool: TinyMCE is a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Javascript that is integrated with Ruby on Rails.

Caching Nameserver with Linux. Very easy to setup under Fedora Core 4, just install the RPM caching-nameserver-7.3-3.noarch.rpm and start it with /etc/rc.d/init.d/named start. Makes life much faster with slow DNS servers, like Telus.

Lots of links, dear me!

Growing Beets
Beets in Wikipedia
Daucus visnaga in Wikipedia - The binomial name for Carrots
Bronze Fennel from Dave's Garden
gmail shortcut keys
First steps in Testing Ruby on Rails
Postgres Gotchas - Things to watch out for when using Postgres.
Queries in Postgres
Rails Wiki Question of the Day
XHTML Media Types
XHTML 1.0/1.1 and HTML 4.01 Doctypes - The intricacies of DOCTYPE in your HTML documents. Very tricky.
New Horizons - A spacecraft that's heading out to Pluto
Continuations and Advanced Flow Control
New things in GNU grep - Very cool, grep rocks, and this will make it rock even harder.
HTML objects - I used this to find a spare field in the IMG tag, and decided to use LONGDESC, which didn't really work with the Prototype Javascript toolkit, so I just now use NAME. Gotta figure out why Prototype wouldn't properly pass LONGDESC, maybe it was too obscure.
Hash Class in Ruby
String Class in Ruby
Array Class in Ruby
A general theory of markup
Misunderstanding Foreign Keys
Passing Parameters - The differences between Parameters and Arguments
Backup your MySQL databases with AutoMySQLBackup - I use Postgres right now, but think MySQL rocks as well. I don't like religous wars, you should use the right tool for the job. Sometimes this is MySQL, sometimes this is Postgres.
People who participated in the recent OpenBSD Hackathon
HTML 4.0 atributes
Easy AJAX with Prototype
More Easy AJAX with Prototype - I'm using Prototype right now, and it is a really sweet way to do Javascript. The thing I like most is that I just have to write the code once, and it works (or almost works) on both Firefox and IE. That is really nice, it can be a long, hard road trying to get your hand coded Javascript working on all browsers.
Maximum Length of URLS - Basically, 2048 bytes with GET, if you want more, use POST.
Narrative Javascript
AJAX with Ruby on Rails - It's really easy and sweet, especially when using Prototype, I'm using a combination of Events and Ajax.Updater with RoR and it's really sweet.
>

Nice curved corners for web pages.