Ideas Needed for Mr. Bones skeleton built on Ramaze
If I were to make a skeleton using Mr. Bones that was built on Ramaze, what would people like to see in it? It's for my use first, but the community's use a close second if I can generalize it enough. I was thinking along the lines of openid support, having a decent home page and logged-in-user gateway, appropriate nav-bars, haml+sass, jquery+ui, etc....thoughts? What do you find yourself doing at the beginning of every website project that you'd like to not have to repeat every time you start a project?
Nifty easy screencast software
Not necessarily the easiest or the best, but it certainly looks cool and could very much have a niche to call its own. It's called uTIPu.
Check it out. Someday I'll create a screencast for something useful.
DEPRECATED: Announcing: jQuery optimization races
Note...this site is down for now...
You don't have to understand it to see that it's at least a bit interesting, so check it out:
http://www.nutriscan.org/jquery_optimization/
It documents a bunch of different ways of doing similar things, and compares them in terms of performance. How much are you really losing by using the jQuery convenience method?
Google Visualization API + jQuery
TODO: bring animations to charts in the Google Visualization API via jQuery to illustrate performance described in previous post.
Projects in progress
I have many projects in progress...
1) "Anybody can program" book, have half of the outline for the first draft done
2) Stylometry web app, have some of the backend services done that calculate stylometry stats
a) Dictionary looker upper, reasonably complete for Merriam-Webster only
3) Blog application, just a few thoughts on paper and a few lines of code
4) Notepad, a note-keeping application, could pass for done
5) Merb Google RSS feed sample application, could pass for done
6) jQuery_merb, a javascript library bridging the gap between jQuery/javascript and merb. limited scope, but could pass for done
7) merb_solitary_part, a merb slice for hitting parts outside of "regular" requests. Needs some renaming/refactoring and some docs, but could pass for done
8 ) Kollaba, a site for finding collaborators to work on...anything. fair bit of progress on it, but probably dead.
9) merb-rails upload benchmark application, basically creating the same simple application in both versions. done enough to be used for benchmarks, at least (and yes, merb's faster).
Phew. I need to finish some stuff! But new ideas are so much more exciting...
jQuery and Javascript Hijacking
I stumbled upon this XSS exploit that Fortify published a little over a year ago that jQuery has failed to account for, even now. Sort of worrisome, since that's the javascript framework I prefer most. Prototype, however, has "fixed" it, as you can tell from the bottom of this page. Anyway, sort of a long read.
Fortify publication (pdf)