December 2008
Dec. 23, 2008
Merb gets merged into Rails 3! Huge news. Of particular interest is the new focus on “framework agnosticism”, whereby Rails will aim to play well with people wishing to use alternative ORMs, template mechanisms and so forth. Rails has previously suffered from a reputation for getting in your way if you deviate from its opinions.
ReferenceError: console is not defined. Since Firebug 1.2 you need to call window.loadFirebugConsole() in order for console.log and friends to work.
Dec. 29, 2008
I seem to have lost the battle to define Web 2.0 as "the use of the network as platform to build systems that get better the more people use them."
Blocks in Objective-C.
Closures are coming soon to Objective-C - interesting syntax, a regular curly brace block preceded by a caret ^{ ... }.
Represent. Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis describe how they built the NYTimes Represent feature using GeoDjango and PostGIS.
Dec. 30, 2008
Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad? Michal Migurski’s experiments with heat maps for Oakland Crimespotting, using OpenStreetMap data as that allows him to position his heat map layer underneath the street labels, keeping them legible.
Researchers Show How to Forge Site Certificates. Use an MD5 collision to create two certificates with the same hash, one for a domain you own and another for amazon.com. Get Equifax CA to sign your domain’s certificate using the outdated “MD5 with RSA” signing method. Copy that signature on to your home-made amazon.com certificate to create a fake certificate for Amazon that will be accepted by any browser.