Via Tim Bray’s blog I found zestyping’s “Why PHP should never be taught”. In it he provides some interesting PHP code that will be difficult for beginners to understand.

Over at the standards-schmandards blog I often test websites to gather statistics on specific HTML use, accessibility and other things. Each time I have written a web crawler to collect the data. In Python and Ruby this is a simple task but last time it was like a déjà vu and I decided to create a Ruby library that I could use in the future.

Why the lucky stiff is a well known name among most Ruby developers. Many have read his Ruby programming tutorials and seen his spectacular performances (or whatever they are) at RailsConf and elsewhere. Personally, I owe him a lot for Hpricot, the liberal HTML parser (at my government agency we use it to run the quarterly test of all public websites in Sweden). Here are some thoughts on why I think Hackety Hack may be important than I first thought.

If you are using model objects in migrations (e.g. for inserting data) you should make sure that the migration works even if that model class is removed. I discovered this when setting up a new development environment and running all migrations in an empty database.
Let’s say you have the following migration code:

class InsertCounties < ActiveRecord::Migration
[…]

Things are heating up in the Ruby-as-a-dotnet-language area. Martin Fowler voiced his concerns on Microsoft not being able to look at source code and therefore having trouble implementing Ruby properly. Microsoft, with John Lam in the cockpit, is implementting Ruby for the .net platform (if you have been reading my previous blog posts I predicted […]

Googling for information on how to use PDF::Writer shows that there are many european developers frustrated with the lack of UTF-8 support in PDF::Writer. As Ruby on Rails works great with UTF-8 these days this can be a bit of an issue.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that the PDF specification (at […]

The current version has some minor bug fixes that will speed up testing. The online test interface has been updated to support direct input of markup. This is for those of you unable to install Raakt locally.
This means that there is no reason to skip basic accessibility testing of whatever you are developing! To find […]