InVisible

On February 27. and 28. I will be hosting Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich, Switzerland. There still are open slots, so if you want to learn hands-on how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails, now is the time to sign up. Details: Venue: Badenerstrasse 585, 8048 Zurich Cost: CHF 750.– Language: German Content Introduction to Rails Database to prototype in 15 minutes Building an attractive, performant and secure web application Using AJAX for dynamic user interfaces Testing using unit and functional tests Using agile development techniques Send an email to info@invisible.ch to sign up for this seminar. ...

37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby On Rails have launched their next application: Campfire. Campfire is a chat application, that shares some traits with Internet Relay Chat but runs inside a web browser. There are some added benefits like searchable transcripts, file sharing. Plus, it looks really nice: I’m running on the 30 days trial account to see, if it solves enough problems that it’s worth to shell out $12 per month for a regular account. ...

Tim Bray over at Ongoing talks about AJAX Performance. His point being, that we should use AJAX to offload heavy computation from the web-server to the users browser. I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question. ...

One of the really bad things in the blogosphere is keeping track of all the comments you made around other blogs. And if you use a news reader to aggregate the RSS feeds, it’s even worse, because you don’t even see any comments - unless you visit the blog in your web browser. Enter CoComment by a team of Swisscom Innovations. Laurent Haug also has his fingers in it somehow. This application keeps track of the comments you posted and comments to your comments. It integrates as a bookmarklet, but Firefox users can take advantage of a Greasemonkey script to handle the really difficult taks of hitting a bookmark prior to posting. ...

After talking to quite a few people about my idea of open sourcing the course materials for my Rails course I decided to go ahead and just do it. The advantages outweigh the drawbacks as far as I can see them: Advantages Giving something back to the community -> Good karma Having other people look over the documents could lead to ideas for improvement (what Scoble has had happen to his “Naked Conversations” book) Having other people actually see that I’m doing something (Cory Doctorow commented that he was more worried about obscurity, than about people downloading his books) Showing potential customers about what they can expect from the course Drawbacks ...

One of the things I’ve been thinking about ever since announcing the Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich is if I should “Open source” the course materials (maybe even making the development process open, so everybody could see where I am, what I’m doing) Today I attended a talk by Cory Doctorow who talked on “Digital Restriction Management (DRM)”. One of the analogies to protected content he gave was as follows (paraphrased) ...