Blog

One thing that has always made Lotus Notes stand out above any other application development environment, is it’s ability to replicate data and design to different servers and/or laptops. This has made the development of online / offline versions of applications trivial. In general “it just worked(tm)”. While the Web (2.0) applications are taking the world in storm and SaaS is what everybody is talking about, there’s still a wide gap, when it comes to working offline. A lot of people need to work offline: On a plane, on the train or in a secluded chalet in the mountains. All of the fancy on-line browser apps fall very very short. Even though there are more and more places that are connected, these connections (through mobile phones for example) are slow and quite expensive. So offline functionality is (and will likely be for quite some time) a very important proposition for applications. ...

In the Extreme Testing presentation, I have a slide with assert_select examples, some of them lifted from the assert_select cheat sheet. All fine and dandy, except that this assert_select "form[action=?]", url_for( :action => 'foo' ) just doesn’t work. url_for is a method of the controller, not the ControllerTest class. So in order to overcome that limitation, you’d need to assert_select "form[action=?]", @controller.url_for( :action => 'foo' ) which doesn’t throw an error, but doesn’t work either, because url_for insists on adding https://test.host/ to the generated URL. Of course, that’s not what’s in the form you have generated. What you need to do, is to add the parameter :only_path => true to the url_for call: ...

reboot 9.0 is happening on May 31st and June 1st this year. I attended both reboot 7.0 and reboot 8.0 and both have been wonderful experiences (reboot 7 being the proverbial “kick in the ass”). reboot 9.0 has a wonderful feature on it’s website: After registering, participants are asked to tag themselves with up to 10 keywords. Later they can relate to other people, talks, ideas that share those keywords. ...

Trotz aller Politikmudigkeit und “die Politiker kummern sich nicht ums Volk”…. Die Zeiten andern sich. Bundesrat Moritz Leuenberger blogt! Bravo Moritz, das gibt mir ein klein wenig mehr das Gefuhl, dass es Politiker gibt, die mich tatsachlich reprasentieren. Weiterhin viel Erfolg und gutes Gelingen! Technorati Tags: moritzleuenberger, politik, bundesrat

We use Joyent (affiliate link) for our mail (born out of Textdrive). Last weekend, the Joyfolks updated the application to a new version (and had quite a few problems in the process). One of the new features is Strongspace integration. Strongspace is a secure storage on the Net (accessible through SFTP, SCP and the like) that I have used for online backups for quite a while. At first I didn’t think much of the integration, but then it dawned on me, that I could sync our companies shared folder (which lives on a Samba server) to Joyent to get access to all our data when not in the office. Turns out, that this is really easy to do: ...

Just 9 people met this time for the SwissRug meeting, but we had some really interesting demos and discussions…. Florian Hanke started of by showing a little application he had thrown together to get his computer to speak to him (a childhood dream). It’s called “James” and based on the speech recognition and synthesis of Mac OS X, couple with the ruby cocoa bridge. In just a couple of lines of Ruby. He’s planning to build an extensible open source application for interacting with the Mac. In his demo, he was able to get a time table for the train through the SBB website. Impressive! ...