They smoke and nobody cares whether an allergic or asthmatic person is near. They do not even have mercy to their own babies!

Berlin was a good surprise sofar. Some of the biggest restaurants offer non smoking areas. Today at the Reichstag they had these nice logos plastered on the way to roof.

 Road Engine

 Patent No. 549,160

 Inventor: George Selden, Rochester, New York

 Issued: November 5, 1895

This patent represents a forgotten episode in the history of the automobile. The question of who invented the motor car is an open one - Ford, Daimler, Duryea, Cugnot all lay claim to the title of "Father of the Automobile" - but you will seldom hear the name of patent attorney George Selden of Rochester, New York, mentioned.

Selden squeezed the fledgling industry for royalties on every car produced until he was stopped. Who stopped him? Henry Ford. How? A court patent fight that made newspaper headlines nationwide. The outcome hinged on a curious court interpretation. The result was the greatest boon to industrial production the world had ever seen — the US automobile industry.

Note: This patent has a witnessing signature by George Eastman of Eastman Kodak.

Full story

Predicting the future!

After a long night of coding we are proud to announce Futurometer version 0. Now you can select for which keyword you want to see the plot.

To the birdflu page we added H5N1.

Stay tuned, more to come soon.

Announcing the birth of a bouncing plugin baby boy:

rails-engines.rubyforge.org/

… at which you can digest all manner of propaganda and rdoc.… well, docs. You might particularly want to watch the demo movie:

rails-engines.rubyforge.org/movies/engines_intro.mov

Any mirrors of this would be greatly appreciated! Below is the hype:

What are Rails Engines? Rails Engines are a way of dropping in whole chunks of functionality into your existing application without affecting any of your existing code. The could also be described as mini-applications, or vertical application slices - top-to-bottom units which provide full MVC coverage for a certain, specific application function.

Why do I want this? Rails Engines are advantageous over normal generators because the do not insert any code into the /app directory, but remain isolated within the plugins directory of your application. Furthermore, you can override individual controller actions and views/partials within your application as needed, whilst leaving the original Engine files intact.

OK, I need an example As an example, the Login Engine (heavily based on the Salted Login Generator, all kudos to those guys) provides a full user login subsystem, including:

• controllers to manage user accounts;
• helpers for you to interact with account information from other

parts of your application;

• the model objects and schemas to create the required tables;
• stylesheets and javascript files to enhance the views;
• and any other library files required.

How do I get such devilry? Engines can be distributed using the same mechanisms as regular Rails lugins (since to the Rails plugin system they appear to be almost the same thing). If you are developing engines yourself for use across multiple projects, linking them as svn externals allows seamless pdating of bugfixes across multiple applications.

The Rails Engines plugin and all other engines should be listed on the Plugins page in the wiki, so that the bleeding-edge script/plugin command can be used to install them painlessly.

Currently they are hosted on the OpenSVN servers at opensvn.csie.org/rails_engines/plugins, although a more permanent home would be make me very very happy.… </beg>

wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Plugins

AJAX SUPPORT

Ajax is the term that describes a set of web development techniques for creating interactive web applications. One of the key ingredients is the JavaScript object XmlHttpRequest. Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request. DRAG AND DROP

Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest. CINEMATIC EFFECTS

When actions are no longer occurring just at the page level but within the page itself, more clues are required to clue the user on what has transpired. Cinematic effects such as scaling and smooth sliding transitions can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.

BEHAVIORS

Take some raw HTML and sprinkle in some behaviors and what do you get? Well in Rico you can get an Accordion component like those found in Macromedia Flex and Laszlo. Just nest some DIVs and with one line of JavaScript turn your div panels into an accordion. And the latest behavior is the LiveGrid. LiveGrid allows you to connect an Html table up to a stream of Ajax responses. Ajax requests are automatically called during table scrolling. The result is now Html tables can hold an unlimited amount of data scrolled into view on the fly as needed! More behaviors are planned!

I especially liked the quote of the week:

 |> Hmm, how many of you have had Matz in your car? :D
 |> Myself, Eric, some others...

 |Does a rental count?

 Where was rental Matz available?  I'd like one.

                                                         matz.

     Euruko Video Productions

     proudly present

     the European blockbuster

     of this year's

     Halloween night:

     http://futurometer.com/320x240x15fps/

link

I have seldom seen common sense strategy. Most companies rely on luck and have close to no strategy, or they go for the lunatic strategy.