The release of the FitPC2 brings us a step closer to a ideal workstation:

• Small (101 x 115 x 27 mm)
• Environmentally friendly (8W at full CPU load)
• Powerful (Intel Atom CPU)
• Silent (fanless)
• Cheap (from US$245)

and of course

• Sexy

In our company we use Subversion for version control.

Using a GUI for Mac gives our more graphical team members easy access to common tasks, such as committing changed files to the repository.

However updating the working copy on a (test-) web server still requires knowlegde of a unix shell and having to log in and running it manually can be a full time position.

After doing some research I found the official PECL SVN bindings. These are still very experimental and a hussle to install.

So I decided to use the simplest solution that just executes a “svn up” on the server and does not require any server-side modification:

exec("svn up ".dirname(__FILE__), $out, $ret);

Which serves perfectly for this purpose.

Wrapping this line in a (30secs) self refreshing file makes sure the working copy stays updated.

And the best thing is:
it does not require anything, except installed svn binaries that are executable for the apache user and write access to the webroot.
Download

The Situation

Its been a while since everybody stopped complaining about the standards compliancy of Internet Exporer 6. In fact there was no way of having a website that was not working in the most popular browser.

However.

Times have changed.

Light in the darkness

The introduction of cross browser compatible Javascript frameworks, like jQuery,  Protoype and Mootools, using halftransparent png fixes like Supersleight as well as using XHTML as the Doctype got the mess under control.

Still the missing unserstanding of CSS in IE causes web designers headaches every day and pushes the cost of websites unnecessary up – limiting the possibilities of introducing other technologies / capabilities such as mobile browsing and accessibility.

How can this situation be solved?

At the end of the day the only substantial solution will be to force users to upgrade / switch by having websites just not working anymore.

This might force Microsoft whether to release IE7 for Windows 2000 or accept the fact of everybody switching to Firefox.

Being a Web design agency, we cant do much other than making clients happy – which implements having their website looking good even on grandmas old machine. (I actually feel bad about writing  these words!)

What we can do is talking to people we meet, recommending the usage of a Standards Compliant browser, such as Firefox and  Google’s Chrome.

The question is…

…should web developers / designers care about browser bugs like the opacity issue in firefox mac?

This would be like manufacturers building cars that drive through water instead of reparing the broken bridge.

Microsoft adds dynamic language support to Silverlight 2.

This enables Python and Ruby scripts to be executed on client side and offers developers to build much faster and interactive Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Reducing cost on server-side.

Microsoft ported two very popular, programming Languages, IronPython and IronRuby:

• IronPython, a Python 2.5 port enabling applications to use the powerful .NET Framework.
• IronRuby, a Ruby port to run in a frontend environment

Read the full features here: http://silverlight.net/learn/dynamiclanguages.aspx

I, personally, find this quite a interesting evolution that brings us a step further, closing the gap beween Web – and Desktop – Applications.

Would be interesting to see how a port of PHP would perform in this evironment.

A excellent article can be found here.

What do you think?