The combination of parental leave, a Sony A100 10 Mpix camera and the 80 Gb HD of my Mac mini server has resulted in a lot of zeroes and ones needing a place to live. I have realized that a lof of valuable photos are only stored on the HD. Should it fail the family will be really disappointed. Hence, the need for a backup solution. I was planning to get a small RAID solution for the home network, but they are fairly expensive, need electricity and space....

Chief Executive Anders Dahlvig in an interview with Reuters said IKEA aimed to put a “bigger focus” on the living room in the next year, adding accessories for TV and videogames alongside new sofas and storage ranges. When asked if that could lead to electricals being sold in its iconic blue and yellow stores, he replied: Maybe. It depends on the stores. They are big, but they are still crowded; there are lots of products we would like to have in there....

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 out more on how you can integrate Raakt in your testing framework check out the Raakt wiki which now has a lot more information....

Via PR 2.0 (in swedish) I found the recently published TeliaSonera report on communication trends in Sweden (PDF in swedish). 10,000 people were interviewed about their online media use and expectations. Most of their findings were not surprising; people expect wifi in hotel rooms, want to be able to watch TV on their cell phone and so on. One thing did stand out though: 25% of the population regularly reads one or more blogs....

Having played with the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit (DIIT) lately it was interesting to see how big the logo file for the camping framework would become if the camping framework itself was embedded in it. The original logo file (stolen from Why’s site) is a 73 Kb PNG file. Embedding camping.rb in it creates a 101 Kb file visible to the right. Maybe this is the future of software distribution?...

This is to announce that RAAKT (The Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit) has been updated. This release includes more accessibility tests and an initial mapping of tests to the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM). Also, thanks to Derek Perrault RAAKT now uses Hpricot to parse the HTML document. This solves the problem where the previous parser (RubyfulSoup) declared a class “Tag” that was likely to clash with your local classes in Rails....

A recent catch by New Zealand fishermen brought in a 992 lb Colossal squid (pictured below). If squid are as intelligent as the octopus we should start getting worried. Octopuses often break out of their aquariums and sometimes into others in search of food. They have even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs. The solution is probably to increase funding to research that aims to produce sharks with lasers on their heads:...

Users of Hpricot (which WWW::Mechanize is using as the default html parser) may have discovered that the buffer size for attribute values is set to 16384 bytes default. Typically this isn’t a problem, I mean who would put 16Kb of data into an HTML attribute? Well, ASP.NET uses a hidden input field to store view state in order to save a few clock cycles on the server side (and spare developers the hazzle of coding view state)....

One of the missing features in the default Ruby distribution is the lack of a good XML parser. The included REXML is only sufficient for the most basic scenarios as performance degrades quickly with XML size. Recently I had a situation where I needed to parse a 700 Kb XML file and extract some values with XPath queries. Doing this in REXML proved to be too slow (around 30 seconds)....

If you need to capture an image of a full web page without having to do the scroll-cut-paste-repeat dance you should have a look at Paparazzi. Paparazzi uses the WebKit framework to create nice full length captures of web pages. If you need to do this programmatically for a large number of sites there is a nice library called webkit2png by Paul Hammond. It is a Python script utilizing the PyObjC bridge ....