To make it sexiers, they used a couple of retro-animated gif’s to tell you they’re currently builing your stat index, in a totally web 1.0 fashionned way:

If you have a Flickr account, you can activate your stats now.

And if your old projects are complaining after installing the new version, you just have to un-comment a simple line in your “config/environment.rb”:

  # Specifies gem version of Rails to use when vendor/rails is not present
  RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.1.6'

The Virgin Suicide experiment

For a few months, or probably a few year, I always wanted to virtualize a scene from The Virgin Suicide movie. In this scene, friends are phoning using music lyrics to make the conversation, with really great soundtracks. The idea I have is to do the same using mp3 and a kind of music chat room.

This morning, we tried to experiment with Sylvain it using CampFire from 37Signals as a music chat room and putting mp3 files inside this room. Well, this didn’t really work, as mp3 handling was really not working, and it was probably too easy to communicate directly to the other personn, not respecting the basic concept rule of speaking only with soundtrack.

A new idea for social audio

But a nice idea came from experiment: would it be possible to have a kind of audio social network? It would be like all these widgets for MySpace, or Pandora intelligent player, it’ll more be like a kind of radio where your friends are putting music inside, and you can just listen to your friend selection. A group interaction could create a kind of music timetable, with special music sessions at a certain hour, music getting random at the other time of the day.

I won’t implement this idea, it’s really a big job to do and it would need few months of dedicated time, but it’s really expected to work if nicely done.

• Adaptive Layout Technique: last article from A List Apart that describes a technique to adapt your layout on the client screen resolution. This would be commonly used in coming months, bye bye fixed layout for developper/contractor screen setup;
• Rails Rubyisms Advent: a simple day-by-day tutorial to learn new small tips in Ruby;
• Rails Advent Calendar: another advent calendar from RubyInside.com to ruby developpers, with a link to some interesting screencasts from the San Diego Ruby User Group.

Today, I’ve discovered a tool that will save few hours of my life, just to build HTML/CSS grid layouts. Simple, elegant:

http://blog.davglass.com/files/yui/grids/

YUI is a nice “2007 tech” challenger. Enough of all these homemade hack to have a Javascript working on IE-Firefox-Safari. 2006 was the year of Web 2.0 JS packages like Script.aculo.us, moo.fx or Lightbox, let’s see what will happen in 2007.