One of the reasons ASP.NET is successful is that it lowers the bar for Web developers.

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails for one of my current web apps that I’m developing, and it’s great (and every time I work on the other one, I regret a little more that it’s in PHP). It’s so easy to get things done, and so long as it’s not the first MVC web app you’ve developed, you’ll really appreciate how it works. I can only scoff at the above statement, from this page – as Simon Willison said, “Holy cow, ASP.NET is complicated”. Still, it’s by Microsoft, so it’s guaranteed that it’ll be pushed by millions of IT managers who know not what they are talking about…

I’m trying to encourage myself to post more often, and I thought this was certainly worthy of it: The Best Blonde Joke… evah!. Surprisingly funny.

It’s been a few days of upgrades recently. First off was the new version of Firefox, released last week. The lightning-fast forward and back is great – especially noticeable when you click on a link halfway down a page, and hit back. No more reshuffling the page as the layout is recalculated. Also, error pages (server not found and so on) are shown as pages, instead of dialog boxes. That’s been a long time coming. The only downside is that most of the themes haven’t been upgraded, so I had to find a different one. Most of the plugins I used are now redundant, since tabs are a lot easier to work with. Overall, a highly recommended upgrade. (If you don’t use Firefox already, you really should try it!)

Yesterday was a not-quite seamless upgrade for my Kubuntu install. I think it took about three chunks of upgrades to sort itself out – each time it would upgrade about a third of the packages. But it eventually worked, and I like the minor upgrades to all the software that I use (and especially to the package manager!). And it’s so nice having the OS and all the programs you ever need sorting themselves out automagically.

I’ve finally got round to upgrading the software that powers this weblog. That’s been a long time coming too. So if you notice anything wrong (or badly styled) let me know. I’ve also got all the spam-filtering plugins disabled; I want to see how well the new version copes by itself. It’s like putting your head in a lions mouth to see if he’s hungry…

This post was brought to you by the words “Open Source”, “Free Software”, and “absolutely fantastic”. Oh, and probably “preaching to the choir” too.

Quickly now, before they fix it. How to get from South Ken to Crystal Palace, via Shepherds Bush, Kew and most of London. If you’re in a taxi, make sure they aren’t using Google Maps for navigation…

So Microsoft are flip-flopping and have now decided to release Internet Explorer 7 after all. It’s going to be a security-orientated release, focussing on “even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware”. (Hopefully there’ll be some improved CSS handling, but I doubt it.)

Whilst it’s all “yay! Firefox is so successful that it’s proded the slumbering dragon into action” and stuff, there was just something about the announcement that left me with a feeling of “umm, so?”, even more than you would expect from me about a Microsoft product. But from another recent topic on the intarweb, Cornelius Schumacher summed it up for me nicely.

“Being useful doesn’t include protecting the operating system from viruses, spyware or dialers, helping to move around files between the internet and home or defragmenting your harddisk. These are all solutions to problems I never would have had if I wouldn’t have started to use a computer [...] I’m really fed up with this kind of software that only addresses software-related problems.

Today’s Firefox plugin of the day : ForecastFox, which now sits in the status bar and reminds me that there is such a thing as weather going on outside my basement office.