Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Summary of Rails 3.x ActiveRecord new query and scope methods (including the lazy loading and Relationship concepts)

Chris Soghoian pointing fingers to the USA's NSA https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/National_Security_Agency for not pointing out the weakneses in the SSL/CA system (and probably silently using it).

"Had the US defense and intelligence community acted 10 years ago to protect the Internet, instead of exploiting this flaw, we would not be in the dire situation that we are currently in, waiting for the next hacked certificate authority, or the next man in the middle attack."

Dutch open source dictionaries used for OpenOffice and Mozilla products

Brilliant idea, makes testing apps with subdomains on your local machine so much easier:

"Tired of having no choice but to add aliases for localhost to /etc/hosts every time you work on a site that uses subdomains? Me too. That’s why I grabbed smackaho.st and made it a localhost wildcard, pointing *.smackaho.st at 127.0.0.1."

Comparison of LESS and SASS webdesign frameworks.

Conclusion:
"If you’re a fan of Ruby or HAML, then Sass might be right up your ally. For me, being a PHP and JavaScript geek, I tend to lean towards LESS for its ease of inclusion and access to JavaScript’s expressions and document attributes."

"Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more. css-bootstrap-rails project integrates Bootstrap CSS toolkit for Rails 3 projects"

Computer science teacher puts his course on Github, hoping he'll get some help in updating it along with the fast-moving Rails

The German online magazin Heise implemented social recommendation buttons that only load Twitter/GooglePlus and Facebook buttons (and tracking code) after the user "switches on" tracking.

As it turns out, Diginotar also had issued several certificates for the TorProject… Guess who would be interested in that?!

Proposed protocol to remove certificate authorities out of the trust chain, replacing them with a number of (self-chosen) notaries that will check for you if a site produces the same certificate, seen from another point at the network.
See this video (1h Blackhat talk) for more explanation http://j.mp/n02qFX

"Convergence is a secure replacement for the Certificate Authority System. Rather than employing a traditionally hard-coded list of immutable CAs, Convergence allows you to configure a dynamic set of Notaries which use network perspective to validate your communication. "

"Blueprint placeholders is a collection of nearly 750 placeholder images, optimized for the Blueprint CSS grid, useful for quickly prototyping designs."

(The images follow a naming convention so by describing them you embed them in your page. Contains formats for ads and video too)

"More is a plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. It automatically parses your applications .less files through LESS and outputs CSS files."

CSS-generating framework, similar to SASS (more recent however, seems to capture more buzz).
The syntax is similar to Ruby. For a comparison of LESS and SASS, see: http://nex-3.com/posts/83-sass-and-less and http://www.quora.com/Which-one-is-best-for-writing-CSS-LESS-or-SASS

"CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing."

Short demo of the grid system at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHLrEF9tHjw

Introduction to Blueprint and Compass

Great in-browser javascript introduction.