the Forty-Second Parallel

Missed this earlier — apparently Google is collaborating with Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera (presumably Apple as well) to embed Gears in browser applications across the board. The idea seems to be to develop a consistent API for offline functionality that developers can depend on cross-browser.

Google Gears (beta, naturally) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality. Cross platform support for Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+. Safari support is in the works.

There's a lot of interesting work being done (and money being poured) right now in this arena — Silverlight, Apollo, Firefox 3 and now this.

If I had to guess, I'd put my money on Silverlight and Apollo coming out on top. But who knows.

A new ministry of the Riverview Church in Holt, Michigan. Their objectives:

• To worship God through appreciation of his creation
• To build community and friendships through a common bond
• To model and exhort enjoyment in moderation of God's gifts; quality over quantity
• To break down misconceptions about the Biblical view of alcohol
• To resume the Church's historical role as making the finest beer in town

Well, I made it home from RailsConf. It was easily the best conference I've ever been to. Being around so many talented people was both inspiring and intimidating.

Why do conference talks by academics on anything related to technology usually suck?

Rails is not Switzerland. Rails has an opinion.

Haml takes your gross, ugly templates and replaces them with veritable Haiku.