I love the title of this book.

It's a book about the basics of design, targeted toward grade school children. Even so, it contains many design fundamentals that a professional would even find useful.

It is also written by Mark Gonyea, the brother of our resident flash/poker expert Michael Gonyea.

Mark, like Michael, is an extremely creative artist. He is also the creator of Mr. Oblivious, a great cartoon strip.

A neat primer (for anyone in visual design) on flag design that includes examples and comparisons of good flags and bad flags.

Georgia's flag is not bad flag but contains the state seal which is meaningless and difficult to discern from any kind of distance. South Carolina on the other hand has a great flag. Simple, basic, easy to distinguish from great distances.

Yes, it's true - Our office has had a Mac attack. But let's be real - Quickbooks seems to be the software of choice for small business owners that need to manage their finances and payroll. Yes there is MYOB for the mac, but that thing is a bigger piece of junk than the PC itself. I have many business associates who have used the Mac with quickbooks and inevitably they have gotten screwed one way or another. Maybe the Quickbooks Pro 2006 version for the Mac is better than the last release. And for the life of me I just can't get past the fact that Mac doesn't embrace the right click! I'm sure someone out there will school me after reading this post, but Shawn was right - I am the last hold out in the office. I don't see that changing anytime in the future unless someone gives me a free Mac.

Yesterday, 8/9/2006, Ruby on Rails 1.1.5 was released, followed quickly by 1.1.6 today, and is considered a mandatory upgrade for anyone running a Rails site on a public facing server.

The vulnerability that 1.1.6 fixes is a routing bug that allowed code to be run which is normally only run for development purposes. For the full gory details head here.

Of course, we have immediately patched all of our client sites that were effected. So have no fear Plexus customers, we're watching out for you!

Some background on why only some of our sites built in Rails needed to be "fixed". Sites created in pre 1.1 days were either expected to have rails installed in the vendor directory or just take whatever the latest gem was that is installed on the server. There are a handful of our sites that currently run by using the latest gem, so we didn't have to do anything to have them use the new 1.1.6 gems, once installed. However, all of our latest projects have a directive in their environment setup file that states which version of the gem they should use. (Incidently, this is the version that the project was created with.) These projects required us to change their environment setup file to point to the latest version.

It's great to the Rails community coming together and keeping Rails safe. The speed of the patching is also a good sign for the framework.

I received a jubilant email today from Shawn that contained a link to this article officially announcing that Mac OS X Leopard will indeed be shipped with Ruby on Rails pre-configured.

For anyone who's followed these great directions to get RoR up and running on a Mac knows that it takes a fair amount of time and a good bit of focus to get everything correct. Having everything pre-installed will save many people a great deal of aggravation.

On top of having Ruby and Rails in the box, they've promised other packaged goodies like Mongrel, a Ruby alternative to FCGI that I've heard is much more efficient.

It's not like I needed another reason to look forward to the OS X update, but now I'm truly excited to get my hands on Leopard.