I’m sitting here realizing I need to manage some files on Amazon S3. I’m currently using S3 Browser which, while nice enough, doesn’t feel like a good client. Ideally, I’d want an FTP-client-like interface. Then, I think, “Gosh, I wish Transmit worked with S3.” On a whim, I fire up Transmit to see if I missed some fancy option. Lo and behold, I’m greeted with a notification that a new version is available. I go over to the web site and what do I see under “New in Transmit 3.6!” but this:

Seriously, how weird is that? It’s like it read my mind. Apparently, this feature came out last week, just in time for me. Thanks, Panic!

If you’re looking for a good FTP/SFTP client for Mac OS X, I highly recommend Transmit. Great client with loads of useful, smart features. Someone here at Fanzter also uses Coda as their HTML/CSS tool, which also comes with a lot of the Transmit functionality built in. I’d be using that, too, except that I already own CSSEdit, which I also highly recommend. Good stuff all around.

Update: Quick review after five minutes: It works great, as you’d expect from Panic. Nice stuff. (ah, except with stuff already on S3. It got confused by paths that are not really paths. Bummer, that’s part of what I was looking for. It does a decent job with stuff that’s put on there via Transmit, but that’s an easy putt)

I’m now deep into Rails land, and I’ve had a ton of Java experience at my former employer, so I feel like I’m in a good place to compare the two.

Bottom line, if I didn’t have to consider hiring issues, especially here in CT, I would go Java if I were starting up my own company. Rails is great, don’t get me wrong, but I feel tied down and held back by the limited choices in Ruby land. And the fact that I’ve had to debug makefiles and break out my C knowledge to figure out some clever things is quite scary.

Basically, I’m reacting to the immaturity of both Ruby and Rails. Both are young, slow, and limited compared to Java frameworks out there. The biggest bonuses of Rails tend to be useless when you actually get beyond the early parts of your app. On top of that, scalability is a known issue with Rails, and there are odd decisions throughout (Rails is inherently non-reentrant?!). These are getting fixed in upcoming major releases, so I’m sure in 2-3 years, they’ll be on equal footing with the best Java frameworks.

So, my advice is to focus on what your dev team knows and you’ll be fine. In my case, I’m pretty good at both Java and PHP and Perl, and Ruby was a snap to pick up, so this wasn’t an issue either way for me. Of course, Rails has enough hype now that it is in itself a selling point for a startup to both VC and investors. For that reason alone, I’m working in Rails. I have little doubt I could architect a site that could handle Twitter or ESPN Fantasy Football traffic in Rails, anyway, so it probably won’t matter.

I just finished a long ramble about this on a Startupping thread if you’re interested in a less coherent version of this post.

So, I’m spending part of my Friday at work like I usually do, working on prototype applications or product ideas I have. I’m working inside my XML Editor (OxygenXML 8) to validate my layout and I hit the pretty print button. All hell breaks loose with my layout. Firefox and Safari both render the layout exactly the same in the broken version, which told me that it probably wasn’t a “bug” but a misunderstanding of the spec on my part.

Here’s a sample of what happened. I went from this:

to this:

After several hours of close reading, double-checking everything, and generally pulling my hair out, I found out that the problem is that the XML editor turned an empty div in my code into an empty XML element. In other words, the only change to the source was from:

to this:

All of this stems from the fact that XHTML uses XML semantics without a real XML parser. The bottom line is that unless the element is defined in the XHTML DTD as EMPTY, you shouldn’t use the empty element notation. It’s better and correct to leave it as separate open and close tags. Many developers have run into similar issues with the script tag, which also has some weirdness when used in the empty element notation. This is why, apparently, browsers do this. I don’t know if they handle it well, though.

Continue reading if you want more information and some links on the background for this.
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If you’re a web developer of any kind, you should get the Firebug extension for Firefox. It’s a neat little tool that allows you to inspect and manipulate the DOM in place. It’s a clever little tool. This is what the DOM Inspector should’ve been.