Ruby on Rails 0.11.0 was just released and this awesome web application framework now has native support for AJAX. This release also includes automatic pagination as well as many bug fixes.

IBM has just announced a new spam filter called FairUCE determines whether or not an email is spam by using DNS lookups as opposed to filtering based on content.

Technically, FairUCE tries to find a relationship between the envelope sender’s domain and the IP address of the client delivering the mail, using a series of cached DNS look-ups. For the vast majority of legitimate mail, from AOL to mailing lists to vanity domains, this is a snap. If such a relationship cannot be found, FairUCE attempts to find one by sending a user-customizable challenge/response.

Tired of the default alert dialog that your web browser displays? Custom Alert is a demonstration of how to over-ride the default window.alert method of a browser and will allow you to create alert messages that fit in with the overall style of your web application.

[link via The JavaScript Weblog]

This is a very cool Firefox video that should be on TV!

The news broke yesterday that Yahoo purchased Flickr. It’s been blogged to death over the past 24 hours, but I came across this very interesting comment over at del.icio.us:

I wonder if the folksonomy, or keyword tagging, system can find a home in the search engine world. Pages ranked higher or lower based on the associated and aggregated types and kinds of keywords that the community of people tie to those pages.

I’ve never been a big Yahoo fan but it looks like it will be a good deal for Flickr users (more uploads for free accounts and the pro accounts will be cheaper).

Born Geek has a tutorial that will show you how to create Firefox Toolbar Extension using XUL and JavaScript.

Many advertising sites have been using Flash to create popup/popunder ads that get past the excellent popup blocking in Firefox. You can learn how to Block Flash-based Popups in Firefox at the at Forever Geek website.

I recently upgraded my MySQL server from version 4.0 to version 4.1 and got a Client does not support authentication protocol… error when attempting to connect to the server using a GUI front end. Turns out that the latest versions of MySql uses a new format for the password, so older client can have problems connecting the laterst version of the server. To find out how to fix this problem, check out the tutorial at Digital Peer.

Here is a very cool method for creating Expandable Lists using DOM-Scripting. The script simply takes an unordered list and makes the sublists therein expandable and collapsible. The method uses semantic markup and the external JavaScript keeps your standards-compliant code clean.

Looking to try out Ruby on Rails? This tutorial will show you how to setup OS X with lighttpd and Rails. lighttpd lighttpd a secure, fast, compliant and very flexible web-server which has been optimized for high-performance environments. It natively uses FastCGI which Rails apparently really likes.