Just installed Subversion 1.4.3 from a package made available by Martin Ott. Easy. Quick. Like that. 
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo/articles/2007/01/25/subversion-1-4-3
Martin Ott is one of the coding monkeys, who make SubEthaEdit, my favorite text editor.
An interesting read with some useful info:
http://www.technicat.com/writing/programming.html
For the author, effective means “the ability to complete projects in a timely manner with the expected quality.”
The team at eLab in Ticino has published a chapter on fast prototyping for e-learning projects. It discusses a useful approach for managing instructional design and collaboration in such a way as to produce testable products early and often in the project life. The lessons learned from Swiss Virtual Campus project experiences offer valuable insights for any e-learning project.
Not this post, but this book: “Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application”, by 37Signals.
https://gettingreal.37signals.com/
37Signals are the developers behind some hugely successful web apps: Basecamp, Backpack, TaDa Lists and others. In “Getting Real”, they give a very readable account of how they manage to build their applications quickly and to the customers’ satisfaction without getting bogged down in the process (there’s only 3 guys behind the curtain).
Their writing style is a joy to read: lots of concrete examples, no blah blah, a friendly conversational tone. Best of all, they get to the point. And they make many points, helpful advice for anyone from coder to project manager to anyone who needs to get the job done, whatever the job is. It won’t take long to read this e-book of just 170 pages, but it’s not the thinness that speeds your reading – you may just not want to put it down. And when you’re done, you may just want to go out and build something.
In Jacob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox on Screen Resolution and Page Layout, he advises us to optimize for screens that are 1024 x 768 pixels, and to use a liquid layout that increases to the user’s window size. He notes that there are still about 17% of users who have a 800 x 600 display who are not to be ignored (that is, for whom it makes sense not to provide a frozen layout requiring more than 800 x 600 pixels).
Almost as a side note, Nielsen mentions how “big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity…”. Might be a good idea to send the link above to the person who approves purchase orders… 
According to the Swedish Design Magazine CAPDesign, as translated by Roger Johansson of 456bereastreet.com, these are the 10 deadly sins of web design (the blog entry’s comments are also an interesting read):
1. Not following basic typographic rules
2. Being too creative with navigation
3. Creating a cluttered navigation system
4. Making sure the site requires certain technology to work
5. Thinking that accessibility is only about blind people
6. Ignoring web standards
7. Not keeping search engines in mind from the start
8. Basing the site structure on your organisation structure
9. Using grey text on grey background
10. Skipping the feasibility study
Fast, faster, fastest Web development?
The long story:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html
Quick, very quick, look at a demo:
http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov
Tutorial:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html
If you know Perl already…
