Whole last week we spent under the warm sun of Egypt: swam in the Red Sea, traveled a lot, socialized. What I would like to show you is our little photo-report — a Egypt set on Flickr. Almost every image is accompanied with the comment — a story, a history note or just an observation.

Kate and I hope you’ll like this little fraction of the journey and share our joy. Leave comments, ask questions, do amends to history notes.

Everyone is welcome!

P.S. Sheriff, Aladin, Amir, and Ibrahim — you, guys, are the best. We enjoyed your trips and greatly appreciate your help with tea issues. Hope to see you some day again! ;)

Flick Set

Hey fans of everything concise. My finding of today is Haml and Sass which is a quickly growing replacement for Rhtml (and plain HTML) and CSS. Just check the syntax sample on their main page and admit it, it’s much simpler and cleaner than plain (R)HTML. Everything has a meaning, everything cuts to chase.

Haml can be used with Ruby on Rails as a plug-in that transparently adds the support to your ActiveViews. You simply rename your views from .rhtml to .haml and start deleting redundant code. In case of CSS, you place your .sass in the stylesheets folder and they are automatically compiled on demand. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is whether they do every time, or once per change to save performance.

Haml and Sass are also used in the StaticMatic toolkit, which is exactly how I discovered them. The toolkit lets you put together static sites lighting fast. You simply write your pages in Haml, model your stylesheets in Sass, preview and do a final build. As the result of building you get a bunch of little cute HTML files and CSS stylesheets ready for upload to the site. If you, like me, still like static sites and want to save time on bringing them up and maintaining, it’s your choice.

Let me know what you think. A couple of lines is fine.

On Saturday, as we landed in Kiev on a way back from the vacation in Egypt, my cell buzzed with a message. A second later my heart broke out the chest — a note from my mother said that they had received the letter from ACS with my skill assessment results. Oh my God!

The next day I paid a visit to my parents, opened the letter to learn that I was approved and granted the highest category of IT specialist. On top of that, they certified me suitable for additional points for excessive knowledge in J2EE, and attached the form for a discounted membership. As you may or may not know, ACS is an organization gathering and training IT specialists under its umbrella, which helps immensely when looking for new job opportunities.

The next step would be to collect all documents necessary for the main visa application and proceed with it online. It will probably take another year to process it to immigration office, but still it’s already half way up to success.

Great news, hah!

Found the mention of that NetBeans 6 Beta supports Ruby on Rails and apparently is considered to be superior to Aptana, RadRails and others. I’m currently an Aptana user, which is Eclipse-based by the way, and pretty satisfied except for several things: code completion never works, popup documentation never works and the subversion integration is … a huge room for improvement.

At this very moment of writing I’m downloading the Beta 1 version of NetBeans 6 for a quick try. In fact the test run is scheduled for the morning, and I just wished you guys to know what’s going on. If everything is true what’s in the review I pointed out, and it all works even half as smooth as the guy describes, I leave for it without a bit of hesitation.

Let me know if you have any ideas on this.