AJAX Toolkits

Ajaxian conducted a recent survery on Ajax toolkits/frameworks. The "winner" was Prototype ( a new one to me ) which is a Ruby-based framework. Wow! I did not realise there were so many AJAX frameworks out there! I use Sajax ( it is simple ) and have been experimenting with Backbase ( too complex for me ). PHP turns out to be the most popular server-side web development platform. Good news for me. I have been using PHP more often than Perl now.  I have been using the Sajax toolkit for a few months now and I really like it.  True to it's name it is simple to setup and use.  I tooled around with Backbase but...the learning curve and complexity required more time than I have patience for.  I also very quickly tired the Dojo AJAX toolkit/framework.  I think that one has potential ( easy to use and lots of features ) and I may come back to it later.

Security implications of Firefox 2.0 session restore feature

The restore session feature of Firefox is very nice to have.  Firefox 2.0 will attempt to restore a session connection if the browser dies.  However this has security implications especially for banking or any service with a login.  See below for Mozilla Foundation notes:

The Session Restore functionality provided in Firefox 2 will restore connections to services which use session cookies to maintain login state such as GMail. It is recommended that users with concerns about the privacy implications of this behavior change the value of browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false.

Parallels Desktop for Mac and Fedora Core 5

I downloaded a trial copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac and successfully installed Fedora Core 5 from CD. The install was quick and smooth but when I rebooted the VM I got this error.Fedora Core 5 install not working in Parallels Desktop for Mac.

I poked around the Parallels forums and found a thread where someone was having the same problem and successfully resolved it. For some reason the problem occurs when the memory allocated to the VM exceeds 512MB. Reducing my VM memory to 488MB resolved the issue for me.Fedora Core 5 VM configuration on Parallels Desktop for Mac

Poking around the forums some more I found this posting which claims the problem is with Linux.

The RAM issue relates to the intel chip. you need to change the grub script in the boot loader. to do this, boot linux with 512mb, then edit the /etc/grub.conf file. on the kernel line, add
mem=nopentium
then you're good to go and can boot with as much ram as you like.

The problem is not with Parallels but is a limitation of the Linux kernel and the original PC BIOS specification. Once I added the line above I was able to boost with over 512MB of RAM.

I was successfully able to install and run Fedora Core 5 in a Parallels Desktop for Mac VM on a 2GHz MacBook with 1GB RAM.