Today saw the final release of the third major production-ready release of Ruby on Rails, everyone's favorite web development suite. This new version boasts a bunch of new features and tweaks, with lots of small little touches that make your fingers sing - the official v1.2 announcement lists many of the bigger improvements but you really should do yourself a favor and pick up the Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd edition) book for a thorough explanation. As I work through it (on my Super Secret Project) I'll mention a few bits 'n pieces that I think are worth highlighting, the things that make you enjoy life and being a web developer :)

Great news today as the OpenDocument file format, used in the excellent OpenOffice.org word processor / spreadsheet / presentation application, was ratified as an official ISO standard. This means many things, from the fact that many major international corporations and organizations will start using it as their standard file format instead of the inferior Microsoft formats, but that also people world over now have security in the knowledge that files they create in this format will still be accessible for years to come, regardless of any one company. This is akin to how in the 90's the various Internet service providers stopped using their own custom messaging system and standardized on regular RFC 2821/2822 email, letting customers of one communicate with friends and family who had the audacity to use another company. Hurray for common sense finally succeeding against one corporation's profits.