My bookmarks from Diigo 11/21/2008

• po-ru.com: Fixing invalid UTF-8 in Ruby, revisited

  tags: ruby, encode, utf-8

  • ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8//IGNORE', 'UTF-8')
    valid_string = ic.iconv(untrusted_string)

• 數學欣賞

  tags: 数学欣赏, math

• 该不该投资百度？ - FT中文网 - FTChinese.com

  tags: baidu

  • 北京时间11月19日晚，百度迅速召开应对“CCTV门”的分析师会议之后，其股价继续跌势，收于111.74美元/股，比前一个交易日下跌了13.22%。前一个周末，中国中央电视台（CCTV）连续两天对百度搜索结果的可靠性提出质疑。中央电视台是中国最大的国有电视媒体，在受众覆盖面和行政级别上拥有无可匹敌的地位。被央视曝光后，百度的股价在三个连续的交易日里跌去了近38%——每股缩水了67美元
    • test - post by vincent
  • “CCTV门”引发百度股价大跌后，一位随即买进的对冲基金人士认为这是2008年的“年度机遇”。理由首先在于，不同于之前透过中移动发送垃圾短信遭到央视批评的分众传媒，百度拥有对平台的绝对控制力。更现实主义的判断在于，由于互联网的复杂性和中国的法制及监管缺陷，央视激起的公愤将是短暂的，而百度的繁荣显然会更长久。事实上，在上述分析师会议上，百度管理层宣称公司的所有业务在中国完全合法，因为“现行法规并不要求登广告者持有任何牌照”。

• Software as a Service Rails Kit | Rails Kits

  tags: RailsKits, billing, payment

  • Write your app. Not billing code.

    
    

    Are you starting to build a new web service with Ruby on Rails? Do you want to avoid having to write the subscription management, recurring billing, and credit card management code?

    
    

    The SaaS Rails Kit gets your new software-as-a-service site off to a running start by providing you a well-tested and proven recurring billing system with credit card and PayPal payments. You also get a framework for building membership-based applications, including account signups/upgrades/downgrades, tiered pricing levels with customizable limits (e.g, # of users, # of projects, etc.), multi-tenant data security in a single database, and more.

  • Features

    
    
    
    
    • Supported gateways: Authorize.net CIM, Braintree, Payment Express, TrustCommerce, and PayPal Website Payments Standard, all via ActiveMerchant
    
    
    • No local credit card storage. All credit card information is stored with the payment gateway, so you don’t have to worry about the PCI implications of storing credit card numbers.
    
    
    • Automated billing script runs nightly for anniversary billing.
    
    
    • Configurable subscription renewal period (defaults to one month).
    
    
    • Automated notification and retry of failed renewals.
    
    
    • Free accounts and one-month trials are supported.
    
    
    • Optionally collect payment information for paid accounts at account creation.
    
    
    • Optionally collect setup fees, if you collect payment info up-front and don’t have a trial period.
    
    
    • Easy customization of plan levels — pricing and custom limits.
    
    
    • Ability to tweak limits and fees per account.
    
    
    • Self-serve account creation.
    
    
    • Self-serve account upgrades and downgrades, with limit checking to prevent downgrading to a plan for which the account does not qualify, based on the plan limits.
    
    
    • Account lookups by subdomain (multi-tenant).
    
    
    • Ability for users to reset their own passwords (Forgot your password?…)
    
    
    • Includes a module with shared controller methods written to scope all model access to the current account.
    
    
    • Comes with a limit on the number of users each account can have, complete with controller code, as an example of how to implement limits.
    
    
    • Integration of restful_authentication plugin, customized for a multi-tenant web service.
    
    
    • SSL protection of account creation and login via the SslRequirement plugin.
    
    
    • Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.4 (RSpec).

• BenCurtis.com

  tags: bencurtis, blog

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.