I tried a few things, like restarting NetBeans, and opening another project to see if the problem was with my Ruby installation. (Other projects were running fine, so the problem wasn’t with Ruby.) I even tried running the project from another desktop, getting the same 500 error.

Finally, I did the one thing that I should have done first – checking the development log file. There I found that the problem was a tiny bit of buggy code in the application.rb file that was stopping the project from initializing properly. And because the application failed to initialize, I wasn’t getting those detailed error messages that I’m so familiar with.

Have you done something so stupid while developing an application? Forgetting to look at the first place where you could have spotted the problem and instead wasting an hour theorizing about what could be causing the problem?

If you are a web developer, you probably hate IE6 as much as I do (or even more, if that much hate is ever possible). And like me, you are waiting for the day when the damn thing disappears off the face of the internet.

When I started this blog, I had planned to make it completely inaccessible to IE6 users, and instead display a message asking them to switch to some other browser. But then I realized that it’s too much effort to hack the template for the sake of spreading the message to the 1% of visitors of this blog who still use IE6.

Instead, I chose to leave all the IE6 bugs unfixed (this template looks awful on IE6) and added the banner from the IE6 No More campaign. “IE6 No More” is a campaign by a group of startups that are fed up with the ancient browser and want it to disappear. Do take a look at their website where they make a very good case against IE6.

However, there’s hope for us yet. Digg has restricted access to some of its features on IE6, Facebook is asking IE6 users to upgrade and YouTube will drop IE6 support very soon. If more big websites will also take steps in this direction, we won’t have to wait till 2014 for IE6’s death.

What browser do you use? Do you think all website should follow Facebook’s lead and ask users to upgrade?

If you are a developer, how much of you time is wasted fixing all those IE6 bugs? Have you worked on any website recently where you didn’t need to make it compatible with IE6?

PS. If you are a Firefox person and have your own website, why don’t you help spread the word about Firefox? The more IE6 users we convert, the better! ;-)