When looking for HTML5 canvas based implementations I found this promising implementation based on the YUI library.
Though workig, it has three major drawbacks: It is rather overengineered and difficult to tweak, it uses YUI (whereas I prefer the more lightweight jQuery) and it performs poorly with image sizes bigger than thumbnails.

After trying to change the code for a while I decided to do a reimplementation in jQuery. The result can be seen on the MomoFlow demo page. Here are two screenshots:

CoverFlow using canvas and jQuery

Quicklook mode

The used 3D transformation is superbly described on the YUI blog .

My implementation caches the rendered canvases per rendering angle. Further speed increments are made possible by adjusting the mesh width used for the slicing transformation depending on the achieved framerate.

The result performs beautifully in recent Safari, Chrome and Opera, decently on Firefox. It also works flawlessly on the iPhone. Keyboard control is coming soon.

I do still need help on IE, maybe the image composition is too demanding for ExplorerCanvas? 
The code is available on github: http://github.com/momolog/momoflow.
Comments and improvements are very much welcome!

A nice way we found was to set the value in question to NULL, based on the condition and let the NOT NULL constraint do its work.

ALTER TABLE sessions MODIFY session_id varchar(255) NOT NULL;
DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS check_sessionid;
DELIMITER $$
CREATE TRIGGER check_sessionid BEFORE INSERT ON sessions  
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
  IF NOT NEW.session_id REGEXP '^[[:xdigit:]]{32}$' THEN
    SET NEW.session_id = NULL;
  END IF;
END;
$$
DELIMITER ;

> INSERT INTO sessions (session_id) VALUES ('ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

> INSERT INTO sessions (session_id) VALUES ('fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffg');
ERROR 1048 (23000): Column 'session_id' cannot be null

jssh ist eine JavaScript Shell, die den Firefox per Port 9997 fernsteuerbar macht.
Download z.B. hier.

y erzeugt einen YAML dump auf der Rails console, mehr dazu hier.

=3D ist ein escaptes “=” in quoted_printable.

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb aktualisiert unter MacOSX sofort die locate Datenbank.

rake db:migrate:redo führt unter rails die letzte Migration rückwärts und sofort wieder vorwärts aus, so dass sich die Vorwärts-Action korrigieren läßt

ack -Q bringt ack dazu, literal, also ohne RegExp zu suchen.