Good selection of news, observations and comments on stuff that is happening around. There seems to be pretty good match between what Michael considers blogworthy and my areas of interest - as I found there lot of interesting pieces.
It is mostly news - but not only news. It is worth browsing through archive, just to discover small jewels - like this one:
If you had a top 7 tips list for managing the flood of digital information, what would it be?
My current client is multi-national company, headquartered in Ottawa with offices in USA and Europe. With teams all over the globe, the conference calls and network meetings are part of the game. This usually means Microsoft Netmeeting to share the screen and teleconference bridge for voice. Netmeeting usually works quite OK - except when it does not - for no obvious reason :-).
Thanks to Yugma, there is now better alternative. Yugma is Sanskrit word meaning "the state of being in unified collaboration" and also a name of a startup, offering teleconferencing product that aspires to unify colaboration between platforms. And they mean it, because their product runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and integrates with Skype to take care of the voice portion.
For sixty more days (actually 59 days and 17 hours as of Time.now, or if you prefer to speak Javaish rather than Rubyish, new java.util.Date()) you will be able to download free PDF version of the book by Patrick Lenz Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications - courtesy of nice guys of Sitepoint.
The book download page is here, no strings attached - all it will cost you is disclosing an email address (book download link will be emailed to you) and bandwidth to get the 20 MB PDF. Mine is downloading right now, so I cannot tell anything about the book yet. It has 447 pages and from the table of content it looks like solid beginner's book.
There is - after all - a Petstore implementation for Ruby. Somebody asked a question at the DZone and the response posted by Raphael Valyi was:
Re: Is there a Pet Store in Grails/Rails? I'm speaking here for the Rails (JRuby) side:
there is actually a petstore, it can be found there:
http://viewvc.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/cgi/viewvc.cgi/?root=tw-commons
Some guys used it to compare C-Ruby vs JRuby performance:
http://www.nabble.com/JRuby-vs-MRI---Petstore-shootout-t4289470.html
According to the TIOBE Programming Community index (which gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages), Ruby jumped 3 places and made it to top ten. Congratulations !
If you look closely on the trends down on the page, the dynamically languages popularity has risen over 3.6% during year period. Which is A Good Thing (TM).
Should I make my personal Top Ten of the programming languages, ordering languages by my degree of comfort of using the language, the language beauty (which is, in the eye of the beholder ;-)). Factoring in also how much I do enjoy reading/writing code in that language and it's usefulness from both personal as well professional point of view, the index would look like this:
From Scott Guthrie's interview on .NET futures
SG: We’ve seen demand for an MVC framework on two fronts. One is for even more testability, having the ability to completely mock-up a request. We’ve also always seen with ASP.NET that some people like having the server control, postback model; some people say, “I just want absolute control.”
The MVC framework we’re coming up with is a fairly simple MVC model, it’s very clean, it’s a front controller model, and it integrates very well into ASP.NET so you can use ASP.NET forms authentication, session state, security, personalisation, caching, all the standard features, but with an alternative to the postback model where you have a more traditional controller-view separation and have complete control over your HTML.
If you live on week cycles, it is quite nice to see the week number in your calendar. It is not (yet) provided as standard feature in the user settings for my calendar solution of choice.
An obvious solution is to run user script in the browser that will decorate the calendar page - using the fabulous Grease Monkey. The user script to install (after installing the plugin) is here.
It works, but ... However I admire the power and possibilities of the user-scripts, it is fairly heavy tool for such simple thing. My Firefox install is pretty large thanks to variety of developer-oriented plugins, and I do not want to slow it down even more. Another issue with scripts is potential security implication - recently (as you will see on the script site) a malicious user started to upload scripts stealing cookies. What this means for slightly paranoid security-aware person like me, is to read and understand the source - and that is way too much trouble.
Experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted.
Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.
They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough
They are there to stop "the other people"
Randy Pausch If you want to watch and listen to a lecture by professor of CMU Computer Science that will teach you things way beyond realms of software engineering, check this video.
As part of current project I need to test some ORM frameworks and for that, you need a database. In this particular case, database equals Oracle. I need a local instance to be able to work outside of the customer's location.
On my notebook, I have already installation of MySQL (for all the Rails stuff) and SQLServer (for ASP.NET). Plus few lightweight databases (meaning that they do not really need a server) such as sqlite3, Derby and HSQLDB). I was very hesitant to add another instance and for some time tried to do the work with MySQL - but differences in SQL and most importantly the way how the CLOBs and BLOBs are handled convinced me this is a bad idea.
This is blog entry I wrote over a two years ago - before this blog has even started. Now I found it on the disk during cleanups and found out it is still valid. The iPod mentioned was my first, now long dead first generation Shuffle.
Here it comes:
Spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday reading this book. I did not really expect to finish it, considering the size (~ 500 pages) and the fact that I am not such a great fan of Oracle products - especially not the Oracle Apps. But it turned up to be way better that expected. I mean the book, albeit I partially improved my opinion about the 11i. Technologywise, it is still kind a dinosaur, but now I can more appreciate the sheer size of the problem these guys were trying to address. But back to the book.