Ruby 1.9 released

Ruby version 1.9 has been released, as Matz had indicated earlier that he would do so on Christmas eve. Mind you, this is a development release and not to be put in production servers. However, one of the interesting things about this release is the speed compared to 1.8 series. I haven't run any comparision tests, but following the tests run from other folks it seems 1.9 release runs about 3 times faster than 1.8.6. That's an awesome improvement and the due credit must goto the core development team. The latest packages are available on the link above.

I am not aware of the Rails roadmap and hence not sure when Rails will be able to run ruby 1.9. But when it does, it will take away some of the speed issues that rails web applications have. And hopefully give the rails folks something to fight the django guys off w.r.t speed :)

Keep learning

How often don't we see people just suddenly ceasing to learn something new once they reach a certain stage? This is especially more applicable when one is involved in a knowledge based industry. The Indian technology industry has been spinning out more and more software engineers who are more concerned with the pay and less passionate about the work. Hence once the initial enthusiasm dies down within 4-5 years and other social and family responsibilities increase, we see ourselves less and less inclined to spend time on learning something new or putting that extra time and effort. The hunger is no more there. This I guess is one of the reasons why we have such a low percentage of involvement in the open source projects and entrepreneurial spirit.

Anyone who gets into the service industry is promoted to a managerial position within 5-6 years. When I mention about the service industry, I include the MNC centers in India as well and not just the local software companies. And this duration is not good enough for one to understand the length and breadth of the domain that they are currently working in. Leave alone the opportunity to grow laterally and understand other technology domains. I do understand that there are some people who go on to become really good managers. But they would have become so, no matter whether they were pushed into the role or not. That makes me envious of hackers, for they possess an unending and ever growing inclination to learn newer technologies and techniques.

On this note, here are couple of posts I found interesting related to this subject.

1. Mark Cooper recounts his journey at 40 years, when he had to make switch from COBOL to Java and OO. The link to original article is no longer working and hence this is from the google cache.
2. Sujai wonders why Bangalore has so many jobs and has tried to de-construct the functioning of the Indian service industry so far. One more of his interesting posts is related to the number of reportees a manager has.
   

That reminds me that I need to get back to learning. This post applies as much to me as anyone else.

As Steve Jobs puts it, "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish".

Django Book online

Django has been a worthy competitor to rails so far. For the folks who are new to django, it is a web framework written in python and incorporates much of the principles as rails. However, django has been comparitively lacking much of the developer involvement, documentation and publicity that rails boasts of. Django Book - an online free ebook has been released, which is written by the django authors Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Any pythonists out there with interest in web development, check it out.

Nokia's iPhone?

Nokia has taken notice of the consumer interest in Apple iphone, it's touch based interface and the UI. This video from Nokia has the iphone interface which we can expect from Nokia devices next year.

Rails 2.0 release

The much anticipated 2.0 release of rails is out. Its been almost an year in the making. DHH has a detailed post about the release and how one can upgrade to the same.

InstantRails discontinued, rubystack in

InstantRails has been a really nice and easy way for any novice to get started with RoR and web development. However its further development has been discontinued now and is no longer maintained. Another alternative for RoR complete solution is rubystack from Bitnami folks. Instantrails was packaged as a zip file whereas rubystack is an installable. Haven't tried it yet but will definitely give it a try.

RSS howto

Even though RSS is widely used by the blogosphere and a large bunch of technical folks are aware of it, the knowledge and use of RSS by common end users has been far from satisfactory. This is a great howto article on RSS and explains how one can use RSS for their needs and the best known online and offline news readers one can use.

Lesson for every salaried employee

I received this lesson via mail the other day. Not sure who the author is but the lesson for sure seems to make sense...atleast to some of us

Note: Click on the image to read it...

CSS Sprites

One of the ways to improve the user's perception of the website performance is to reduce the number of HTTP requests while loading a page for stuff such as additional images. CSS Sprites is a way to reduce the same and improve the web performance. You can read more about CSS Sprites here... and appreciate it.

Rails post

With this post, wanted to share some more info and resources on RoR.

1. Peter Marklund has shared the slides of his 5 day introductory course on Ruby on Rails. The slides are quite exhaustive and lengthy (341 slides) and cover everything from MVC, ActiveRecord, Migrations, routing and deployment options.
2. Heroku is a new venture that addresses the deployment aspect of RoR. People who are new to rails and the web as well as web hosting in general face an uphill task when they are done with the other painful task of actually developing a web app. Heroku attempts to solve this with a complete Rails environment that runs in the web browser. Developer can create a new rails app, import his code and the his webapp is online instantly. He can share the url and invite feedback from close group. There are some screencasts that explain more about this service. As of now, Heroku is still in limited beta but you can request for an invitation.
3. Jonathan from Parkerhill Technology group has published a paper where he compares the current two hot web frameworks - Rails and Django. He concludes that Rails has a comparitively wider community support and buzz whereas django is more technically appealing. Though he accepts in the paper that he has not written any real life web apps with either of the frameworks.

More about Android

In an earlier post last week, I had penned my initial thoughts about the Android mobile OS/platform from Google. Just wanted to share some more information that I have come across.

1. The early peek of Android SDK is now available for the developers to play with for Windows, Linux and the Mac. There are some videos explaining about the android development, APIs as well as some about the android running on a variety about end terminals. The SDK also includes examples as well as a terminal emulator to play with till we see an actual android device sometime next year.
2. Yankee Group has published a brief analysis about the Android announcement from Google, its impact on the cellular industry, its chances of success as well as how it will impact the incumbent players.

Barcamp5 Bangalore Winter Edition

The much awaited Barcamp 5 Bangalore winter edition (bcb5) will held on 17th and 18th of Nov (that is this weekend) at IIM Bangalore. I missed the last one due to personal reasons, and it's tentative this time as well. Though I am really interested in attending couple of sessions.

For those interested, register yourself and the pick the collectives you are interested in. The sessions I am interested are around development and entrepreneurship.

Andoid: Google's mobile platform

Google announced the establishment of the open handset alliance yesterday and also announced android, the free and open mobile platform. The alliance has more than 30 technology and mobile companies including most of the handset vendors and chip manufacturers and some of the operators as well. The mobile manufactuers as of now include Samsung, LG, Motorola and HTC.

Android would be based on Linux and would be made available for free to handset manufacturers. The developers will have access to the platform SDK and a number of tools using which they would be able to develop applications for the platform. Google would make available almost all of their applications as part of this software platform. Google plans to extend its monopoly of web search to mobile world as well and make money out of it.

Couple of key manufacturers missing as you might have noticed is Nokia and Sony-Ericsson. Nokia probably sees Android as a threat to the Symbian platform in which it has major stake and its Ovi services.

The first handset with Android software platform (software stack) is expected to be available in 2nd half of 2008. And the initial version of the SDK would be available on Nov 12th which the developers can download and start writing applications with.

Google further says that it would be willing to share the revenue from its search services with the operators though its not sure how much. However, this linux platform is yet one more addition to the linux based mobile platforms that have been existing till now which include LiMo.

Since the first handset based on Android wont be available till late next year, as a developer I would probably glance at the SDK that would be made available next week. And not spend too much time on it till I am convinced that this is not a pure PR exercise from Google.

Update: I wonder how much impact this would have on the IMS deployment by the operators.

YC ad

YC (Y Combinator) folks put up an ad for their Summer Founder Program in The Stanford Daily newspaper. Y Combinator is a venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups (seed funding). Paul Graham is one of the partners at YC. The ad is quite cheeky and well conceived...



Note: This photo was orginally shared by Martin Davidsson on Flickr under Creative Commons.

How to be a Programmer

Robert Read has written a nice article titled "How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary". As the title suggests, it as his views and ideas on what it takes to be a good programmer. Just couldn't resist the urge to share this with you all...

OpenSocial

As most of you might have known already, OpenSocial has been launched by Google along with some of the other members of the social networking web community. OpenSocial seeks to provide a common set of APIs based on Javascript and HTML that developers can use to pull social data from websites who are confirming to the OpenSocial interface.

As of now, the web community consists of Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING apart from Google.

This move from Google seems to be another attempt by Google to make themselves relevant in the social networking community. Google's flagship product Orkut, which was Google's attempt to capture the social networking market is believed to have not been able to live up to the expectations. And with the onslaught by Facebook and Myspace, things have not been easy for Google.

Though one things that is curious to me is how obsessed are people with US based users/customers. Though Orkut has a great following in India, it has been judged as not good enough just because Orkut has not been able to grasp more US based users compared to Facebook. It seems the users in countries like India have been taken for granted or are considered not worthy enough.

BTW, for people curious about OpenSocial here is a video that explains the same.

Convergence of web and voice

The convergence of web and voice is almost here. Couple of developments in the recent weeks have convinced me of the same.

1. Tringme - Offers widgets that one can place on the websites and blogs and incase any visitor needs to interact with them, the visitor can just click on the widget and within no time would be talking to the concerned person. A pretty simple example would be customer support. Tringme tries to reach the person on cellphone, gtalk etc. This service also lets the users leave a voice mail.
2. Lypp - Lypp provides VoIP services over the existing IM service. The interesting thing that caught my eye from lypp was their Ruby On Rails plugin which helps the RoR developers to easily integrate the voice services into the websites.

Geektorrent

GeekTorrent is a new torrent tracker site for programming, technical and gaming related screencasts and videos. As per the site, it has been written purely in django and its good to see newer web frameworks such as django and RoR slowly penetrating the world which was dominated by php.

Right now there are not many videos in the programming and technology sections which I am keen about. But I hope to see more in the coming days...

Preview release of Rails 2.0

The preview release of Rails 2.0 is out. This is a precursor to the public release. DHH has a detailed post about the same which includes instructions on how to upgrade to this release as well as changes in 2.0.

ROR book available for free download

Patrick Lenz's book - "Build your own Ruby on Rails web applications" is available for free download for the next 60 days. Guys interested in RoR can check out the same...