(image source)

Anyhow, the 10% internet explorer usage fits nicely with another or my stats from Google Analytics:



The ‘Connection Speed’ distribution numbers for modem users are actually an exact match to the Internet Exploder numbers. Hmm, coincidence?

Maybe, but just in any case, let me give a warm hello to the seemingly web-savvy internet wizzards still surfing the net on their modem lines with Internet exploder and Windows. God luck, but rest assured you  won’t find ‘optimized for IE’ stuff here.

have fun

p.s.: yes, i spoiled actual visitor numbers. You just don’t know the timeslot.
 


Technorati Tags: apple, marketshare, google, analytics, IE

Gain your insights from the businessweek article on Google’s 101 course in which they start teaching web-scale computing in the universities. This is how they reach out to find new generations of engineers to fuel the never-ending appetite of the Googleplex for young brains.

and remember, just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they not out there to get you.


Technorati Tags: google, webscale, cloud,

First was Tim Lossen giving a good round-up of the JRuby developments. Not of much interest to me because i have’t touched Java in a while. There was a common understanding that JRuby is a good thing and will pave Rubys way into the enterprise world, and with Sun now as official backing partner, JRuby is heading for a 1.0 release this summer for Javaworld confererence. You can already run JRuby based Rails applications inside you IBM Websphere Application server, Yeah! But can you run a Rails application with JRuby from inside a Java applet on your client browser? Hm, interesting idea, we couldn’t answer that yesterday.

Next was the talk by Murphy about the state of the ruby 1.9 release. Murphy mainly used Mauricio Fernandez eigenclass for reference and gave a really great overview around the three main themes of this topic: Roadmap, New and changed features and performance. Everybody loves the hand drawn roadmap image(which i can’t find now) and while a Ruby2.0 release being something from a far utopian future, we might see a 1.9 release later this year. I’m actually not following the 1.9 developments but became inspired to check again. Enumerators for examples reminded me to my STL/C++ years, just now without the template pains :-) Interessting were his comments on performance. Tim already showed some charts which related the JRuby to some other implementations and Murphy made some own benchmarks which were pretty much in line with Tims data. The general information is that 1.9(==YARV) is a couple of times faster, ranging from 3 to 10 times faster. BUT! and that is a big but, Murphy did report that on the real life applications he tested, the speed-up was close to insignificant for various applications. This is because the the performance tuning in 1.9 seems to be focussing on benchmark relevant stuff. And real life application are hardly build from benchmark functionallity. This sounds like, been there, seen that before. History(benchmark tweaking) is repeating itself. For me it doesn’t matter. When others can do 4000 requests/second, ruby/rails is definitly fast enough for me.

Finally Benjamin Krause showcased his upcoming OMDB project(tech blog, development version, live). OMDB is a IMDb in wikipedia style with a creative commons licence. 16501 People(see comment) 16000 movies are already in the database and once it will open up, everybody can extend it. Thats a cool idea conceptually and what he showed technically was nothing less than the equivalent to an “Full House” in poker. For example the subsecond async response times for fetching actors from a huge database which were made possible by his ferret magic. impressive.

And this also led to the agenda for the next meeting where Benjamin will give a talk about ferret on Rails. Everybody wanted to see more of it. Also we will have a talk by Adam about AmzonWebServices: S3 and Rails on EC2 . I’m looking forward to it. And about the open mic section, i’m pretty sure we are releasing our foto-foo into the wild.

And for you to have some fun, we plan to record the talks next time and put them up as podcasts to fit with your online consumption habits. Murphy and Tim also promised to upload their talks for online viewing (to the wiki i guess).

looks like the ruby users group berlin is consolidating.

Technorati Tags: ruby, usergroup, YARV, jruby, omdb, imdb, idmedia, berlin,

New versioning, 0.12.2 —> 2.2.0:

is the most ridiculous version number jump i have seen i a while. Yahoo just released a new version of their Yahoo! UI Library and pull this little marketing trick.

This is even more extreme than in the good old new economy times when marketing geniuses where pushing their fail-ups towards their IPOs.

Don’t get me wrong, YUI is a fine piece of work and the yuiblog a delighting source of inspiration. But no marketing blah-blah whatsoever will make me understand the reasoning behind going from below 1.0 to 2.2 in a single step. Get real, start at 1 please.

cheers

Technorati Tags: yui, yahoo, javascript, gui, library

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
–Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics

agreed, but one thing is certain: it becomes way more complex than it used to be.

I recently just skimmed this 2007 Web Predictions and by quickly counting every major trend they identified in their post i figured out that I can’t keep up with the progress any more. I can dive into any given topic deep enough to cope with it, but not more all of them at once. Personally I’m unable to  accumulate information that fast anymore, and maybe it  is also impossible for a company. You can always hire people, but besides the difficulty of getting the right ones, you start loosing focus. Beeing “a jack in all trades, master in none” is no viable solution.

I recognize the pattern though. In the beginning, when i got started with the messy world of computers, i could keep up to date with all and every topic. Heck, there was only one (offline) magazine! “Byte”, and much later than came, heise C’t for the german market.

After just  a decade down the road, the web came and and funny enough, the earliest online reference of Bye magazine covers 3D graphics for everyone. That was in ’96 and now 10 years later i come back doing stuff with SecondLife. History is repeating itself? Or is it just me running around in circles?

have fun


Technorati Tags: market, trends, predictions, future, secondlife

… it lacks automated refactoring tools. Ruby doesn’t actually need them in the way Java does…

…But programmers are a stubborn bunch, and to win them over you have to give them what they think they want.

and right he is i think. Steve does not spoill his inside knowledge about what the next big language will be, but his commenters are concluding pretty much on it to be ECMA script. Well, may be it so, that will not be for some time.

Meanwhile from the sneaking ruby through the system department we got more and more reports from the field like the one from my colleague. In a nice guerilla tactics approach they contaminated the working place with making ruby an integral part of the ant based build system. And this in an all java only development group. congrats comrades.




Technorati Tags: programming, ruby,