Recently, I’ve been working on a Rails project for the first time.
It’s a nice change after years of perl.
There are quite a few little things that I knew how to do in perl, that I didn’t have clue on how to do it in Rails. Also I run into issue peculiar to Rails or ruby.
I solved all these issues so far and the links below give pointers to some helpful information.
I’m quite annoyed at Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!
I’m a happy user of several Yahoo services but given the services overlap between the two and what Microsoft wants Yahoo! for, I fear for future of the Yahoo services (I’m a paying customer for some of them).
I fear because I’ve chosen to use them and for the way I go about online things, I feel they are superior to the competing offerings from MS, Apple or Google (in areas like user experience, platform agnosticism, integration between services and use of open standards).
After some grumpy start following Yahoo’s ingestion of Flickr, I’ve actually started to like Yahoo! integration between web services and I like their openness (use of microformats, restful apis, recent adoption of OpenID).
Most importantly though, I’ve got quite a few former colleagues and friends working at Yahoo! and I can just imagine how p**ed off they are at the moment.
I think, in my humble opinion, part of Yahoo!’s troubles comes from not having played the openness card in all their areas of business. I’m thinking about Instant Messaging where they slept with Microsoft and Search where they stood alone. That way they let MS think that there are “synergies” possible or a common vision can be shared.
It would be different, if say, Yahoo! were part of a cloud of interacting open APIs with liberal licensing between coo-petitors, partners, clients.
Elsewhere, Daring Fireball is making a layman’s translation of a Yahoo! memo about the subject.
Also, Roughly Drafted has an article about Microsoft’s intention and why everyone is going to loose if the bid goes through. The article is interesting as it’s full of background and historic information.
In another part of the web, the TechCrunch blog proposes a solution for Yahoo! (or the new entity) to survive in the Search market.
Finally, Yahoo! has rejected (for the moment) Microsoft’s offer.
Seen today on Boing Boing, strange and beautiful photos:
Namibian ghost-town turning back into sand-dunes: “Check out these haunting and beautiful photos and video of the abandoned Namibian town of Kolmanskop, a ghost-town that is turning back into sand-dunes.
Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port of Lüderitz. In 1908, Luederitz was plunged into diamond fever and people rushed into the Namib desert hoping to make an easy fortune. Within two years, a town, complete with a casino, school, hospital and exclusive residential buildings, was established in the barren sandy desert.But shortly after the drop in diamond sales after the First World War, the beginning of the end started. During the 1950’s the town was deserted and the dunes began to reclaim what was always theirs.
(via Neatorama)
“
(Via Boing Boing.)
On the 12th of January, I attended a photo walking in central London.
I discover the event on Upcoming but most people were Flickr users.
The organizer Phill Price has written a wrap-up post on photowalking.org.
If you’ve got Google Earth and want to navigate the photos on the route we’ve walked, here’s the Flickr link to the KML file for that event.
Below are some of the photos I took on that day (it was an exceptionally sunny day for this time in the year in London):
As someone who like Futurama and The Simpsons, I found this picture merging both quite funny.
Futurama Meets The Simpsons (PIC): “The best of both worlds in one intergalactic catastrophe! Awesome.”
(Via digg.)
Back In May, I’ve posted a “TAP vs XML” article (triggered by a similarly titled article from Curtis Poe) mainly focused on the challenge of integrating perl testing with Cruise Control.
In the meantime, Rufus Cable pointed me to the direction of Matisse Enzer who wrote a tool to output perl test report into the junit xml format used by Apache Ant.
Originally uploaded by Arnold Pouteau’s
Another nice found on Flickr to follow up on my previous post 
Recently, I came across astonishing and beautiful photos of sculptures from some Flickr contacts:
1. waterincatania, 2. Italian Garden, Hyde Park, 3. Untitled
They also remind me an episode of Doctor Who (more info here, here or here) where statues had a pivotal role.
Interestingly, following the airing of “Blink”, someone has created a group on Flickr called: Don’t blink.
If you’re not sure what’s the difference between a controlled vocabulary, a taxonomy and a thesaurus, this blog article is quite good at clarifying the above concepts and more.
What’s not covered are tags and folksonomy.
Interesting article on Boing Boing about Google image labeler and how to entice the mass into a dull job by the means of a game challenge…
It’s a clever way to do retrospective tagging. Organizations with large archives of data are likely to do more of this in order to open access to their “long tail”.
In a non-digital world, an analogy could be the way the BBC organized national “treasure hunts” to retrieve long missing archive material, except they were one-offs.
Google has found a way to harness the power of the mass (and no, this has nothing to do with what happens to humans in the Matrix trilogy, although …)
