Rogers announced today that they had come to an agreement with Apple and will be bringing the iPhone to Canada later this year. I can’t wait. No details were released so we will have to wait to see what the plans are.
Jim Weirich gave a brilliant presentation called Shaving with Ockham this year at MountainWest RubyConf 2008. His premise was K.I.S.S – Keep it Simple Stupid. The presentation is both entertaining and educational. And at the very least, it servers as an excellent introduction to LISP.
Weirich takes the audience for a walk through the various programing languages that he has used over his career. These include LISP, FORTH, Erlang, and something resembling Java/JSP. He then extracts a few simple rules from each of the first three languages that make them simple and very powerful. These elements are a small core, simple rules, and powerful abstractions.
Along with showing simplicity, Weirich also analyzes why programmers make complicated, complex programs. He suggests that it because we like to solve complicated, complex problems with complex solutions. We get so intent on solving a problem that we do not look around to see if there is a simple solution.
The presentation ends with Ockham’s razor: “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Also known as, “all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best”. This is definitely a video that every programmer should watch.
I just registered a domain name for my wife for her photography business. For any .com domain name, this is a fairly easy, almost trivial process. You find the name you want, click a button, usually labelled “Register” or “Proceed to Checkout”, and then pay some money. Viola, the domain name is yours.
For a .ca domain name, the process is a little more involved. Once you find the name you want, you have to prove why you want it. Apparently, .ca names must maintain a very direct connection to Canada. This means you have to be a Canadian company, part of the government, a Canadian non-profit organization or a Canadian citizen. The next step is to register with CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. This involves going to a completely different website and agreeing to five (5) pages worth of agreement policies.
At the end of the five pages, they have a paragraph which basically says that even if you didn’t read the preceding five, very long pages, you are still agreeing to them, and therefore, legally bound to whatever the five pages said. As you can tell, I did not read any of what I as agreeing to.
Once you register with CIRA and complete that insanely long process, then you can complete your registration. Eventually you pay them some money and you are done. Well, almost. Nowhere during the registration process are you asked to enter DNS information (at least on the webnames.ca website). This you have to figure out for yourself after the fact.
This is the part that infuriated me the most. I think this is Webnames.ca’s attempt to trick you into hosting the website with them. If searched around and finally found the spot to enter my DNS info. This was less then obvious. This ensures that .ca names must be registered by knowledgeable web professionals.
Bottom line, find somewhere else to register .ca domain names with other then webnames.ca. Or better yet, just get a .com domain and keep life simpler (and cheaper).
The Effectif Development website has posted a very neat trick for opening Ruby gems in Textmate. This is very handing and the cool part is that it includes tab completion for the gems.
I am playing around with the new media/image importing tools in WordPress 2.5. Here is a picture of the hotel at Lake Louise that I took at the end of Feb, 2008.
Over the last week I have been thinking about the benefits of storing data online. This includes things like email, calendar, news readers, bookmarks, and online backups.
I use Google’s Gmail client. I have not opened a desktop email app in about a year. I originally made the switch because I was using several different computers and traveling a lot. Using Gmail allowed me to send and received email wherever I was on whatever computer I was using. The downside to this convenience is that I do not have a local backup of all my emails. A problem that is easily fixed for email, but not so easily done for things like calendars and news readers.
In addition to Gmail, I use — 37signals’ Backpack and Highrise, Google reader, and Google Calendar. The data in the apps is not as easily replicated without entering it twice.
The last area I have been thinking about is online backups. I have looked at two companies; Mozy.com (I am trying their free account now) and ElephantDrive.com. Both have very attractive plans at reasonable rates. The upside is that they provide offsite backup which is good to have. The downside is that if I ever loose my data locally, I may have to download 50 Gigs of data one file at a time. It almost makes more sense to buy a terabyte drive, fill it up, and store it in a bank vault.
The question I would like to pose is what do people think, do you use online applications or do you put all your data on your computer? In this age of online computing, does it makes sense to have all your data online, or is there still a place for desktop email clients and news readers?
Google has announced the preview release of the Google App Engine. It allows developers to build web applications and run them on Google’s infrastructure. Currently the only language that is supported is Python. The service is free, but limited to “500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views”. Google is also limiting registration to the first 10,000 developers who sign up.
The development environment includes the following features:
- Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
- Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
- Automatic scaling and load balancing
- Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
- Fully featured local development environment
It will be interesting to follow the development of this. Hopefully Google will support more languages when this goes live (Ruby and Java would be really nice). At a minimum, this might just give Python the boost that it needs.