Listening to: White Shadows - Coldplay

Google App Engine… This has the potential to do for the web what VB and Delphi did for programming Windows Apps.

While I prefer the Amazon approach of decoupled services this service is an in important offer - because of and in spite of it’s limitations. It’s a platform that asks a programmer to provide code in return for massive scalability without worrying about the plumbing. Awesome… I’ll stick with my arrangement of virtual servers, S3 and web services for the mean time thou

Listening to: So Far Away - Dire Straits

The Mindscape guys kicked off just as I was leaving Provoke (happy birthday guys) and as it has turned out they are doing some seriously cool work in the .Net world. Check out the feature highlights for their 2.0 release:

1. LINQ everywhere – LINQ to LightSpeed means .Net 3.5 users can leverage the power of LINQ when writing their queries but still use the performance features that we are known for (like Named Aggregates)

2. Designer support – Full modeling support for your domain models directly from Visual Studio 2008. Drag and drop your tables onto the design surface, have associations automatically set up, easily setup validation attributes on model properties and much more.

3. Database support – SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite are all supported. This means that LightSpeed 2.0 will be one of the first data access frameworks that provides LINQ to Oracle, LINQ to PostgreSQL, LINQ to MySQL and LINQ to SQLite!

4. Command line tools – Some folks prefer using command line tools to generate simple model classes so we have included this as well as the Visual Studio integrated designer support.

5. The simplest, fastest and most lightweight O/RM for .NET – The right balance of power vs. complexity has always been our focus with LightSpeed and this hasn’t changed for version 2.0. There has been considerable work done to tweak, optimize and enhance much of LightSpeed

As I was waving au revoir to the Microsoft world LINQ emerged - a seriously cool concept. The Mindscape team is onto a real winner by providing that facility over the leading open source database systems. Nice work!

Listening to: Absent Friend - Zillionaire

I think the real difference between Windows and OS X is that the rumors of Windows and it’s new feature set are ALWAYS better than what is delivered. I read that article and think. “Hey cool! Windows could rock again!” But I have been down that road once too many times

Listening to: Shadowplay - The Killers

QuickLook alone is worth the upgrade to Leopard. The feature is now pretty much complete with the addition of plugins for ZIP files and folders.

Listening to: Off The Wall - Michael Jackson

All Cocoa text fields come with auto-complete built in … start typing a word and then hit Shift + F5.

Listening to: Spirit Walker - The Cult

One of the very nasty habits that was prevalent in my early ASP code was this sort of thing:

	...
	<% Response.Write("<div id=""" + div_id + """>) %>
		hello world
	</div>

This is very bad because it makes reading the code really difficult. You need to hunt for the opening div tag … you know it’s got to be there somewhere because there is the daggy close taggy. Wading through someone else’s rhtml I found exactly the same behavior. For a moment I smiled, it was like seeing an old and badly behaved friend - and then he threw up on the carpet and I sighed one of those (very rare) *scripting* sighs. Bad habits never die … they just move programmers. For the record the way to do it is:

	...
	<div id="<%= div_id %>">
		hello world
	</div>

Listening to: The Dope (Wonderful You) - The Dandy Warhols

This great little video outlines the importance of people loving your product and, importantly, how fostering that love is a route to product longevity.

Listening to: Thnks fr th Mmrs - Fall Out Boy

Well, after a bit of a struggle (damn them and their “secure by default” policies) I have been able to spin up an Amazon EC2 instance. So now I have essentially limitless computing priced by the hour … REALLY powerful! This means I can now foot it, software wise, on a global scale - from my office, muuuuuuuuuuuuuhaha! But seriously - Kiwi companies, pay attention! Global computing infrastructure for dollars …

I am using the very slick Right Scale tool. The guys there have done a great job in wrapping up the Amazon services in a very neat package. Nice work!

Listening to: Twilight Zone - Lupe Fiasco

As I have mentioned I have been advising VortexDNA. The Vortex guys are getting some great results (there will be more about that in the near future) with their technology and they’re looking at testing some interesting ideas.

Given that they have nailed the issue of relevance they are now pushing out and have started investigating the idea of the ‘My Web Hypothesis’:

Technology start-up VortexDNA is asking for volunteers to test the hypothesis that there is not just one Web.

Embedded within cyberspace, the organisation claims, there could be hundreds or even thousands of different web-worlds, each relevant to a group of people who share a similar outlook on life.

“This could lead to a profound change in the way we think about cyberspace and create a better web experience for everyone, “comments VortexDNA director Branton Kenton-Dau.

Called the ‘MyWeb’ hypothesis, the idea of thousands of web-worlds embedded in cyberspace is now being tested.

“Just as Newton passed sunlight through a prism to discover the entire spectrum of colour, VortexDNA wants to pass Google search results through a prism of your ‘DNA’ to see if your purpose, values and life focus provide you with a better search result,” explains Kenton-Dau.

When you think about it this is a very powerful concept … it’s the idea that amorphous mass of data that is the web can be tuned to match you, your needs and your goals. The Vortex guys are offering on of the key benefits of a walled garden app but on the public web … yeah, that’s pretty big

To test this idea on a larger group of users they are looking for people to start using their Firefox plugin.

Listening to: Don’t Believe Anymore - Icehouse

I have been watching the Twitter stoosh that has been dominating the Rails community over the past week. It has been interesting to watch the personalities at play and the various arguments be put forward. My take is very similar to:

In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.