Scary Trend – Charging for Service Packs
Sorry, I wasn’t one of those jumping up and down when they announced Snow Leopard and its “low” price. In fact, I’m disturbed by the fact that software companies are beginning to charge for service packs.
When I opened up ScreenFlow to record my next short screencast, I was unpleasantly greeted with an upgrade notice that says I now have to pay $29 for what appears to be a service pack. I find this insulting even as a person who makes living writing software. All I can say about this is that Telestream, the company that makes ScreenFlow, just lost a customer.
I live by a simple rule, treat everyone like the way you want to be treated, and if that’s not the case, well, do my part in punishing them.
Circle of Death
What Does This Do?
I haven’t used pastie for so long, thought I’d use this bit of code to test the embedding functionality. This is NOT from Rails. Can you guess what it does and where it came from?
Dave Thomas Video From Lone Star Ruby Conference 2009
Interesting Phrases I Learned…
I’ve learned, and still learning lots of interesting phrases ever since I dove into Ruby and Rails. I just wanted to say that just about every phrases are from Rails crowd.
1. “fuck you, read the code” or “read the fucking code”
2. “google it before asking”
3. “just use a plugin, it’s DRY”
4. “oh, we don’t document because we’re agile”
5. “fuck” – apparently a requirement for Rails developers
I now get all Zed Shaw’s jokes.
iTunes App Store Spamming?
Although this not related to Ruby, I thought this was very interesting article.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/03/apple-bans-app-stores-3rd-most-prolific-developer/
The important lesson here is the quality is much more important than the quantity. This is why I find it amusing when developers talk about the number of apps they worked on rather than the number of types of apps.
Emacs 23.1 Released – No Longer Matters to Me
I tried, tried, and tried, but I just can’t make the jump to emacs. I just came to the realization that my fingers won’t let me do it. Therefore, rather than fighting, I now accepted the fact that I’m a vim dude. In fact, I gave up other editors such as Geany and Komodo.
I’m getting used to using NERDTree and in fact, prefer it over TextMate. However, I will not give up my TextMate for Rails development.
This Blog Moved to http://blog.rubyhead.com
It’s now live! Like I announced before, RubyHead.com will go through complete redesign and the blog portion of the site is now live at http://blog.rubyhead.com.
Next step for me will be putting up a redirect page until the design is done. Sorry about the inconvenience.
Announcement – End of RubyHead.com as a Blog
In coming weeks, rubyhead.com will be converted to the company site rather than the blog. I will make the articles available at blog.rubyhead.com as soon as I finish setting up the server.
RubyHead will be offering technology management consulting (from a former CTO), Ruby and Rails development, and a program for startups. If you need to reach me, please email me at joon at this domain.
RubyHead Update and Rant, 1 July 2009
If you are wondering why I haven’t done much lately, that’s because I’ve been extremely busy now that I’m completely independent. In other words, I’ve been focusing on client work. By the way if you need a RubyHead, let me know.
This brought an interesting issue for me. It appears that I’m not very scalable. I have my limit on how much I can work.
The problem is that I was born this way. The way God made me does not make me very scalable. If he designed me to be very scalable from the beginning, I may not have this issue.
Interesting.
The same can be said about an application. If you never give an ounce of thought on scalability, then “scale later” may not even be possible or very expensive. I see this everyday as Rails made time to market ridiculously fast and focus solely on application features. I see too many apps slapped together with a bunch of plugins that makes scaling difficult.
The choice of tools is also very important. I always believe that there’s a right set of tools for every situation. I’m not talking about the text editor or IDE, but frameworks such as Rails, Sinatra, Merb, and etc. For example, do you really need entire Rails stack if you’re creating a web services? Do you really want one application handling both front-end and back-end services?
In coming weeks, I plan on creating screencasts on scalability as I’m trying to transfer some of the experiences I had with other platform to Ruby.
