This came up in conversation with a client today - the problem with
 projects is the equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
 The more control you want on their status (or position), the less you
 have over their velocity. Pick one of the two - and pick wisely.

Summary:

• Advertisement market has limits
• the cash from the IPO is the emergecy fund to reinvent themselves
• only buy small companies with interesting technology
• take on Yahoo and Microsoft, but not directly
• Amazon, ebay, etc. are there to lose .. The key to making money in search is to get between people and what they are searching for, and that’s where Google is on a collision course not only with Microsoft and Yahoo, but also with Amazon and eBay
• expect GoogleMedia taking on iTunes and entire new market places of intellectual property
• whatever Google will do will be incredibly technical

 After labouring over the weekend, I am happy to present the first
 version of Gnome's Guide to WEBrick:
 http://shogo.homelinux.org/~ysantoso/WebWiki/WEBrick.html

 The guide is more of a reference-type documentation rather than
 tutorial. I believe that WEBrick is straightforward enough for someone
 to grasp its idea. At that point, a tutorial would be of lesser use
 than a reference.

 Being the first release, I am aware that there are many mistakes:
 spelling, grammar (not native English-speaker), obtuse example, etc. I
 am also aware that there are missing sections. Some of the missing
 sections are listed in the 'NOT YETs' section. If you think there are
 other topics I missed, please inform me.

If you want to relax after too much work .. and are sick of the normal Hollywood movies, check out Beat Takeshi.

Excellent page about Beat Takeshi.

Takeshi Kitano on the question: What’s you’re coolest moment?

 "In Japan, there is a broadcasting station called NHK,
  like BBC, but much, much stricter. When I was a rising
  star in comedy I appeared on a live program, and the director specifically
  said you can't say such-and-such, if you use these words you'll
  be finished. So of course I couldn't resist. I said 'shit'
  12 times in a row. I said, 'I saw a shit-like substance on the street.
  So I went over and I picked it up and smelled it, and it smelled like
  shit. Then I felt it and it felt like shit, and I liked it, and
  it tasted like shit, so I put it away. Thank god I didn't step in it!'
  That was my coolest moment, because it was a tremendous risk. They could have
  cut me off but they didn't. The director was fired and the producer was moved
  to another program, far away from Tokyo."

I always think of such measures as inferiority complex. People will listen to what is best, no need to purify one’s language. Evolution will win in the end anyhow. .. but doesn’t marketing power brainwash us? Yes, but vote with your money and buy the cds of the language you want to support.

How come some sucessful bands like "Wir sind Helden" still sing German in Germany? If you sing English, the audience is much larger .. where is the problem? It’s a good thing .. people can actually understand it.

Countries like France that try to push French even in scientific publication only shoot themselves in the leg and live in the past. Sorry, vive la belle France!

There are cultural differences between countries. The French are still more likely to buy a French car than Germans buying German cars.

Why does Europe not wake up and only use one official language? Already now with 11 languages we wasted 550 million euros per year on translation. 1,300 translaters translate 1.5 million pages a year. Now the budget will increase to 800 million euros.

BBC-story-Ukraine

BBC-story-Translation

Just in case you do not know what to buy me as my next birthday present .. I saw this monster on Gizmodo.

Today I’m passing on to you the first fruits of a big batch of material forthcoming. The Tiger’s Vest (with a Basic Introduction to Irb.)

poignantguide.net/ruby/expansion-pak-1.html

Stick around. Picture a man with a balloon, pinching the air out slowly, cats tied to his leg. If you can do that, then you’re all prepped for chapter 5.

Thank you, -talkers.

_why

  "Are you still using a database?"

    Madeleine is a Ruby implementation of Object Prevalence:
    Transparent persistence of business objects using command
    logging and snapshots.

     http://madeleine.sourceforge.net/

          Hi,

          Just figured it was a good time to release all the good stuff I and
          Stephen Sykes have been preparing in the Madeleine CVS. YAML marshalling
          and snapshot compression should be the highlights for our existing
          users.

          Madeleine 0.7 (July 23, 2004):

         * Broken clock unit test on win32 fixed.
         * AutomaticSnapshotMadeleine detects snapshot format on recovery
         * Snapshot compression with Madeleine::ZMarshal
         * YAML snapshots supported for automatic commands
         * SOAP snapshots supported for automatic commands
         * Read-only methods for automatic commands

        If you're planning to use either YAML or SOAP marshalling, beware that
        there are objects and classes that Ruby's own Marshal can handle but
        these can't. You will have to try for yourself if your application
        works, both to make a snapshot and to read it back, with the marshaller
        you want to use.

                                  cheers

                                  /Anders

And once you start doing agile development and pair programming you really recognise the benefit of a big monitor. And if you’re like most companies, you have the largest monitor available, a big blank wall and a screen projector. It’s just that most companies don’t let the programmers use such a valuable item. People that can be trusted to maintain the software that keeps the company in business somehow can’t be trusted with a simple peice of hardware. fairlygoodpractices.com/wallcode.htm

I highly recommend also look at this website. fairlygoodpractices.com

Sven C. Koehler has not had much time lately to add more languages or benchmarks, but it is an impressive collection of benchmarks. link

 in the very near future i'll be releasing ruvi 0.4.11.
 its a fairly complete vi(m) reimplementation in ruby
 thats getting to be fairly mature.

 includes stuff like:
   auto indent
   ruby highlighting
   curses interface
   macro support (new in .11)
   undo / redo
   class/module/method selector (major speedup in .11)
   word/filename completion in buffer (new for .11)
   rrb refactoring

As Stefan has sent me many new quotes, I did finally update my quote collection again.

Why does the world need Nutch, when search engines are free? Search engines are free to use like television is free to watch, but, like television programming, search results are subject to manipulation by the interests that control them. The only way one can be certain that search results are unbiased is if the technology which computes them is public. Nutch seeks to make high-quality search technology freely available.

How can a non-profit afford to run a search engine?

Nutch is primarily a software project, not a service. Large scale deployments of Nutch will probably be run by commerical interests separate from Nutch, funded by advertising or somesuch. If the Nutch software is good enough, perhaps existing major search engines will use it in place of their current closed source code.

The Nutch project itself may choose to host small-scale demo system, so that folks can see that it really works. This will require only moderate funding. The Nutch project may never host a full-scale deployment for folks to use as their everyday search engine. We’ll leave that to commercial ventures that can afford it.

Will Nutch ever be as good as other search engines?

We hope it will be better. With developers and researchers from around the world helping out, we hope to be able to surpass the quality of what any single company can do.

Nutch

One thing I found interesting about his talk that I managed to relate to XP was when he talked about how humans have "normal" level to categorize things. For example he showed a picture of a tree. Whenever people see a picture of a tree and you ask them what it is, they say "tree", not "maple" or "plant". There seems to be a "middle" category that the mind tends toward.

Traditional software development takes either a top-down or bottom-up approach to categorizing things. That is we don’t start at the natural middle abstraction and work our way up or down the hierarchy.

I was wondering if when we take a TDD approach to design, we can manage to start at the natural middle level and then refactor to generalize or specialize as we need to.

 Potential Corporate SCO Defendants

 For those organizations threatened with legal action by SCO, the Legal
 Defense Center is the one, central source for objective information
 regarding common issues faced by all potential SCO defendants. Based
 in Washington DC and comprised of a carefully-selected Panel of
 highly-specialized Intellectual Property legal experts fully-briefed
 on the intricacies of the case, the Legal Defense Center provides
 unmatched legal and defense resources. Membership in the program is
 $100,000 annually and provides resources to its members that
 would cost in the millions if developed independently.

 Linux Kernel Developers

 Individual contributors to the Linux kernel gain access to the
 full resources of the Open Source Legal Defense Fund including
 guidance on how to best protect and defend their own intellectual
 property rights. They also receive $25,000 in legal protection
 from OSRM if they are named in future lawsuits involving their
 contributions to the Linux kernel. Membership for individuals
 is $250 annually.