carbon8

And before the iPhone, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iPod, post iPod Apple has been a second coming of Apple. And before the iPod, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iMac, post iMac Apple has been a second coming of Apple.

The SDK is free.

You don't have to wait; they've already done it with the iPhone/iPad OS. Apple is clearly still willing to make hard and dramatic decisions when it comes to its operating systems.

Snow Leopard, Ubuntu server & VMs, XP VM (using VirtualBox)

Ruby, Haskell, Python, Javascript

TextMate, vim

git, gitx, git gui, vcprompt

bash

homebrew

postgresql, pgadmin

rvm

jquery

sass, compass

gemcutter, github

linode

chef

google apps

photoshop, illustrator

Firefox w/ firebug, firecookie, firequery, firerainbow, the web developer toolbar, cookie culler, user agent switcher, live http headers; webkit nightly dev tools; iPhone simulator from the iPhone SDK

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

http://asciicasts.com/ (text versions of the railscasts mentioned below)

Screencasts:

http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

http://railscasts.com/

Books:

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_arr/advanced-rails-recipes

And others in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails sections at prag progammers: http://www.pragprog.com/categories

The "pickaxe book" (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby) is often considered the standard Ruby reference, and there is a version for 1.9.

API:

http://railsapi.com/

http://api.rubyonrails.org/

http://www.gotapi.com/rubyrails

Conference presentations:

http://www.confreaks.com/events

IRC:

irc://irc.freenode.net/#ruby-lang

irc://irc.freenode.net/#rubyonrails

Google Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk

Ruby and Rails projects are abundant on github, providing lots of example code.

Don't forget that the core elements of google's corporate identity, regardless of whether it's just an ideal, are "do no evil" and "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I have no doubt that at least some executives as google, almost certainly including sergey and larry, feel that maintaining this corporate identity is important.

I don't need to follow my sister on facebook, I just meet up with her to talk. I really don't need to see what statuses by strangers my long-time friends "liked", I'd much rather just meet up with them in some interesting place for a vacation. And if I am connected to them online, I have no use for a notice that a friend is DJing at such and such club on the other side of the earth in 5 days, but I'd like to share music we are working on or books we are reading, so I connect with them on platforms designed to share those things.

Online socializing also provides the opportunity to be exposed the ideas, work and output of people who I couldn't meet any other way. As a result, when I'm online I seek out strangers who are working in domains that interest me, read what they say, check out their work, discuss things with them and collaborate on creating things.

So, in my situation, I relate to the author's approach: I seek out content. I strongly prefer discussion-centric platforms like forums and the only social networks I use heavily are either domain-specific, like goodreads or linkedin, or content-centric, like github, soundcloud, vimeo and even, to some degree at least, twitter. Friendster, Myspace and Facebook have never been interesting to me.

It's just a different perspective. Different people simply have different interests and differing socialization patterns. Personally, I find these differences fascinating.

    # config/initializers/disable_mass_assignment.rb
    ActiveRecord::Base.send(:attr_accessible, nil)

    # app/models/some_model.rb
    class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
      attr_accessible :whitelisted, :attributes
    end

http://github.com/astrails/safe

Dead simple to specify what to backup, drop the config in /etc/safe and add a cron job.

Plus, it's important to note that the current draft spec actually supposedly covers the existing 1.9 implementation and all other existing implementations by excluding features that differ between them. From the Drafting Guidelines (http://ruby-std.netlab.jp/):

Second, we intend that existing implementations such as Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, and IronRuby can conform to the specification without modifying them. There are some features which are not implemented in some of the implementations or are different among the implementations. Those features are excluded from the specification, or described as either "implementation defined" or "implementation dependent."

I'm on a relatively late model macbook pro using safari with a fresh silverlight install and it's dramatically slower than street view, enough that it's difficult to navigate around.

"the Bing thing is handling perspective deformation much better, whereas Google Streetview introduces a lot of messy artifacts as the 3d parameters change."

I don't see what you are referring to. What I do see is poorer quality from the top camera on google ( http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&... ), but I also see artifacts and whole blurred sections (like frosted glass) of images on bing, though it's apparently not possible to link to individual views.

And other than what I mentioned, it really, actually is just a straight up street view clone. It's not a value judgement, it's just a fact. One huge company cloned something created by another huge company. I'm not sure why any of these statements would be controversial to anyone unless they had a stake in the success of one over the other.

    "foo@example.com".slice(/@(.*)/, 1)

I think it would be more accurate to say that Ruby's String#[] aka String#slice method accepts arguments other than just indices (including regular expressions and other strings) for returning substrings/subpatterns. It's just a different approach, intuitive and rather uncontroversial, IMO.

"For those who know nothing about it, it would seem like a triviality"

English is my first language. If a speaker didn't speak english, was quoting a non-english passage from someone else and mispronounced the english word "two" as "swoh" I wouldn't think any less of him or his work, but I would think less of someone who thought it worthy of this kind of criticism.

No, it's not. It's like someone who doesn't know english mispronouncing a single syllable english word while reading an excerpt of a non-english book written by someone else that he quoted in his non-english book. And criticism of it would be just as silly.

He writes "as a journalist would" because he is a journalist.

I'm not sure why anyone would read his writing as much of anything else, nor why writing as a journalist is a bad thing.

Personally, I find it incredibly strange for someone to criticize an author for mispronouncing a single syllable word from a language he presumably doesn't know while reading an excerpt of a book he didn't write. He doesn't claim expertise and acknowledges his sources, who are experts, and he explicitly states that these are their arguments. What's the problem?

It's also important to remember that university libraries very adamantly do not view themselves as archives at all and are constantly weeding out books that they view as no longer relevant to them. The only items that can be assumed to be retained by the library are those very few items that are in each library's special collections.