TechNayak

Every night now, for the past three days, I am sitting religiously in front of my 8 year old desktop running gutsy (both my laptops are’nt with me now ) trying to learn Ruby on Rails - ror in short. I must say, I have been completely fascinated by its possibilities and look forward to building some really cool and useful apps with it in the near future. I have also been trying to look for tutorials on ror and not finding much help online. A friend of mine pointed me to The Book for ror which I am trying to get my hands on. I have never been the type that learns a new language from a book; I like to get my hands dirty and try out things - thats the way I learn. So, based on my experience learning ror , Im penning down my getting started with ror.

 What can ror do ? It makes developing web applications really, and I mean really simple. You give it a table structure and rails automatically builds a table, forms for insert, delete and display for the fields and also build MVC architecture by default. Controllers and views are built and all you have to do as a web developer is to add CSS to the generated files so that they look awesome. There is demo which shows how you can build a blogging engine using rails in under 15 minutes. Now isnt that cool !! Its a really cool hack that has made the job of writing everyday web applications really easy. Well two of my favorite applications online have been built using ror. Check them out .
 
          
 

Well for starters ruby is a programming language - older than java, very english like and mostly interpreted I guess. Rails is this wonderful platform like hack which does a lot of cool things and ruby sits on top of rails and you can build applications using them.

  Installation : I found many places which listed installation instructions but this one worked best.
                    http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu

 
  This brings me to another wonderful piece of software that runs under 400kb, Gems. A apt styled package manager built to get ruby related software.
Once you are setup, I guess its time to learn the language and to learn ruby, I would definitely suggest why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby. Nothing beats this online book … sorry online masterpiece in explaining the aspects of the ruby language. Im still not done with this but I cant wait to read more of it.

 Since ror is for web development, its obvious you need a webserver, so you can use the prepackaged WEBrick server ( good for small dev). For more serious programming use Mongrel, Apache or lighttpd. Instructions to configure Apache and Lighttpd for ror can be found here. Get MySql for the database and you will be done.

 Lastly you need a very good article to get you started and this is the one that got me started out. Its not perfect considering its almost 2 years old but the errors that show up will help you learn much better. And thats it , we are done. Best of luck learning ror.
 

Tags: ruby, rails , ruby on rails, getting started, tutorials

For quite some time now, I have been trying to locate a service where all upcoming events are listed. There aren’t that many around and searching surely doesn’t help. I looked at the local sites and also at public calendars on Google but to no avail, most of them are not updated and soon lose their mojo.

  Then I read about upcoming getting a better interface - a random search on Bangalore and lo, tons of results on upcoming events. I really like the variety of events that are listed. I am not sure about the community that upcoming has in Bangalore or its popularity but looking at the events listed there, I think they are doing pretty well. Also if any of you are looking for public events in Bangalore, this is the place to look. Please do comment with other sites that list public events in Bangalore. Meanwhile

 http://upcoming.yahoo.com

and here is the link to the events in Bangalore.
   
 http://upcoming.yahoo.com/search/?type=events&rt=1&q=&loc=bangalore

Tags: Bangalore, events, public events, upcoming, yahoo

Quite recently there have been many apps that have added the ability for third party applications to plug into the main app. Some examples include Myspace, facebook, iGoogle, Okut and currently Yahoo Search ( thanks to SearchMonkey). The intent is to improve the usefulness of the main application in turn make these otherwise undiscovered third party applications popular. The third party applications thrive on the popularity and traffic of the mother app. The popularity of third party apps have spawned an entire eco-system of app builders who target exactly these platforms and hope to cash in on the phenomenon. Social applications are green pastures for such application builders, who hope to reach a large audience by utilizing this community as a service.
 Now most of these apps are pretty alright, but most of them just break and compromise the entire user experience. Facebook is currently the site that is facing the app overload problem. Too many apps clutter and spoil the entire facebook experience.
 
 The other problem is that most mother applications are huge in their own right and drive a lot of traffic. In that case there should be some guarantee that the plugins also scale equally. This is a problem I have faced after integrating searchmonkey applications on Yahoo Search and also some apps in Facebook. Unanticipated loads on third party apps wreck the app and most of them dont scale and all they do is spoil the UX of the app as a consequence. My StumbleUpon addition to Yahoo Search just didnt work the first few days and I could only read a “This plugin is not available right now” message. In another instance, I integrated an app on my blog and the problem was that due to the right sidebar, my content wouldn’t load until the third party app loaded and when it didnt, the blog would serve up nothing. There is no way for the mother app to figure out whether the third party app is available and running. If it isnt available then dont publish it onto the clients interface, thereby retaining the users experience.

 In fact, for any third party application, there must be some scalability requirements enforced and only when they meet such requirements should they be allowed to publish. An alternative would be for the mother app to build its own cloud and make sure that the 3rd party application uses that cloud so that its highly available ( Case in point Google’s App Engine - Use for widgets). Or, there must be some load test designed when the 3rd party app registers with the mother app ( ex : Automated load tests on sites like TopCoder ). An even more elegant way of figuring out scalability problems would be to statically analyze the submitted code to check for bottlenecks and other possible leaky parts of the code and then reach a decision whether to allow for the code to run or not. Until such rigorous checks and constraints are not enforced, third party apps will keep ruining our experience.

Tags: cloud, facebook appliation, third party applications, static analysis

Remember early 2004 and the release of Gmail ? The “ooh so exclusive, invite only” mailbox that was so cool. I remember. How hard I tried to get an invite and how I rejoiced when I layed my eyes on Gmail; How I tried to figure out why is the page not navigating or how is that my contacts are autofilling the to field but I cannot find them in the source. How, almost after 4 whole months of searching, I learnt the buzzword that would graduate me from mere novice to a professional in the web space. AJAX.

  After that started the GCraze. Almost any entity that had a G before it was sought out to be the most watched property on the web. This craze still holds; the only difference is that the craze has moved from web developers to general public. Most G properties are running only because of the G in front, sort of like the Y! of the late 90s. Call it fate or just too much popularity, I think a lot of people are coming full circle.

 Over the recent few days I have seen a lot of discontent among all the G users. I shall list most of the ones I remember, but you will get the idea

 - Mail : probably the most sought after mail service in the recent past has its own share of problems. The first being slow connections. You must see Gmail running at our university, when 250 people share a 16Mbps connection, Gmail takes on a life of its own. Mails dont open, conversations are not updated and the chat feature is a pure disaster. The biggest problem I have with Gmail are the intrusive ads next to my mails.
 - Orkut and Google Talk: Orkut was the social network for India, so claim many people. But if it wasn’t for the G tag, I would have liked to see how far Orkut would have gone. I know this having competed with Orkut for a year. The problem with social networks with no personal value add to it ( unlike del.icio.us or flickr) tends to grow boring and spam and other marketing material get the better of the network , you have no choice but to opt out. I consider Gtalk as a piece of art , a wonderful piece of software who got the design and the user experience part just right. But Orkut integration did one very awful thing, it increased my contacts on Gtalk from a mere 10 to about 200, which I really didnt want. Some say I missed a warning to the same, but now there is no undoing it. Lot of my friends are shifting back to Ymsgr and Windows messenger because they see more peaceful days there.

 So thanks to these problems and more, there is a reverse migration to older properties who over time have become better and people are rediscovering their long lost loved ones. Google is doing all the right things with other properties though. I love the reader and just cant do without it and thanks to the sharing and the friends aspect of it, its almost like a new paradigm of use of RSS. Docs also is really cool, though I still like using Zoho, coz its home made and is just purely awesome. Thats about it I guess.

ps : Inspiration for this post comes from my valiant struggle for almost 2 whole hours to get Gmail to work only to see a “Your Account is experiencing Errors” or something. And then I try Yahoo Mail and its so wonderfully fast and awesome and guess what, hotmail works like a charm too. Also, my adsense account has served almost 100,000 ads and yet I haven’t made enough money to buy a decent meal Come on. 100,000 is six digits and they account for something, then why not pay me.

Tags: google, gmail, google talk, gtalk, orkut

Google is giving us pond-skater minds | Andrew Sullivan - Times Online

Read this wonderful article and I realized, we are hooked to the internet!! Not a day goes by without us plugging in. The tools you work with clearly alter the way you do things and not necessarily in the right way. To give you an example, an electrician came to my place and couldn’t put a hole in a switch board because his drill bit was broken; an electrician from the pre-drill age would heat a sack needle to do the same. Did modern day tools spoil the electrician ? I would say, yes!

The same is the case with everyday programmers and web workers. I remember programming without search engines, an age where I peered through command lines and man pages to figure out why in gods name was the screen showing segmentation fault. Debugging was a very involved process, no modern day debuggers or code analyzers, just the program and console outputs. Though it sounds really painstaking ( and trust me, it was), it did make me a better programmer. I knew where not to screw up and also where things could fail. I see people start programming using IDE’s like Eclipse and Visual Studio and I really wonder whether they will ever have all the learnings that I had. Search engines and effective ones at that have paralyzed out ability to think, read and find information. Its affected us in adverse ways, so not comprehend able.

To become humans again, not impaled by search technology, I second the concept of a web sabbath. A day or two in a week, where we do not use modern day amenities like the mobile phone, Television , Internet or search. Such a day will help us to think, read, scour for knowledge the way we would have done ten years ago and hopefully that extra effort will make us think beyond technology and its limitations. I would like to hear from people who agree with me.

Tags: google, web, sabbath, nosearch, websearch, technology