BlogAllAlong

This is a nice interview with one of the developers of Twitter, talking about the issues they face with Ruby on Rails when it reaches peak usage. Apparently the site is getting around 11,000 hits a second on peak times, and since Rails cannot talk to more than one database at a time, this is causing big time delay for end user. This does not mean we should all keep away from Ruby on Rails, as it a great potential in cutting down development cycles, and enforcing the MVC. Unless you are planning of building a site that will receive this massive hit, I guess RoR would do just fine.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Slashdot reports Logistep is using the system called File Sharing Monitor to track P2P users who are sharing illegal copies of games. In a nutshell, the system works by tracking the illegal files that are shared on the P2P network, tracking and logging user IPs and tracing them. The hope is that those trace information can be used in court as a proof against P2P users who are spreading those illegal copies, while some are suspecting it’s credibility.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Competition is healthy they say. You know why? The $2 billion price tagged DoubleClick has ended up in a $3.1 billion Google deal, leaving Microsoft out of luck, and once again, Google beats Microsoft and dominates the internet advertisement. Some people argued the $2 billion is overpriced. How about $3.1 billion now. Perhaps the company it self is not worth that amount, but for Google, it’s about prosperity, and losing it to Microsoft is a double loss. Bill Gates had this concept when he war running everything in Microsoft. The way he looks at it is, if you lose a $100 K deal, you actually lost $200 K. The $100 K deal it self, and the other $100 K deal your competitor is going to make. And in Google case, it’s about keeping their ground, which they did.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Following the high reviews it received, and my friend Kroms’s nagging and pushing, I decided to ignore my demo perception and still buy Psychonauts. After all, how much would it cost? $9 only on Amazon. I didn’t want however to pay for the shipping, so I thought of looking for a downloadable soft version of the game when I landed on Double Fine (developing company of the game) and guess what? The game costs $40, and it even goes up to $50 for the signed version of it! How on earth does that happen? The game costs 4 times the price of Amazon, who are offering it through a reseller, where everyone is taking small part of the share. I’m not sure their shop is working for real, but obviously no one is updating it. Best top anticipated game launches at $49.99 at most (same applies for PS3 games here), one year later, even the best game’s price goes to as low as $12. New games are coming, no one is gonna look at the old games any more. Anyways, I had to go with the shipping cost option from Amazon, and on the way dropped a few more nice games in the basket ;).

Popularity: 56% [?]

While Microsoft are still struggling to meet the current HTML standards in their IE7, and along comes the nightmare of web developers to support IE6 & IE7 (since IE7 is only distributed this time for licensed Windows versions), Apple, Mozilla and Opera are pushing the wheels and increasing the pressure on W3c for the adoption of HTML5. The request for the adoption comes from the frustration of the slow progress of the W3C community. The delay however is good for the people behind, people who once said we set the standards!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Few weeks back I have started moderating all the comments, sadly, and added an extra math challenge that you have to pass before being able to post on my blog. I did not include any advanced math nor Laplace, but it’s just to increase the IQ of people posting in my blog to a limit of a decent human being. Sadly, I never wanted to do this, but I started getting over 40 spam posts in 10 minutes!. As an apology, and also a thank for people who do still pass all the tests, I have removed the NoFollow attribute from user comments. So now:
rel=’external nofollow’ => rel=’external’

So what is NoFollow? and why did I remove it? NoFollow was presented to fight spam. People tend to post their site link everywhere they can to increase their site popularity, and blogosphere is the best place for it. NoFollow is embedded automatically with visitor comments, to tell search engines like Google, this link came from a comment to a post and is not an out going link from me. Since I am moderating each and every comment, and all comments appearing on my site are legitimate, I figured there is no harm at all in giving commenter his right of link. So enjoy visitors, now your comment values for more. Special thanks to DoFollow plugin.

Popularity: 18% [?]

While Basecampe is probably the most famous web app for project management, this article discusses the weakness of this app, and shed the light on other competitors in the market.  If you have a team working virtually, or like to keep your information synchronized in one place, try to look at the alternatives they have.

Popularity: 13% [?]