Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0 wasn’t even out yet when some people had already started commenting on the fracturing of the Ruby community that this new framework might bring with this, and the impact that this high visibility “competitor” might have on Rails. I believe that having more than one widely adopted web framework will only benefit the Ruby community. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that this is not a zero-sum game. Ruby programmers are perfectly capable of learning two frameworks and using one or the other, depending on the project at hand. This is particularly true if we consider that Merb, for all of its advantages – and disadvantages – when compared to Rails, is not totally different from its forerunner. If you are an expert Rails programmer, you should be able to become proficient in Merb in very little time. To help with this process, the Merb community needs to concentrate on the documentation now, given that the API is finally stable.

Rails Myths: David Heinemeier Hansson began a series of posts about Rails Myths. I like the idea of seeing common myths addressed straight from the horse’s mouth. Over the past two years, Rails has received quite a bit of backslash and old fashion FUD, so it’s important to set the record straight, whether the myths are entirely fabricated or if there is some element of truth to them. Whether you agree with David or not, it’s also nice to hear two sides of the same story. In fact, at the beginning of my book I debunk a few myths, just to set the record straight regarding what some readers may have heard surrounding the framework. It was a fun part to write.

My Book: Speaking of my book, Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers, I’m getting closer to the finish line. I’m about to complete Chapter 9 (out of eleven chapters). The initial schedule I was provided with has been extended slightly so that there will be sufficient time to properly review the content and ensure that it’s up to date with the final release of Rails 2.2. Some people wondered what the “Microsoft Developers” part means. Is it for people that work at Microsoft? Is it for .NET programmers? Is it for people who develop on Windows?

The truth is that “Microsoft Developers” is probably just a marketing term that Wrox selected as a catch-all for of the aforementioned categories of programmers. As an author I’m trying to serve all of them well, by providing a guide that sneaks in much of the Rails culture and softens the migration path by using an Operating System, and to a certain extent, tools that they’re already familiar with. In my opinion one of the major obstacles when switching to, or trying, Rails when coming from the Microsoft world, is the culture shock. The documentation and most books assume that you are familiar with *nix systems and tools, and this can be frustrating for those who are forced not only to learn a new language and framework, but also an entirely new set of tools. As it’s targeted at Microsoft developers, the book obviously makes quite a few references and comparisons to the .NET world, where they fit. This is done so that the many .NET programmers amongst the group of so called “Microsoft Developers” will find the book particularly useful. Yet the book remains generic enough so that it can be used by any programmer (particularly Windows users), even those without any knowledge of the Microsoft .NET Framework or ASP.NET.

Python books: While on the subject of books, I wanted to mention that the final version of the Pylons book is available online. Despite the much less fancy UI, the book pretty much does what the Django Book did in the past. And both are available in print as well (The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right and The Definitive Guide to Pylons). Pylons is a Python web framework that can be viewed as a Ruby on Rails clone, in a far greater way than Django could ever be considered.

Another thing I want to mention is that I received a copy of Expert Python Programming. I haven’t gotten to far into it yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, things look good. I hope to be able to read it through, over a weekend in the near future and then provide a proper review. Stay tuned.

Language Popularity: If you take a look at the TIOBE Index, you’ll notice a few interesting things: Ruby has dropped two positions since last year, and it’s now the 11th most popular language in the world. This shouldn’t be cause for concern though, as shown by this Ruby graph. Python on the other hand is increasing in popularity and moved from the 7th to the 6th most popular language. Interestingly, according to the index (the results of which are educated guesses only), Python would seem to be more popular than C#. I find this to be true, in terms of online activity within an increasingly vibrant community, but in my opinion, the job market hasn’t caught up yet. In fact, at least in Toronto, when there’s a Python opening it’s pretty much an event that’s worthy of being discussed on the local Python mailing list. C# openings are much more common. This may be different in Silicon Valley, of course. It would also seem that Delphi has experienced a huge come back, moving from the 11th position last year to the 8th one this time around. It’s hard to imagine that Delphi has had a similar level of adoption as C# and thus has become more popular than Perl, JavaScript and Ruby. Delphi is a great solution for Win32 programming, but I don’t quite believe this overly optimistic outlook. And if this is the case, where are all the Delphi jobs and buzz?

DB2: This interview shows a few good reasons why even smaller and medium sized companies are increasingly adopting DB2. And while the video doesn’t mention it, IBM is coming out with an updated version of DB2 Express-C 9.5. This new version, 9.5.2 or 9.5 FixPack 2, is going to introduce exciting new features, including an engine for full text search.

The Great Ruby Shootout These days you hear a lot of talk about parallel programming. Intel promotes it and despite their bias, it’s plausible that parallel programming will become important as the CPU market heads towards an increasingly larger number of cores, as opposed to focusing on the frequency of said CPUs. In the world of Ruby, this translates into multiprocessing, as opposed to multithreading due to the infamous GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). This means that Ruby will most likely approach the problem similarly to how Python 2.6 did with the multiprocessing module, which is a process-based interface. The obvious exceptions are JRuby and IronRuby, which establish a 1 to 1 relationship between green threads and OS threads.

For the shootout, it would be interesting to see some multithreaded code, so as to get a better sense of how well JRuby and IronRuby compare to MRI and 1.9, when more cores are available. In fact, the long-promised shootout will be performed on a quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM. If Charles Nutter, John Lam, or any of their team members would like to contribute some programs that are able to take advantage of “native” multithreading, I’d be very happy to include them in the Ruby Benchmark Suite, to be used for my shootout.

The repository requires some love and refactoring, since it needs to be split in two types of benchmarks. The simpler one will evaluate the execution time minus the startup time, while the more advanced benchmark will also exclude the time required for parsing and loading modules, classes and methods in the AST. It would also be nice to test each program with variable input sizes and report these results accordingly. Right now I’m very busy with the book, but as I become more available, I’ll start working on this.

Finally, I want to point out a very interesting article about performance and UIs. Slow is indeed a very relative concept, and it’s important to understand how to analyze and respond to the user requirements when it comes to the responsiveness of an application as a user interacts with it.

Hardware: I finally bought a Trackball made by Logitech and the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard (Microsoft makes great hardware). I don’t have wrist problems, but I’d like to see how these two affect my extensive computer usage. I plan to report my experience as soon as I’ve had a chance to use these input devices for a while, since I know this is a topic that interests lots programmers (many of whom end up being victims of RSI, and some of the IRS ). I also bought a bad-ass color laser printer which is quite handy when you’re a programmer and you are writing a book. I’ll let you know how it goes. What I didn’t buy, but still think is awesome, is the Flip minoHD. It’s the equivalent of an iPod for the world of camcorders. $235 for a camcorder that’s so perfectly compact, and yet that can record in HD, is a pretty sweet deal. I’m considering it for Christmas, assuming it reaches Canada by then.

No related posts.

Ruby and Rails Videos

Blip.TV is now hosting the videos of RailsConf 2007. The audio and video quality is very good even though no slides are shown (but you can always google them). While on the subject, you can also watch the videos for RubyConf 2007 (including slides), Mountain West Ruby Conference, Ruby Hoedown last August, and the fourth edition of RejectConf. If you are in the mood for video learning, also check out Railscasts, RubyPlus, and Rails Envy.

RailsConf ’08

David has announced that the registration for RailsConf ’08 is now open. The conference will be in Portland, Oregon from May 26th till June 1st. It’s going to sell out very quickly, so book your spot while they last. I’m almost sure I won’t be able to participate since I’m still dealing with the process of getting my Canadian permanent residency (but we are finally getting really close, and then I’ll be able to travel freely).

Qtrax is a disaster

I’ve been following the (mis)adventures of Qtrax closely. It’s a disaster, the perfect example of how not to launch a product even if they had amazing PR skills and where able to get coverage in the MSM worldwide. The premise was good: share the ad revenue with the artist, and allow users to get music for free. Something that SpiralFrog has been doing for a while. The problem is that SpiralFrog’s catalog is rather limited as far as mainstream music goes. Qtrax claimed to have an agreement with the four major recording labels and a catalog of more than 25 million songs. That was what set them apart and what made the announcement attention worthy. The reality was much harsher. They didn’t have any agreement in place (they essentially lied), they didn’t make the download available when they declared it would be, and the site was unreachable or intermittent all the time. Not only this, but their software is nothing more than a skin on top of Songbird. Downloading songs is basically impossible and the software is unusable at this stage. Don’t even bother getting it. It’s a festival of connection timeouts, 404s and “welcome to Oracle Application Server 10g” messages. A real shame.

Arc: too little, too late?

Paul Graham has finally announced the release of Arc. Graham and Morris have made a forum, a tutorial and installation instructions available on their official ArcLanguage.org site. While Paul clearly states that Arc is still incomplete and requires a lot of refinement, at least it’s out and people can start using it (Paul’s Hacker News has already been adopting it for a while). It’s not vaporware anymore, it’s here. However, amongst the enthusiasm that met this release from curious and early adopters, there are also a great number of people disappointed by Arc’s first (pre)alpha. Keep in mind that many people talked about Arc for several years and had great expectations, perhaps even something close to the mythical hundred year language. What they found is that Arc is currently a skin on top of MzScheme (but not the latest version) that adopts a more concise syntax compared to Scheme or Common Lisp. There isn’t anything too revolutionary, it doesn’t support packages or modules, or Unicode. It uses tables for HTML libraries, and so on and so forth. Paul Graham has a strong influence on the community and I’ve no doubt that many people will put time and effort into learning Arc and will in turn improve it. Heck, even I’m going to give it a shot for fun. However right now it’s not really convincing as an alternative to CL or Scheme itself. Don’t construe this as a harsh criticism towards Arc, it is not. We are talking about a language that it’s in its infancy and that as I said, I plan to experiment with myself. I hope to see it grow rapidly and I congratulate Graham and his team for finally making it available. That said, right now I think it’s a weak release and therefore, in my opinion, the disappointment of many is justified. In any case, good luck Paul, we’ll watch this one closely.

Share your DB2 success stories

ChannelDB2 is looking for DB2 success stories. If you appreciated that great piece of software that is DB2, please share your experience here. If your story gets published, you will receive one of the tokens available in the loot bag: DB2 “paraphernalia”, books, Amazon.com certificates, and so on. If you have a company or a startup, it’s also a good way to get your name out there.

Apple’s quote for $1348.09

A while ago (a couple of months, perhaps) my MacBook Pro was accidentally dropped. It was an accident due to there being far too many cables in my room. It upset me of course, but it’s not the end of the world. It could happen to anyone. Thank Science, the screen is intact and the computer works perfectly. I was lucky. There are a couple of things that bug me though. Aside from a tiny dent in a corner of the top case, when closed down on the base the lid has a slightly wider gap on the left side, than it does on the right side. Also, the the latch on the bottom case must be somewhat damaged because when touched even minimally the lid pops open. These things in no way affect my usage of the laptop, and that’s part of the reason why I didn’t even bother trying to fix it for a long time.

Then a few days ago, for unrelated reasons, I began to question my choice of getting a Mac instead of just buying a top of the line Lenovo T series to be run with Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu and it’s becoming increasingly better with each release. With the exception of Textmate, I started to think that Ubuntu (that I currently use a lot) could easily replace Mac OS X for me. Also, the ergonomic qualities of Lenovo’s notebooks is so nice and as an IBM employee I get a decent discount on them. Okay, perhaps I made a mistake when I reached my purchase decision 7 months ago. I’d never owned a Mac before and I really wanted to. Truth be told, I think that Mac OS X is a very polished operating system and I can’t emphasize my appreciation for it enough. It’s eye-candy on top of Unix. But there are other factors to be considered, especially as a developer, and I feel that Ubuntu could have been just as good as my end choice.

Not only that, but I must also say that my old T42p was a much more comfortable laptop, despite costing half the price. Anyways, it came to my mind that I could either run Ubuntu as my main operating system on the MacBook Pro, or fix the cosmetic issues on the laptop and sell it to buy a nice Lenovo T61p. Cosmetic issues can usually be ignored or easily fixed, but on the second hand market they often impede the possibility of selling it for a good price.

Just out of curiosity I decided to call Apple and ask how much it would cost to get it fixed. The laptop is still under warranty (only 7 months old), but I caused the damage, so I pay, no issues there. The agent on the phone understood the problem very well and quoted me about $200. I specifically asked him if the lid could be replaced independently from the screen (which is in perfect shape) and he confirmed this. So Apple booked an appointment at the Genius Bar at an Apple Store downtown Toronto. I went there on Saturday, by public transportation it took me almost two hours each way. The “genius” confirmed that the latch on the base is somewhat broken and that the upper lid may or may not be slightly warped (hard to tell with the latch issue in place). After a long wait he came back with a quote… $1,348.09. I kid you not. It turns out that the lid is sold as one piece with the screen and the whole display assembly can be replaced for $809. The guy at the genius bar agreed that it’s probably only the base that needs to be replaced. But it’s still $214 dollars for the part, $170 for labour plus taxes. A whopping $437 for a little latch that is not behaving. I wasn’t too happy with being quoted $1350 given the price of the laptop and the fact that I was previously quoted an all-inclusive $200 on the phone. I wasted 4 hours of my Saturday. I’m not repairing an Aston-Martin here for Darwin’s sake.

If you drop an Apple laptop and you break the screen (not my case) you may as well just get a new laptop because it’s going to be cheaper. This is sort of true for any laptop, but I feel that just like Apple makes you pay a premium to get their hardware, they still charge you plenty for any minimal repair. To change the lid they wanted to replace the whole screen. To change a broken latch, they needed to replace the entire base. And $170 plus tax for carrying out the repair!? I’m aware of sites that sell parts and instructions on how to perform the replacement myself and may consider it in the future (changing only the base assembly). For now I’m fine, given that the latch issue doesn’t cause too many problems for me. I must say though that my experience at the yuppie Apple Store made me even more convinced that my choice of getting a Mac in the first place may have been the wrong one. I wonder how long it will take before I’ll follow Mark and Cory and switch back to Ubuntu full-time. The thought both excites and saddens me. Time will tell.

Possibly related posts:

1. Ruby on Rails 2.0 has been released and other Zenbits
2. The Apple approach (aka first impressions of the MacBook Pro)

ERROR: Error installing rails:
              rails requires activeresource (= 2.0.0)

To solve this problem, assuming you are installing, simply run:

$ gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

For details about this new release wait for the official announcement by DHH and his team.


On the subject of announcements, the IBM_DB Python driver for DB2 version 0.2.0 was released. This includes a Python egg for Linux and (finally) for Windows. You can download both of them from Cheeseshop.


A few days ago NetBeans 6.0 was released. Its support for Ruby and for Rails is stellar. Its editor seems to be refined to provide developers with a comfortable environment for programming Ruby and Rails applications in. The code auto-completion (with documentation on the fly) alone makes it extremely valuable. From what I’ve seen so far it’s a solid, well thought out IDE that sets the bar high when it comes to the world of Ruby/Rails editors. Now we need Aptana IDE to implement similar features, for those of us who use and prefer (at least on Windows and Linux) an Eclipse based IDE. Between NetBeans’ support for Ruby and the active development of JRuby, one can only conclude that Sun is very serious about Ruby and that they really “get it”. We can wish for the same kind of commitment from Microsoft, but so far I get the impression that projects like IronRuby are seen by Microsoft as little more than pet projects just like IronPython is. But I’d be happy if my first impression was to be proved wrong. That said, Microsoft is receiving a huge wake up call from their research division, as shown by excellent videos which cover non-mainstream and research topics as well. They’ve also proved this by incorporating advanced features from research languages in C# 3.0. We’ll see how it goes, but it looks like there might be some hope after all.


Speaking of videos, I recommend a fantastic interview with E.W.Dijkstra, recorded a few years ago. It’s called Discipline in Thought and deals with the subject of the nature of programming. I highly suggest that you watch part 1, part 2 and part 3. After that, you can dig further by reading some of his manuscripts in this archive.


On a different topic, I’d like to thank everyone who commented and posted about my Ruby shootout. We made the front page of, among others, Del.icio.us. Its popularity is important to me, because it gives the proper exposure to these projects and their authors and debunks the myth that we are all happy with Ruby’s status quo in terms of speed. The next run will add extra benchmarks (in order to provide less of an advantage to Ruby 1.9). Performance is not everything, but it can be an important aspect. I like Charles Oliver Nutter’s (of JRuby) approach:

If you run across benchmarks of any kind that show JRuby running slower than Ruby 1.8.x, we’d appreciate you filing them as bugs.

That’s the right attitude, it shows serious commitment in terms of resolving this issue. Kudos to him and his team. As far as commitment goes, I can’t praise Engine Yard enough, as they’ve just hired two excellent hackers (Ryan “zenspider” Davis and Eric “drbrain” Hodel) to work full time on Rubinius along with Evan Phoenix (who started the project in the first place). From January onward, Engine Yard will also pay Wilson “Defiler” Bilkovich and Brian “brixen” Ford to do work on Rubinius. That’s a ridiculously high IQ potential to have working on Rubinius. We can only expect great results and undoubtedly say that Engine Yard really gets it.


Finally, for those of you who requested it, please find here the results of my benchmarks in Excel and PDF format.

Update

The released (through rubygems) but not announced Rails 2.0 has now been upgraded to 2.0.1, and that’s what you’d get if you ran ‘gem install rails’ or ‘gem update’. The error reported above still exists, so you can update by specifying the source as mentioned in this post.

Update 2

For those of you who didn’t believe in my “scoop”, here is the official announcement with all the glorious details. Awesome!

Update 3

The gems should be properly propagated now, so that error shouldn’t be there anymore.

No related posts.