Categories
All JRuby

JRuby on its way up?

ruby

I am programming Ruby since a friend of mine pointed me to this language and I think that this language is even better then Smalltalk which has been my all time favorite since I learned it back in the late 80’s. The concepts are sound, minimal and powerful and don’t take too long to learn. All else you need comes either with the standard library or nicely packaged as ruby-gems.

Especially JRuby, designed to run on the JVM, gives you portability together with access to the huge fund of java libraries. An enormous powerful concept! I love it!

Last night I have been searching in Google a little bit about the usage of the different programming languages to see if the usage of Ruby is increasing. The good news is that Ruby seems to be constantly in the top 10 of the most used languages. But to be frank, I would have expected it before Python and fighting with PHP about its rank but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

There are plenty of sites which analyse the language popularity and the results differ depending of where they gather their information. Some of the major sites are: SourceForge, Tiobe and Langpop. Unfortunately I could not find any comparison about the usage of the different ruby implementations.

I asked myself: what does it need for a programming language to become successful?

  • an elegant, minimal, easy to learn and complete set of language elements.
  • the ability to add missing language features as natural extension of the language or in additional libraries.
  • a powerful infrastructure including IDE, build system, deployment, …
  • good frameworks for maximum momentum when starting a new project
  • killer applications

When I think about Smalltalk-80 and ask myself why did this language never get one of the top places in ranking even though it had undeniable a huge impact on all subsequent languages? I think it is because there are simply several factors missing which denied this language its broader success. Even though the language was elegant, powerful and extendable it had to fight with it’s, for that time, heavy weight virtual machine and the need to deploy the whole image. And I have never seen a so called killer application developed in Smalltalk.

When I come back to PHP, Python and Ruby I was wondering why PHP was clearly in front of Python and Ruby even though I think that the language concepts of Python and Ruby are sounder then the one of PHP.

They all have IDE support, good frameworks and powerful supporting infrastructure but PHP still has one big advantage. It nearly dominates the market of opensource CMS and Blogging products.

If we want to push Ruby into the first places I think there are only two ways to do this:

  1. development of killer applications
  2. bringing Ruby into the browser

For the first way we have the ideal starting point with JRuby. True Multi-threading and access to a vast fund of professional Java libraries together with the expressiveness of Ruby! I think that would qualify for a pole position.

The second way … OK, I don’t know how much would be needed to integrate ruby into a browser. But I think that Javascript is used everywhere on the client side in web applications in a lack of a better alternative.

While I was still writing I got some good news. It seems that there will be enough supporters to reconsider the Netbeans decision to discontinue the JRuby support. A good possibility to do something for the visibility of JRuby!

Let’s go for it!

Categories
Germany

Germany – Land of Opportunities

germany-land-of-opportunities

I lately found this picture in the internet. A tweet pointed me to it and I had a hard time to breathe normally again after I rolled laughing over the floor. This really contradicts every experience I made with ‘good old’ Germany.

About five years ago a friend of mine, Kenyan with an master in computer science from a well known Russian university, wanted to come to Germany for work because she had several friends in Germany. Another friend of mine who runs his own software development company was willing to see her. Because, like most of the time, everything went on short notice she didn’t have the time to apply for a business visa and came with a visitor visa to Germany. After the successful interview with my friend she tried to get a working visa but was denied and had to leave Germany again.

Everybody who is following the news should know by now that the demographic changes in ‘good old’ Germany are already leading to a lack of skilled workers because the Germans are getting too old. So how can it be that a civil servant can deny someone who is skilled and has a job opportunity in Germany the appropriate visa?

My wife is Chinese. We married in Switzerland and left for China because she wanted to pursue her career as judge. After a while and because her Chinese career was ended by marring a foreigner, we tried to go to Germany. Hahahaha … don’t worry I will never try to come back to Germany again. It seems that my wife only gets a visa for Germany when she is able to speak German. As it is she speaks fluently four languages but unfortunately German is not between those.

Luckily there are still countries in this world which really appreciate skilled workers who want to work in their country and contribute to their society 😉

Categories
Australia

Flying in Australia

virgin

In Australia you are usually flying when you want to see another city because the distances are quite big and the speed on the roads not very high. My favorite airline is Virgin Blue. The prices are reasonable and they cover nearly all of Australia.

The only issue I have are the delays. Nearly every flight I take at the moment is delayed due to some reason. To make it clear, I do not object against a delay when an error in my plane is found and they have to bring another plane from somewhere to arrange the flight. But to sit at night on an empty Canberra Airport without dinner, all shops already closed and you don’t even get a free Coffee … I think in this point Virgin should reconsider their strategy of keeping their customers happy.

Categories
Computer

HP Region code for printer

While I was living in France I needed a new printer/scanner and decided to buy a HP Photosmart Premium, a combined office machine with everything you need for your home-office. It was not really cheap but it was said that buying directly from the internet would give a 50€ cash-back.

The machine itself runs fine apart some minor problems while scanning but …

The first problem I had was to get my cash-back money. I tried to contact the support via mail and received the answer I should try to call a certain support line. I tried but could not get anyone on the phone so after some tries I just gave up and thought I might as well live with the price I paid. Anyway, the ink for the printer cost quite a fortune and you learn fast where HP makes its real money!

Now I moved to Australia and naturally I moved my printer too.

Lately I ran out of yellow ink and went into a shop to buy a replacement cartridge of yellow. In the shop I was already astonished that there were no 364 cartridges to buy but 564 cartridges which are described as valid replacement for my HP Photosmart Premium c309a.

Back home I got shocked. Not that the cartridge didn’t fit. It was looking exactly like the 364 one which I wanted to replace … but the printer denied to use this original HP cartridge which is the right one for my printer !!! (in Australia)

I called the support and learned that each HP printer has a region code which can be altered three times only and that because I moved to Australia I have to change the region code now. But they could not help me directly and I cannot change the code myself as it seems, the passed the issue to a second level support which should call me within 48h. Naturally I didn’t get any calls.

Since then I had about half a dozen mails exchanged with the support and each time I got a phone no. to call where I am promised that I will get a call from someone who can change the region code of my printer for me.

So far I am still waiting (about 2 week now and several attempts!).

In the meanwhile I learned from the support hotline that if I change the region code my other (nearly full cartridges) will not work any more because they are bought in France! A full set of cartridges cost about $100,- AUD … are they insane?

My conclusion … after so many years of buying HP notebooks and printers from laser to office machines I am extremely disappointed and will not buy anything from HP any more.

And I can only warn everybody to reconsider if he wants to buy from such a Producer because this is purely rip-off of their customers.

Categories
Internet Misc

Finally Moved

Hey everybody!

It took some time but I finally made it, to move my blog to a new server, update to the newest WordPress version and also update my plugins.

Hopefully I will have some time to write new articles as well 😉

Categories
Internet Misc

Big Brother is watching You

hal

It is about 4 week ago that I switched from my favorite browser Firefox to Googles Chrome. On my Windows 7 system Firefox simply used too many resources.

Today I updated my Spybot installation which protects my registry and made a system scan. What shall I tell you it found 26 tracking cookies on my computer which I caught during only the last 4 weeks. My main usage of the internet is to search for programming informations.

Perhaps I am a little naive but I see no evidence that a session cookie must remain on the computer of a surfer after the user is logged out. Personalization of a website like on Amazon is a nice thing but I think that I should be able to surf in the internet anonymously and only get a personalized view once I reveal my identity intentionally as by logging in.

Instead of anonymity even the browsers reveal more and more informations so that these can already be used as identifying fingerprint as shown in the EFF Panopticlick project.

If you think that all this doesn’t matter to you it is perfectly OK with me but be aware that the companies who are tracking you and your behavior are making a lot of money with your data. What do you get in return? Databases full of tracking data which, connected to a real person, will make you and your doings completely transparent.

What will be the logical next step after connecting you as a person with the sampled data …. ? I don’t think that needs much inspiration.

Be aware when you surf in the internet that many eyes are watching you!

Categories
Misc Thoughts

A dream within a dream

I just came back to the idea that the whole world is just a simulation on a nice super-computer like in the old science fiction film “Die Welt am Draht” from Fassbinder oder in the film “the 13th Floor”.

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

There is always the problem how to hide from the simulated entities that their world is quite limited. I believe in our world they found a nice solution to this problem, they made it round! 😉

Categories
All JRuby

Rails Plugin Documentations

As computer scientist I am working since 20 years now and since 2 years I have a lot of fun programming in Ruby or better in JRuby.

At the moment I am working on my first bigger Ruby on Rails project and have to state something which I wouldn’t perhaps have agreed with in my earlier years too:

Code (even well documented) is no substitute for good documentation!

I would like to address this specially into the direction of some developers who are writing really great plugins for RoR. A little bit more documentation about the basic ideas would lower the threshold for Rails newbies like me a lot. Naturally I am able to figure out how a plugin really works without documentation and I am sure that I can learn a lot from this experience. But eventually I will end up writing my plugins myself because that makes me faster then figuring out how something works which another programmer has developed.

So please keep in mind: Writing code in a computer language which is easier to understand and comes more natural does not subsitute for a good documentation!

Categories
Misc

Blog enhanced with WPTouch

Since I am one of the guys playing around with an iPhone now I thought it might be a good idea to make my blog a little bit more readable on the iPhone and other PDAs. After a small research I decided to install the WPTouch plugin and have to state: great work, thanks!

Categories
Around the World China

Buying an iPhone in China

Lately it was the time that I had to replace my old PDA with something new because I dropped it one time too much on the floor. Because we had business in Shanghai and found a shop with “original” iPhones we decided to switch to iPhones.

iPhone

The first question when you buy something like an iPhone in China is: How can you be sure it really is an Apple iPhone and not a chinese clone? First I would suggest to search for some detailled pictures of original iPhones, they are very slim and have a characteristic position and border of the embedded camera. But I think the easiest way to identify an iPhone is the software on the phone. If you make a photo with the phone and scale it with the multi-touch ability of the iPhone the image scales and corrects the image resolution at the same time so that you can hardly see pixels while zooming.

So we went into this shop and in total bought 3 iPhones. The iPhones were neatly packed, seemingly in original, brand new boxes and my test showed that they were real Apple iPhones.

Before I bought the iPhones I didn’t now anything about jailbreaking and unlocking. I just tried my chinese and my german SIM card in the phone and both worked.

Back in the hotel the problems started. I reconfigured my phone and it didn’t work with any SIM card any more. So we went back to the shop and they made it run within 5 min and gave it back to me. While leaving they told me better not to update the software on the phone myself which finally made me really curious and back in the hotel I started an internet research to find out if the iPhones where original ones.

Especially the Apple Service and Repair webpage was very helpful. One of the iPhones was a replacement part without any guarantee, the other two were already several month old. Conclusion we bought refurbished iPhones sold as new ones. When the battery life of the replacement part showed that the battery was already quite old we decided to go back to the shop another time and ask the sellers directly about the fact that they hid that they sold refurbished iPhones.

iPhone shop

The result was not really satisfactory. They changed the replacement iPhone with the damaged battery to another one but that was all.

Because one of us was really pissed off, she called the police later to ask them what to do. The police forwarded us to a special unit which deals with these matters and they told us that only China Unicom is allowed to sell iPhones in China and therefore they will do nothing about our case.

After we got this information I finally understood what happend to my iPhone which suddenly didn’t work any more and had a closer look on the installed software. The iPhones were original China Unicom phones which have been jailbreaked and unlocked!

As final resultI can only warn you to be aware that most phones, even in official China Mobile Reseller Shops like the one where we bought our phones, are fakes or refurbished. This puts the price we payed into a complete new perspective!