Comments?

I'm gonna stop blogging. No one seems to want to comment on anything. Hmmm ... maybe my content is too intellectual for everyone? Or is it just too boring?

Google, REST and the next Social Open Networks

Google I/O 2008 - What's Next for OpenSocial

Google is spearheading the way for RESTful design and the next revolution in social networks.

More RESTful videos

Google AJAX APIs go RESTful

RESTful Designs

Everyone on ahigher level of web development is talking about RESTful designs. What is REST? REST is a term coined by Roy Fielding in his Ph.D. dissertation to describe an architecture style of networked systems. REST is an acronym standing for Representational State Transfer.

If you feel that you don't want to be left behind, here's a link to the video introducing REST : http://www.viddler.com/explore/MindTouch/videos/28/

Murphy's Tech laws

For those who are not familiar with Murphy's Laws. Here are those related to technology :

• Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
• Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
• Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
• If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
• The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm.
• The attention span of a computer is only as long as it electrical cord.
• An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
• Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure. great discoveries are made by mistake.
• Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
• Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
• All's well that ends.
• A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
• The first myth of management is that it exists.
• A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
• New systems generate new problems.
• To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
• We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
  
  
• A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.
• Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss putting in an honest day's work.
• Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.
• The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
• To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
• After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
• Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development.
• A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
• If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number.
• Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
• .Give all orders verbally. Never write anything down that might go into a "Pearl Harbor File."
• Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
• If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
• The more cordial the buyer's secretary, the greater the odds that the competition already has the order.
• In designing any type of construction, no overall dimension can be totaled correctly after 4:30 p.m. on Friday. The correct total will become self-evident at 8:15 a.m. on Monday.
• Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.
• All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.
• The only perfect science is hind-sight.
• Work smarder and not harder and be careful of yor speling.
• If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
• If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
• When all else fails, read the instructions.

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Petrol price up, food price up, rent up. The only thing that's down is my appetite.

Rails, django,liferay or Joomla ?

The world is getting smaller. And more confusing at that. We started with plain old flat, HTML based sites about 10 score years ago. Then came the need to gather data online. Why? Because we became plain old lazy. Not exactly, but we just needed a better, faster way to collate information. Someone gave birth to ASP (yuck!)

I had a client who wanted a e-commerce site (heresy !) built with ASP or Coldfusion. Why ? I screamed at him? Why can't you just sell stuff from your shop? Why do you have to make me grovel at those commercial tyrants? Anyways, I decided to give it a go, and lo and behold : My first dynamic site which did something useful rather than just spew useless data, was born.

10 years down the road, I was working with PHP and MySQL on 'portals'. Whoever gave the name 'portal' must be a rabid fantasy RPG fan. What does a web portal do? Transport you to another realm while you trying to run away from a horde of angry trolls? Nope. It's supposed to epitomise community collaboration, Web 2.0 (buzzword!). It's supposed to bring the world closer. Hmmm ... why do we still have wars then? Wasn't web supposed to fix all that?

'Portal' back to now : I'm staring at a new phenomenon : Multi language CMS and portals.

Python freaks gave birth to django, ruby worshippers rolled out rails, java beanies roasted on liferay and jboss and php, well, still rules with joomla.

Don't get me wrong, technology is good. But not for a 36 year old, balding, tired guy. All I want is more sleep.