Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat.   Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive.  Teambox organizes communication around projects.  Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files.  The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar.  And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data.  And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails).  Now I just need a project to test it with… Read the rest of this entry »

Stackoverflow.com is in private beta now, but is a user-driven programming Q & A site. The overall design in the beta is very nice, and even in the beta postings I picked up some interesting information. Like a RAILs clone for PHP — Akelos. So far the quality of the posts is pretty high — it will be interesting to see how that continues once it has a more diverse user base.

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Sure it is cool that Google has now released a beta of it’s dream web browser, but should we care? From a web developer perspective I kind of wish everyone just used the same browser (especially if it is Firefox 3!). It really makes me tired to thing that there is yet another browser I’ll be forced to test in.

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Ok, so I’m totally into this ‘learning ruby on rails’ thing. And for me part of the learning process means creating a total immersion learning environment. Well, maybe not total, but enough to have a couple of learning streams running at the same time which help reinforce each other.

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One of the interesting themes in the various Rails training resources I’ve been using is that SQL is ugly, and you can let Rails do the thinking/database stuff for you. As a database designer that notion makes me a little uncomfortable — I care very much about how the data is structured. And through experience I’ve come to realize that what is easy, quick or even possible can vary greatly depending on how the data is structured.

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I’m a couple of chapters into my Ruby on Rails training and so far, so good. It is a lot to wrap one’s head around, with MVP, REST, DRY, the Ruby console, ActionController, ActionView and ActiveModel. Ruby as a language doesn’t strike me as a huge improvement over PHP, but remember I’m not a programmer, just a hack who needs to get things done. I will say that it was designed with objects from the start, and it is obvious that the concepts are in the core logic of the language. In PHP 5 it still feels a little pasted in.

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