Ruby Book, Ruby Book - Where Art Thou, Ruby Book?

I was kind of stunned to discover this week that books about the Ruby programming language are in such short supply in Borders book stores.

It does not look like they have recently sold out to me. There are not "holes" left by recently removed books near the ones they do have.

What makes this seem even odder is a recent article I saw on the web that said that Ruby books had outsold Python books this year at O'Reilly. When I looked on the same shelves, I saw dozens of books covering the Python programming language.

AspectJ 5 Released This Week

AspectJ 5 was released this week on December 20, 2005.

The best details of what this includes is in the The AspectJ 5 Development Kit Developer's Notebook.

Here is a brief summary of the enhancements made; most of which are to take advantage of features introduced by JDK 1.5:

• annotations


• generics


• autoboxing


• varargs


• enumerated types


• covariance - lets you override a method and narrow its return type (something straight Java does not let you do)

Aspects look like they provide a way to handle a lot of difficult software engineering/maintenance problems elegantly.

Ruby books outselling Python books at O'Reilly

I was surprised to see this news item today.

Rails takes Ruby higher than Python: "

Tim O'Reilly crunched the numbers from BookScan and the results are stunning. Ruby book sales have exploded. In total, Ruby is up 1,552% over last year in the same period. That's one thousand, five hundred, and fifty two percent. Holy smokes. It's insane!

To bring that number into perspective, Ruby books are now selling better than Python books. Which of course is the first time that ever happened. And that language was not even standing still. Python is up 20% over last year. At the same time, Perl is down 3%, Java down 4%. So its no wonder we have a feeling that the duo of modern, dynamic languages are taking off. It's because they are!

(Via Loud Thinking.)

I have been programming in Python off and on since around 1997. At the moment, it is probably my favorite scripting language.

Lately, I have been studying Ruby.

I guess I am not the only one who is!

Howard Stern is the New Frontier of Web 2.0?

Before today, I had never seen a single web page that demonstrated a whole bunch of the myriad useful, popular Web 2.0 features that Yahoo has. Some of them they just acquired in the last couple months by buying up some of the web's most popular, useful sites. Others, they have created in house very recently or even dating back five years or more ago.

Well, all that has changed. And the catalyst for that change comes from an unlike source: Howard Stern!

That is right. Howard Stern is the first major poster child for Web 2.0.

Yahoo just put up a new page on Yahoo promoting Howard Stern. They are using all their web 2.0 wiles, wares, and web services to do it. It is very crafty.

It gets people who are into Howard Stern already a chance to maintain their connection to him as he transitions this week. He is going from being a notoriously famous ground-based ex-Clear Channel radio talk show celebrity - to the best known satellite radio broadcaster on the airwaves.

He has managed to leapfrog the FCC's rules and the limitations of analog radio in a single bound. Now he has XM satellite and digital radio at his command. No doubt he will be drawing more subscribers to XM Satellite Radio and driving more sales of XM digital radio receivers.

But that is not my main point. Yahoo's subliminal self-promotion is equally successful. More so than I have ever seen it before. This season Yahoo has actually managed to make itself hot, and this page they created is the latest example - if not the first culmination - of that.

Yahoo, for its part, has managed to beautifully promote not just him but Yahoo's exciting new services as well. There are a scores of Yahoo services now. The page that last sentence links to does not even include their newest sites like: Live 365, Flickr, Upcoming, AllConsuming, 43things, 43places, etc. Nor the ones that are in public Beta now: Yahoo Answers, the new Web 2.0 enabled Yahoo Maps beta that works like Google Maps, the Yahoo Local that now ties beautifully into the other sites I have mentioned.

Over the past 5 years, and especially in 2005, the company has quietly pioneered in many of the technologies that make up Web 2.0. What they didn't create, they rapidly bought up in a series of unexpected purchases that caught everybody in the industry off-guard: Live 365 streaming music (not sure if they own it but the TiVo client supports it), Flickr photos, del.icio.usYahoo My Web 2.0social bookmarking, etc.

And the fruits of their efforts can be seen not only on the web - but on TiVo systems, starting earlier this month. That is right, back during the first week of December, Tivo started rolling out a free upgrade to their service that lets TiVo users watch/read/listen to the resources that Yahoo provides. Many people already have set up free accounts on these sites and barely need to do anything to get set up. Many of the sites have a shared single-signon mechanism that means you do not have to log into each site individually.

I have used the Yahoo services from my TiVo a number of times since it became available on my unit a week or so ago. I am telling you, it is top notch. Do not under estimate how useful, fast, or convenient this is. Yahoo is now not just available at Internet speeds. It is available at the flick of a button from an Internet appliance, the TiVo.


Now, their next phase is apparent. If you have ever played the game Monopoly, you will know what I mean. Whatever properties they did not land on themselves by being struck with the idea and creating it from scratch, they have bought up. They now own a lot of the board. They have started to build houses on them, boosting the sites inherent functionality by linking them together. Owning a couple blocks of related services gives you a lot more chances for a user to land on one you own. And when those services work together, as they should - the chances of him benefiting from that accrue. And when they benefit, Yahoo benefits. It increases the name-recognition, marketing clout, user base, and enables whole new scale of social web services.

There are lots of examples of this.

• My Yahoo home page - not only has hyperlinks to the most popular Yahoo services and Yahoo searching - but also allows you to aggregate live content to it by telling it about RSS feeds, or by pushing the content to it from other Yahoo services (Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers, etc.)
• Yahoo 360 profile page - shows as many as you desire of the following: your Yahoo Messenger status, Yahoo Photo albums, Flickr photostreams, reviews you have written of local businesses, Yahoo Groups you belong to, and your Yahoo Avatar or profile photo(s)
• Yahoo 360 reviews page - all your reviews written for Yahoo Local published in their entirety here (if you wish them to be)
• Yahoo 360 groups page - lists all your Yahoo groups (for any Yahoo identities you want to publish group lists for)
• Yahoo 360 lists page - no links to other sites but it does link to people on 360 who share any individual interest of yours (movies, music, TV shows, books, or other interests)
• Yahoo Local - shows what is going on in your area, etc. (and can be shown on your Yahoo 360 reviews page if you wish)
• Yahoo Answers lets you save a peephole to things you wish to keep an eye on to your My Yahoo portal page (as well as providing RSS feeds, if you prefer)

Now, Microsoft can talk about how they spent a couple of months "looking" at RSS, as they recently did. They can even practice it a little bit. But Yahoo has spent 5 yearsbuilding Web 2.0. And what they did not build, they bought. Either way, they own it.

Not only do they own quite a bit of the hottest Web 2.0 stuff, everyone uses their Web 2.0 stuff. It is everywhere. All over the web. They are as ubiquitous as Google. Their mojo is just spread out over a greater number, and more diversified, set of services.

Google has search (as does Yahoo), Google has local/maps (as does Yahoo), Google has news (as does Yahoo), Google has shopping (as does Yahoo), Google has blogging (as does Yahoo), Google has their ad words and a few things Yahoo does not have - as far as I know.

Yahoo has many, many, many things Google does not have. When you look at web search hit numbers and how to monetize that, Google is pretty impressive. But when you look at the sheer size of a footprint of content over the web, I think Yahoo probably has that.

I would like to see Apple and Yahoo pair up to co-promote Apple products/software with Yahoo services/sites, they way that TiVo and Yahoo recently did the same with TiVo DVRs and Yahoo's web services.

I frankly have not noticed any web pages Yahoo or anyone else wrote calling attention to all these cross-site/cross-service linkages within the Yahoo empire. Perhaps Yahoo was waiting until they had all the pieces of their kingdom in place - on the board - before they called their hand.

I think when you look over the list above, which is just a taste of what Yahoo owns and of the inter-service links Yahoo has forged, you will begin to get a feeling of awe over the scope and scale of the kingdom of Yahoo. It covers the globe, and it covers every major daily interest the average person and the typical professional has. They truly have something for everyone.

Now they just have to put it everywhere. And they have gotten a darn good start on that.

Scientists call for plans to change course of Asteroid Heading toward Earth

It's called Apophis. It's 390m wide. And it could hit Earth in 31 years time. Scientists are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

If the asteroid does not hit the Earth on time, then we are going to have to fix the year 2038 bug.

read more | digg story

MPAA: pirated DVDs are "NEW DRUG ON THE STREET"

In an announcement released today the Motion Picture Association of America claims pirated DVDs have become "The New Drug On The Street." Give me a break...

Last time I checked, movies were not a drug at all.

Unless one considers them a "gateway drug" to popcorn.

The conduct and rhetoric of the entertainment industry in 2005 is something that is taking itself to a whole new level of deplorable.

It seems like a backlash against the music and movie industry by consumers in 2006 is all but inevitable.

So anyway, when it comes right down to it - I am sure most Americans would rather have former drug dealers running around with a polycarbonate disc placebo than actual heroin, cocaine, or crystal meth.

Hopefully, they will all get caught and stopped. But in the meantime, the idea of a teenager watching an unauthorized copy of It's a Wonderful Life this Christmas season, instead of spending two hours taking some sort of drug is something we can all be grateful for. If the MPAA wants to take credit for that - well, good for them!

read more | digg story