My World

Google just never stops surprising me, now they have started Google Health.

At the moment it only works for people in the US above 18 years, but it’s supposed to expand soon. Haven’t found any dates yet though.

The idea is to add your health data into the Google Health app, at the moment I can’t really see the point of it. Don’t even know if I trust Google with that kind of information about me.

However it could get really interesting if the data could be used to learn about ways to solve medical problems by statistics. Lets say that there are people in the world that somehow don’t get breast cancer, then maybe by using this health app they can realize what they have incommon, and then find a cure.

Not likely? I don’t know, anyhow I’ll keep an eye on it to see what happens, but I’m probably going to wait until I start submitting my own info.

– Jo

So I’ve been up for quite a while trying to figure out what language is the coolest to start learning.

PHP was for a long time the only (if not counting ASP) out there that could do everything that you needed to do. But much like C/C++ it needed a lot of code written before anything actually happened, a lot of code means a lot of time spent writing it and planning it. This is obviously not good in our kind of high speed development era.

Apparently, this was before I started web programming probably, there has been quite a few web frameworks out there. But none really following the DRY way of thinking. So when Rails showed up web development just boomed, since everything was so fast.

So far so good, but it’s here that I’m starting to find some flaws with Rails, and that is that it’s built on Ruby. Ruby is still in it’s core a C driven language, this shouldn’t make a very big difference, but it seems to be quite slow compared to other languages with the same kind of philosophy. The philosophy being simplicity. The Ruby team are working on binaries for Ruby, but until that happens it’s probably going to stay as slow as it is.

Yesterday I was really in to Rails, and thought it was the solution to every web developers problem, but after looking around I kind of figured that it isn’t. Especially when we are talking about huge amounts of data. Therefore I decided to install Django, which went really smooth since I’m using OsX. I skipped MySQL, and went with Sqlite, since I only want to use this site for development purposes, I’ll be looking into the server setup later.

Anyhow…
As you probably can see I haven’t really reached my verdict yet, but after yesterdays post, when I was leaning towards Rails, I have quite drastically changed towards Django after quite a lot of hours spent reading about benefits and drawbacks.

I’ll tell you more about it later…

– Jo

I’ve been researching a bit around Ruby on Rails to see the benefits of using it. I’ve, for quite a while, been using PHP as my main web-development language, mostly because it’s been free. But lately there has been some new interesting alternatives showing up. The first one being Ruby on Rails, that is based on the really neat language Ruby. But after really getting into the whole Rails thing, I started hearing a lot about a new framework built on Python called Django. This didn’t sound all that bad either, so I started looking into it. And even the Rails community has brought up Django as faster, so now I’m confused, which one should I use.

Not that speed should be the only reason for choosing a language, especially nowadays when servers seems to be growing on trees.

But after some more research I found the JRuby project, which really kicked Rails back to the top without any doubt. The ability to use the JVM as a backbone really seems appealing. Especially today when everything is moving towards more mobility.

So I think that I’m going to stay with Rails for a bit longer, even though I haven’t really started programming yet, which means that there is still time to change.

– Jo

I’ve been a Mac follower since early ‘06, when I choose to use a mac as a work computer, and I guess that I’ve never turned back. At the moment I work on a macbook, and I’m loving it!

Because of this it’s really nice to hear that Apple is doing so good.

I’m looking forward to see new state of the art products from them, the latest being iPhone, which I’m really looking forward to it’s release in Sweden soon.

Anyhow, now it’s time to sleep, and stop exaggerating, it’s going to end up making me stop blogging again.

Tjopp

So I just upgraded wordpress, and figured I should change the look too, this is the just basic look of wordpress, but it’s not that bad.

I’ll see if I can find something better, or even better would be to make a whole new one, but I’ll see about that later.

If there is someone out there that has any tips on good places to find nice designs, please don’t hesitate to tell me.

….

The file sharing debate has blossomed here in Sweden due to a recent trial about a guy from Linköping, the city where I live. And due to some weird circumstances the trial was called off. I don’t have time to write about it now, but I will as soon as I get more time, if I forget, give me a shout.

Anyhow, the debate has blossomed and there are some really interesting views out there, one of Joakim an old friend from highschool, and this is an other from Henrik Alexandersson both really interesting, but in Swedish ofcourse.

I’ll try to make a brief briefing of the whole story a bit later, in English, but as I said, really interesting.

- Jonas