We had this idea, if we’d hit the first so many downloads Ian would swim. And so he did :-)

What a great way to conclude a marvelous day in which we got marvelous coverage from Wired, The Washington Post, Mercury News, CNET, and Techcrunch. And oh, we got Digged.

As Glubble’s newly appointed VP of Engineering & Technology, I had a roller-coaster week here in Santa Clara, CA working with the development team to prep Glubble for launch.

The team has done a tremendous amount of work, working late hours and having early morning starts. It was really a great week!

Last evening Techcrunch broke the news. CNET quickly followed.

Of course I will blog much more about Glubble in the near future, but that will be on the Glaxstar and Glubble blogs.

I’d like to thank Ian and Willem-Jan for inviting me to work for a great company that aims to make the web a safer place for kids. Thanks guys!

Stay tuned!

The Washington Post has a nice write-up on Glubble. It’s very rewarding to see that many reviewers like the product and that they give it a real spin to see how it’s actually working.

I’ve added my contact details to this site (until now it displayed a very lame ‘Under construction’ message, which was soooo last century). However, I didn’t want to to present my phone numbers and e-mail address in a format that can be harvested by bots. I could have put this information in a picture, but that is last century too. Instead I wrote this text obfuscator code:

def obfuscate_text _txt
  _txt = "document.write('#{_txt}');" 
  string = ''
  for i in 0..._txt.length
    string << sprintf( "%%%x", _txt[i] )
  end
  return "<script type=\"text/javascript\">eval(unescape('#{string}'))</script>" 
end

This code translates a string to JavaScript Latin-1 encoding. When the text is rendered, eval() calls unescape() and the result is printed to screen by document.write(). Simple but effective. This code is based on the code behing the mail_to() method in Rails.

I’ve added Ruby syntax highlighting as a new feature to my home grown blog engine. It uses an excellent lexical analysis framework called Syntax by James Buck.

Let’s use this new feature to explain itself!

Whenever I now want to include a piece of Ruby code in a blog article, I simply paste the code in the article and surround it with a <code> tag. This link shows the ‘raw’ source for this article you’re now reading.

The following code shows the markup parser code I’m actually using (note that I’m also using Textile and REXML, two other very useful Ruby gems):

def spitouthtml _txt    
  # parse textile markup
  html = RedCloth.new( _txt, [:no_span_caps] ).to_html( :textile )
  # enclose HTML fragment with div tag as root element  
  doc = REXML::Document.new( "<div>#{html}</div>" )
  # process code tags
  doc.elements.each( "//code" ) { |e|
    convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "ruby" 
    # parse ruby code and apply syntax highlighting using Syntax plug-in
    codeblock = 
       REXML::Document.new( "<div class='ruby'>#{convertor.convert( e.text )}</div>" )
    e.replace_with( codeblock )
  }
  return doc.to_s
end

That’s all! All I had to do was add some extra CSS styles for the various Ruby language syntax elements (link).

Last Friday (Nov 10) I put Railsgigs.com live, a project I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. I hope Railsgigs.com will grow out to be a global meeting ground for companies seeking Ruby on Rails expertise and developers seeking gigs.

It’s funny to see that the site in just a few days has already received 398 page views, without any serious effort on my side to drive traffic. Over the course of the next months I will approach the Rails community and introduce and explain the concept.

The concept is simple: companies (e.g. design or ad agencies, start-ups, etc) can post projects they wish having developed using Ruby on Rails. Developers (individuals, teams or companies) can contact these companies and offer their services.

If you don’t know what Rails is, you may wonder why you should have your next project done in Ruby on Rails.

The following quote, pulled from this Wikipedia article pretty much sums up why Ruby on Rails is an interesting technology:

[ Ruby on Rails ] strives for simplicity and allows real-world applications to be developed in less code than other frameworks and with a minimum of configuration.

If you are in the market for having a project developed, the ‘less code’ part of the sentence must sound like music to your ears. Less code usually means less costs, right? Right! But there’s much more to Ruby on Rails than less code.

The true power behind Ruby on Rails is that it’s absolutely fun to use. It’s fun because Ruby is a magnificent language (easy to learn, and beautiful for its compactness and elegance). It’s fun because Rails was conceived by very smart but at the same time very practical people (actually, the first release of Rails was designed by just a one guy, a fellow European David Heinemeier Hansson). Sure, a language like Java was conceived by equally smart people, however the Sun guys clearly lacked the practicality genes which explains why I had to grab a reference guide with every 20 lines of Java code. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shy away from hard to grasp stuff, but RoR just seems to fit my brain better than any other web development technology I’ve used since 1995.

When something is fun to use, the more likely you say to a client “Sure, I can add that feature, just give a minute”, or even better “Did you see those extra features? I thought you’d like them”. I can tell you, customers love it when you positively surprise them with some extra goodies. And happy customers bring fun to your work as well. Really, RoR developers are a happy bunch.

And to get back to the ‘less code’ thing, less code means more time to test, more time to refactor some of your code and less code is, obviously, easier to maintain.

Check out railsgigs.com and add your project to the list!

I’ve upgraded the site to run on my homegrown blog engine, written in Ruby on Rails. It’s very basic at this time, and yes I know there are tons of existing blogging engines but I like to keep stuff simple and clean and (as always) it was fun to write it in rails.

The blogroll (at the right) comes straight out an OPML file I exported from Newsfire. Ruby has an excellent XML parser that allowed me to parse the OPML file and render the blogroll using just a few lines of code.

Bear with me for a few more weeks to fully pimp my site, I do this is the wee hours after everything else is done and finished :-)

I’ve bought and co-located a new server back a month or so. I didn’t want to install Wordpress on this server, so I put up a temporary ‘pardon our appearance’ page last month, hoping that I would find time to design a new website in September. Well, that clearly didn’t work out since I’m pretty busy with several software projects.

Embarrassed about not having a decent website and blog, I decided today to fire up Photoshop and crank out a brand new design for the Bitgain website. Do you like it?

Momentarily the site has no back-end logic. Next week or so I will write my own blog engine and stick it underneath this website.

Just finished reading Big Bang (The origin of the universe) by Simon Singh. The book is clearly written, it explains complex scientific principles in a very readable way. When you like to brush up your cosmology knowledge, this is the book to read. It compresses 15 billion years in 532 pages, quite an achievement I think.

Somewhere in the book Simon Singh makes a remark about serendipity, a word coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend, Horace Mann, the English resident in Florence. Singh continues to give examples of ‘serendipic’ scientific discoveries such as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and Post-it Notes. It started me thinking about serendipity related to business ideas, software design, and startups—there are many examples of companies that started out doing X and ended up being successful in doing Y. So perhaps you shouldn’t resist serendipity, although common sense would tell you to ‘stick to the plan’ and ‘focus on the goal we decided to pursue’.

Three Silicon Valley top dogs joined a great dinner cooked by Boris and Patrick. Sitting at the table – clockwise starting with Boris (yellow polo shirt – are Dan Ambrosi, Patrick, two friends of Boris (of which one of them clearly wishes to remain anonymous), Mark Fletcher, Rikk Carey and Arjen Schat.

Yesterday evening we helt a small alpha testing party at the Fleck HQ in Amsterdam. Everyone brought their own computer and enjoyed the fun of Fleck for the rest of the evening. Pizza, beer, an introduction to Fleck by Boris and most importantly valuable feedback by the testers, turned the evening into a successful event. So what is heck is Fleck? Sorry, still not allowed to say…

Check out the photostream on flickr

On my drive from my home town (Hoorn, The Netherlands) to Amsterdam, I’m seeing more and more cars with the small TomTom device mounted on top of the dashboard. I wonder whether companies like TomTom, or its rival Garmin, can uphold the outrageous pricing level of their products. The avarage TomTom device costs a whopping €600 and for what? The components inside the device cost no more than $80 I guess. Of course TomTom must license the map data from Navteq or TeleAtlas, and they have to finance expensive marketing campaigns (also in the US since a few months) but I think they’re making a nice margin.

I’m always a sucker for scenarios in which a whole vertical market gets beaten by a killer app. I think the GPS device market runs such a risk. Bear with me for a moment:

• The TomTom software adds no spectacular value to their hardware. The software is not really “deep” in terms of richness in functionality, it offers limited interaction with the user or access to external systems. I don’t say making software easy-to-use is easy, I really mean in this particular case that the actual navigation software is not extremely difficult to make. Put otherwise, Open Source software like Linux, JBoss, Apache or MySQL probably consists of many more lines of code.
• Cloning the TomTom or Garmin hardware is also not difficult. A Chinese factory can design and manufacture a generic device with an LCD or OLED screen plus a GPS receiver in a matter of months. They should embed a real-time operating system (e.g. RTOS) into the box so we don’t have to pay licenses to anyone.
• Based on public domain map data a basic driving directions application can be created. The first version will suck, it can’t find anything but at least you’ll see the roads, lakes, rivers, cities and villages happily scrolling by.
• Now it’s up to the community around our Open Source GPS box to enrich the map data. Just by driving around we’ll know whether a crossing is really a crossing or a fly-over without on or off ramps. We’ll discover roundabouts (where our basic map still displayed a crossing). Does this sound silly? Companies like Navteq and TeleAtlas do exactly the same, they have hundreds of cars on the road every day to fine-tune and update their map data.
• The data collected during your trip is written to a flash disk and can be transferred to an on-line database with a few clicks. After uploading the data you receive an update of the complete community map database. Give and thy shall receive!

Because our generic GPS box is open, people can write all kinds of additional applications like a bluetooth connection for their cell phone, radar detectors and news tickers. The box could offer USB connections to attach e.g. a bluetooth receiver. What would this mean for companies like TomTom and Garmin? Well, for sure their pricing comes under pressure.

Techcrunch has an interesting post on a new service from Amazon called S3 (Simple Storage Service). According to Techcrunch “[..] it is a storage service backend for developers that offers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs?.

Interesting twist: Amazon is not going to push S3 to end-users. Instead it is a service geared towards the developer community. This is a very, very interesting development. Just like Google, Amazon has a massive grid computing platform on which its main service runs. For Google it’s search, for Amazon it’s selling goods. Both companies are discovering they can do much more with this platform. Google is pushing out new services like crazy (mail, maps, calendar, etc) and now Amazon is following suit (and where is eBay? Still counting how much money they have left in the bank after their $4B “VoIP development project”?).

To me the introduction of the S3 service marks a milestone in the web services revolution that is going on. This service will be followed by many other services, effectively wiping out a whole bunch of companies. Imagine this: Amazon/Google/Yahoo might launch the following services: (I’ve picked software applications that are used by companies that help you and me every day.)

Global hospital information management service: conforming to standards like Health Level 7 (HL7), state and national requirements, privacy etc. Finally a doctor in the US can obtain the patient record entered by a doctor in Italy.

Global accounting service: how hard is it to create a web service that contains the fiscal business logic of the top 40 countries in the world? The service doesn’t have to provide the user interface, but purely the back-end business logic and storage. Companies like Quicken (or the Dutch company Exact) would still offer the GUI front-ends but part (or most) of the internal logic is transferred to the online accounting service. A Wikipedia-style collaboration model can be used to feed the system with the constant changes in legislation.

Global news room editing service: creation, editing, management, publishing and storage of (multi-lingual) news articles and video clips for use by newspapers, TV and radio stations and web portals. They offer the tools and make the content searchable and act as a syndicator. Result: the end for many CMS vendors.

Other examples of services that can be turned into global, generic web services are cross-border citizen alerting systems, reservation systems (airlines, rental cars, hotels), utility billing systems (gas, water, electricity), telecom billing systems, Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

I’m not saying that Amazon/Google/Yahoo would offer the total solution, but just the basic, say, 60%. This 60% represents the generic part, the part that every company in the world needs. The remaining specific 40% can be added by local developers (“integrators”). But these developers don’t have to worry anymore about up-time, fail-over, load balancing, scalability, back-up etc. I’m curious what the first applications based on S3 will look like. It’s an exciting time.

Here’s a snapshot of the Tracecollector home page. The counter is fake.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the power adapter market would settle on (1) 110-240V auto-switching, (2) only two types of connectors (e.g big and small) and (3) blink a LED when charging. Don?t these guys get together once a year on their ‘power adapter conference’? Geez.

Wanna take a peek at the future of Google? A peek that is probably right by 90%? Then I suggest you read these two (one, two) articles by Robert X. Cringely.Also recommended are Robert’s fascinating Nurd TV episodes. So far he has interviewed people like Dan Bricklin, Dave Winer, Tim O’Reilly, Bill Joy and Andy Hertzfeld, among others. The episodes are approx one hour and are available in video and audio-only.

I held I’m doing a keynote short talk on the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference held in San Francisco January 24-26 2006. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media

Great fun: make a doodle and this site searches for matching photos on flickr.com

Joel Spolsky has a great article on the sad fact that most Computer Science courses today teach Java instead of C. I’ve quickly added my 500+ KLOC C experience to my resume. I previously thought it was not hip to mention C but now I realize it raises ones hacker status considerably.

Jeff Minter’s name popped into my mind tonight, don’t know why. I remember well how impressed I was about his game Attack of the mutant camels which he released early in the ‘80s for the Commodore 64. This computer is now on display in the Computer History Museum :-)