First of all, an admission… My name is Ijonas, I used to be a Java programmer. I’ve been clean for a year and a half. So much for my “Java Anonymous” meeting. In that period I’ve been experimenting and pondering about Ruby and of course RubyOnRails. During such ponderings I’ve pondered why so many experienced Java programmers are jumping ship onto duck-typed languaged such as Ruby and Python (of which I’m a massive fan). I’m going to write a bunch of posts about Ruby and the impact on solving certain class of computing science problems, that I believe are...

Hi folks, I’m the CTO for Vamosa, a software company headquartered in Glasgow, with an rapidly expanding office in Boston (across the pond). We’re a 30-man strong company with a small development team in Glasgow that needs expansion. Our software allows clients to migrate and transform huge websites, from one content management system to another. The software is built on both J2EE and .NET, using the usual suspects in componentry: Spring, xUnit, Hibernate, etc. etc. Woven through all of this is a big helping of both Jython and IronPython. I’m looking for an opinionated,...

I’ve been playing around with SQL Server 2008 CTP, exploring the benefits of the new HIERARCHYID datatype, which has been designed to efficiently store depth-first tree structures in SQL Server 2008. My requirements were to store URI paths such as ones you might find in URLs, whereby each path component is held as a separate record in a table. Each path component refers to a folder in file system, e.g. URL: http://www.vamosa.com/index/information_solutions/technology_and_products/vamosa_content_migrator.htm URI: path:...

Robert Scoble says: Joe from Flixter denotes why this is SO HUGE: his app will run anywhere that the OpenSocial platform is running. Plaxo. Ning. NewsGator. MySpace. No rewriting of apps. The Open Social announcement is an equivalent to Sun announcing Java in the mid-nineties… The big promise back then was write-once run-everywhere… Java never became the major success for writing end-user apps that Sun had dreamed off, so the jury has to be out. Hopefully the Open Social API designers will keep Java’s history in mind as they take their technology forward. MS Windows users don’t...

So there we have it… Google has made a big splash into the social networking arena. Open Social is its name and helping widget developers is its game. Great news for developers, but no news for users of these sites.Robert Scoble is raving about it something rotten on twitter and his blog, like a surfer riding the big kahuna… I love his excitement but I can’t share it. End users now get the same “virus apps” spreading across multiple social sites (MySpace, Ning, Hi5, etc) because these apps are can now be built atop the same APIs. The problem is the data remains stuck...

Soup.io is a great new web app coming out of the YEurope oven. In short its a little bit of microblogging mixed up content aggregation from other sites such as flickr, twitter, delicious, and in my case Wordpress.com (there’s more take a look). There’s already some chat in the blogosphere comparing it’s microblogging features to twitter and pownce.Soup.io lacks the immediacy of twitter and its desktop & SMS entrypoints, but that’s ok by me.Soup.io to me is a wonderful way to aggregate the content that I’m producing through various web apps, which I would consider...

This is funny because its classic case of desigining a black magic product thats scans all the databases in the world in-place using its adaptable plugin modules that enables it to extract hidden terrorist messages from your mum\’s recipe spreadsheet in her Documents folder and correlate with credit card spending in Indonesia, via the included plugin module that sits atop of the VISA global credit card database. My favourite line in the pitch is…. and I guarantee that I\’m not taking it out of context: because its distributed, its totally secure Nuts! As someone working for a company...

I’m noticing quiet a lot of search results hitting this blog, looking for ideas on how to integrate the Polar CS300 and your trusty old Mac… in my case a MacBook Pro. Well, I’ve got it working but it isn’t the most elegant of solutions… First of all there is to my knowledge no OS X version of the Polar software, therefore I’ve had to employ the following… Ingredients 1x copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac (installed on your Mac) 1x copy of Windows XP (installed inside Parallels) 1x Mac Book Pro 1x Polar CS300 watch 1x Polar WebLink SW software installed...

I found myself drawn into Stewart Brand’s presentation on environmentalism and urbanisation… He makes some really interesting points on how the environmental- or eco-movement will change over the next couple of decades. The movement will change from a grassroots “nice-to-do” group of Western Industrialised tree-huggers and idealists to a global phenomenon of not just romanticised activisim but cold-hard-fact-based politicking. This change will be brought on by two things. Firstly the internet will enable global organised communication to even the remotest parts. Secondly,...

John C. Dvorak writes in his column today: Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results—a bust. It’s déjà vu all over again. And since this moment in time is only the beginning of the cycle, the best nuttiness has yet to emerge. Nevertheless, this is not to say that a lot of nuttiness hasn’t already happened. I can only partially agree him… Yes, the same copycat, cookie-cutter business models exist. Yes, each startup is some form of...