Posted by Timothy Fisher Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:37:00 GMT
For those who Twitter, the Ruby on Rails Bible book now has a Twitter feed of its own.
You can follow Ruby on Rails Bible for content updates and corrections, new content, discussion about the book and its contents, and Rails knowledge sharing.
You can follow Ruby on Rails Bible here: http://www.twitter.com/rorbible
Posted by Timothy Fisher Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:09:00 GMT
and other online book sellers. Another Rails author,
Noel Rappin
, also contributed content to this book. Noel is the director of the rails
practice at Pathfinder Associates.
Posted by Timothy Fisher Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:51:00 GMT
With all the hype that the iPhone and the new Google G1 phone are getting,
I’d like to talk about a device that I think is probably the most underrated
electronic gadget that is available today. This device is the
Amazon Kindle
I’ve had my Kindle for about 2 months now, and I have to say I absolutely
love it. Like most people, I am someone who always preferred reading actual
books and hardcopy over computer screens. However, reading on the Kindle is
a completely different experience than reading a computer screen. What you
see on a Kindle screen looks more like words on paper than words on a computer
screen. There is no backlighting on the screen. The technology used is something
called E-Ink. If you are someone who reads a lot of books, articles, papers, etc.
you will love the Amazon Kindle.
The selection of books available through Amazon on the Kindle is at over 190,000
and growing weekly. You’ll save money on the books you read also. Most Kindle
books are priced at $9.99. This includes new releases and best sellers. Compare
that with the $25-$30 that you would typically spend for a new physical book.
Unfortunately, most computer and technical books even in Kindle form do tend to
cost more than the
standard $9.99, but they are still discounted from the physical book price.
However, the books available for the Kindle are only a
small segment of what you can read on your Kindle. Other content that you can
subscribe to through Amazon includes popular magazines, newspapers, and blogs.
I actually have more free
content on my Kindle than content that I’ve paid for. You can find free books
compatible with the Kindle at sites such as
manybooks.net and
feedbooks.com.
It is also very easy to
transfer your own documents to the Kindle. Kindle accepts most common document
type formats. The Kindle support for PDF is officially considered to be
experimental; however, I’ve transferred many PDF documents to my Kindle and
have never had any issues with their display. Documents can be transferred
to the Kindle through a USB connection, or by emailing documents to an email
address that every Kindle owner is given. Documents sent to that email address
are sent to your Kindle.
So far I’ve talked about the e-reader features of the Kindle only. However,
the Kindle has much more capability than only as an e-reader. What I think
is a hugely overlooked feature of the Kindle and under-marketed by Amazon is
the fact that with the Kindle you are given absolutely FREE high-speed wireless
Internet access. Every Kindle has access to the WhisperNet network which is an
EVDO cellular network that Amazon provides through the Sprint cellular network
at no charge to Kindle owners. Compare this to the $50.00 monthly fee you normally
pay for a wireless data plan on your cell phone. The Kindle has a browser built-in
that allows you to read GMail, access Google, Wikipedia, and other websites. You also have
access to the Kindle Store which allows you to search for, read reviews, and purchase
Kindle books and have them sent to your Kindle in a few seconds. Here’s another great
feature; You can get a
free chapter sent to your Kindle of any Kindle book that is available. I find myself
taking advantage of this feature quite often to sample books before I purchase them.
I’ve always been an avid reader, but since getting my Kindle I have probably doubled
the amount of content that I read. If you’re an avid reader, I highly recommend that
you check out the Amazon Kindle.
A good blog to check out that is dedicated to the Kindle is
The Book of Kindle.
Posted by Timothy Fisher Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:20:00 GMT
Generation Y includes those in the age range 13 to 31. This is the largest
generation ever, even surpassing the population of the Baby Boomers. In total
their are about 80 million “GenYers”. This is a generation that has been
brought up on technology. They have always had computers, cell phones,
email, and instant messaging. They are now very familiar with Web 2.0 and
social networking. This is also the next generation of employees that companies
will be hiring over the next decade. This generation will come into your
company with the expectation of Web 2.0 technologies, just as the previous
generations expected email. Using social networks is as natural to GenYers
as email is to GenXers.
GenYers have seen how Web 2.0 technology can be used extremely effectively in
their social life and will expect nothing less in their professional life.
They will wonder why a large company is not using a social network
to enable and connect employees. They will wonder why their company is not
using blogs to spread their message and respond to thier customers in a very
transparent manner. Blogs and social networks allow GenYers to build networks
of friends and associates. The good news is that these are all questions that should
be asked because they have the power to transform your business, and if you
are not asking those questions internally now, your company will soon be left
behind in this new I.T. revolution. This new revolution is one that brings
Web 2.0 technology and culture into the enterprise and it is often referred to
as Enterprise 2.0.
Even as Enterprise 2.0 takes hold in many large corporations, there are still
many other corporations that remain ignorant of this revolution. Some mistakenly
think that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is just about technology. They are the
companies that are adverse to taking risks on new technology, so they quietly
ignore the Web/Enterpise 2.0 revolution. The truth is that Web 2.0 and Enterprise
2.0 are not about technology. They are more about culture, social interaction, new
ways of uniting your employee base, and new ways of effectively marketing your brand.
Enterprise 2.0 brings with it a massive change in culture
that many companies are not ready or able to deal with. Companies that rely
on strict top-down hierarchical organizations have the most to fear from the
GenYers and the Enterprise 2.0 revolution. Enterprise 2.0 expands
the power of the masses in your company at the expense of the power of the
senior management and executives. When individuals act together socially,
whether it is for personal projects or business related projects, their power
becomes much greater than what they could have achieved working as an individual.
GenYers expect their thoughts and ideas to be listened to and acted upon if
they are good ones. They are not willing to sit back passively and follow
the direction of someone simply because they are higher up on the “corporate ladder.”
Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to harvest ideas and innovations
throughout the company rather than from a select few that sit on the top floors
of their headquarters. Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff refer to this inversion of power and
influence as the Groundswell in a new book titled Groundswell: Winning in a
World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by
Forrester Research.
Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to open up a bidirectional
communication path between itself and its customers. Any single company is
limited in terms of their internal resources and the
amount of innovation and creativity that can be sourced from them. However,
a company that can effectively use a much larger global community of social
networkers can expand its abilty to innovate on a massive scale. If your company is
not taking advantage of this ability to collaborate globally, your competitors are,
and they will quickly surpass you with their ability to innovate.
Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn allow individuals
to meet more people, expand their social networks, and get more and better
information faster and easier. Used inside of a company, social networking
communities can energize an employee base and build a massively linked
platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration. This platform will be
a vehicle to capture tacit knowledge in ways never before possible.
IBM has an internal social network called Beehive that has over 30,000
employees on it. A social network like this used internally will not only
help your company share knowledge but you will find developers collaborating
on innovative uses of technology, sales people mining new leads and exploring
new sales opportunities, and management with a tool to monitor the pulse of
the company.
A social network can also be used very effectively to create buzz around your
brand and to increase your brand visibility. The book Groundwell describes how
a company can make use of Web 2.0 technologies to get great benefits in
marketing, product development, and customer support. Enterprise 2.0 is also
where you will need to turn to find the best and brightest employees amongst
the GenYers. More people, especially the younger ones, are moving away from
large job boards like Monster and Dice as sources of jobs and instead finding
jobs through their online social networks. Are employees at your company blogging?
Does your company have any presence in the Web 2.0 world? If the answer is no,
your company very well may be left out of the employer pool considered by the
best and the brightest employees.
Large I.T. companies including IBM, Dell, Salesforce.com and even retailer Best Buy
are already using Web 2.0 technologies both internally and externally to communicate
with their customers, enhance their brand message, enable broad collaboration, and
leverage the power of the global community to speed up the process of innovation.
I recently finished reading two excellent books that I believe should be
required reading for anyone in a leadership position in any company today.
These books are Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and one
the other one I’ve already mentioned,
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. These
books show how your company can thrive thorugh Enterprise 2.0 culture and technology.
They are both filled with case studies of how existing companies are embracing
Enterprise 2.0 as well.
Read more…
Beyond Blogs, Business Week, May 22, 2008
The “Millennials” Are Coming, CBS News, May 23, 2008
Groundswell
Wikinomics
Posted by Timothy Fisher Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:59:00 GMT
Today, social networking, and user-generated content web sites are among the
most popular sites on the Internet getting millions of hits every day. Sites
like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr,
and Google Apps allow users to share user-generated
content and collaborate with each other like never before. Smart organizations,
enterprises, and product vendors are now realizing the potential for
Web 2.0 technologies inside the enterprise.
There are some fantastic web applications on the Internet that would provide
tremendous value inside of an organization. I’ve spent the last several years
working for large professional services organizations. These large service organizations
have perhaps the most to gain from harnessing the concepts of Web 2.0 internally.
Consider for example an internal Intranet version
of an application like LinkedIn, allowing employees to keep current resume and profile
information online that can be easily updated by each employee. This would provide a huge value to
professional service organizations whom are always looking to staff the next project or fill
a clients staffing requirements.
For the developers of a large organization, think how useful an internal Code
Snippets site would be. Public snippets sites such as DZone Snippets,
allow contributors
to share small snippets of code that solve commonly occurring problems. The value
of such a repository is even greater inside of an organization where different
teams often encounter similar problems. Essentially, a snippets site provides
another outlet for code reuse.
In a development group, every project should be maintaining a wiki site. A wiki
can be updated by every member of the team to include links to the latest
documentation, schedules, and technical data related to the project.
Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us also provide examples of a
technology that could be very useful internally. If you are in a large development
organization, every developer will usually have his or her favorites sites for researching
and looking up technical information. A social bookmarking site would allow your
organization to harness collectively those favorites and categorize them with a content tagging
system. Content tagging has become the preferred way or organizing large amounts of information
in the Web 2.0 world.
Even some of the fringe social sharing sites such as Shelfari
and LibraryThing
implement concepts that would fit well inside an organization. These sites allow users to
share information about their personal library of books. Users can contribute book reviews,
book ratings, and comments about the books. Software developers are some of the largest
purchasers and readers of technical books. Some organizations will even reimburse employees
for technical book purchases. A social site allowing employees to share reviews and comments about
technical books could be a very useful addition to an Intranet. These types of value-added
applications that allow employees to actively contribute content to Intranets will encourage
employees to view your Intranet and participate in sharing knowledge and information. This is much
better than the centralized content controlled sites that most Intranets are today.
One of IBM’s newest products targeted at the enterprise is
Lotus Connections. This is
a product that aims to bring Web 2.0 and social networking into the enterprise. The product
includes blogging, social bookmarking, wikis, communities, user profiles, and social networking features.
IBM is not alone in thinking about the value that these products have. Smaller vendors in this space include
HiveLive, SocialText,
and Thought Farmer.
There are new and different types of Web 2.0 and social networking sites coming online nearly
everyday. Every time I come across a new site, I always imagine how much that site could contribute
to the collaboration and knowledge sharing environment and ultimately to the productivity of
teams inside of a company. I believe that we are on the brink of seeing more and more Web 2.0
technologies entering the Enterprise. These applications can allow an enterprise to capture more
of the ad-hoc and tacit knowledge that typically is not well managed in a large organization.
If you are in a position of influence, you should start
thinking now about how these technologies can make your own organization more productive. If you
are interested in learning more about Web 2.0 in the enterprise, an excellent blog to follow is the
Enterprise 2.0 blog from Dion Hinchliffe.
Posted by Timothy Fisher Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:11:00 GMT
Heroku is a web application that provides a complete environment for writing Ruby on Rails powered web applications. With Heroku you get both a development environment and a hosting platform. Each application that you create with Heroku is also assigned a unique URL that you can use to access it.
Heroku has plenty of gems and Rails plugins pre-installed and available to any Rails application. However, if you want to use a gem or plugin that is not already installed, you can do that also. It is simple to install any gem or plugin into your Heroku Rails application. You can also upload a complete Rails application that you developed locally, into the Heroku environment. The opposite is also possible. You can export an application that you developed inside of Heroku and download its source to your local computer. As you write migrations, they are automatically detected and run without any manual intervention. You also get a built-in console for running any rake tasks that your application has. A built-in Rails console is also provided in a browser window.
Heroku also recently added an API that allows you to develop your Rails application locally on your computer and deploy to Heroku remotely through the Heroku API. The source code version control system that Heroku uses to store your source code is also exposed. The version control system used is GIT. If you have GIT installed locally you can directly access your application’s source code and make commits against it. When you want to deploy back to the Heroku servers, you do that through the Heroku API.
Heroku is probably not the host you’d select for deploying a production Rails application, but it can be a satisfactory development environment, and an excellent platform for learning. In a training environment, students would be able to develop a complete Rails application using only the Heroku web application without having to install any software on their computers. It is also easy to collaborate on an application using Heroku. Once you create an application, it is easy to add other users as collaboratorsruby who also have access to the application’s source code. Overall, I think this is a great tool that can help more people get exposure to the Rails platform.
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