Bill Gates attempts to Master Kung Fu in retirement

Mr. Bill Gates, at his first Kung Fu lesson upon retiring from Microsoft.

Powerset : Ruby Front End

Great insights on Ruby's front end from Kevin Clark's blog:

http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2007/06/21/powerset-to-launch-front-end-on-ruby

"The simple fact is that Ruby wasn’t the source of Twitter’s woes. As it often happens with rapidly growing sites, they ran into architectural problems. Some design decisions don’t hurt until they reach a massive scale and at that point you have to rethink your approach. In an email he writes:

For us, it’s really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and Ruby haven’t been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. The performance boosts associated with a “faster” language would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in January

This is great news for Twitter, but even better for us because we don’t have the bottle necks that they’ve struggled with – databases, instant messaging servers, and regularly recycling cache systems – which makes scaling horizontally much much smoother. At that point, our scaling issue doesn’t concern Ruby. For a search engine, the front-end is largely just a templating system and the real work happens in the back when we process your query."

Microsoft buying Powerset?

...Rumor has it, that Powerset is being bought by MSFT... that can only mean they are trying to go semantic in their search quest... hopefully the great technical and semantic momentum with Powerset will carry on.

...Powerset is written in all OpenSource -- Ruby, Merb, Rails, god, Mongrel, Mootools, Memcache, Erlang, Fuzed*, YAWS, Hadoop... one of their developers is Kevin Clark, active Ruby/Rails developer: http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2008/05/12/holy-god-powerset-launches

More on Powerset:
http://searchengineland.com/080512-000100.php

had written about Powerset and Kevin Clark 9 days ago...
http://holtsblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/businessweek-article-on-search.html

Interesting to see how this plays out.

...great demo (and cross-browser)

e

...using Canvas... this guy created a photo-table-like system. Be sure to click the "show corners" and resize the images on the fly in the browser. Pretty slick (and thought provoking for you image-philes). Then you can export the image as a .jpg. "makes it easy to create highly customized compositions"... yeah yeah, that's cool and all, but beyond this implementation the demonstration of what 'can be done' in browser-native style is awesome. (amazing it works in ie6, with the 'excanvas.js', which is apparently a Google contribution to the community)

Have fun...
http://www.ernestdelgado.com/public-tests/canvasphoto/demo/canvas.html

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariJSRef/Classes/Canvas.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/-CJBCECGI.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Canvas_tutorial

Anyone know of any good books or good tutorials on Canvas?? They seem to be few and far between.
? The books on are few and far between. Post a comment if you know please. Cheers-

Canvas compatibility table for the Canvas Photo Experiment:

Browser	Support
ie6+	Yes (+ excanvas.js)
ff2+, ff3+	Yes
safari2+	Yes
opera9+	Yes