MicroPlace Launches

MicroPlace Launches: MicroPlace, a site that lets you make small loans to workers in developing countries and receive a return, just recently launched. Josh Susser, one of the contractors that worked on it, wrote a great introduction to the project.

“As far as I am aware, MicroPlace is the first SEC-registered online brokerage implemented in Ruby on Rails. We had to go through an extensive security audit, and there were a lot of regulatory requirements for us to meet… But the bottom line is that we didn’t have any significant problems with either Ruby or Rails in passing those hurdles.”

Josh also mentioned that MicroPlace is owned by eBay, making this the first Rails project at an otherwise all-Java shop. Awesome, high-fives all around guys. I hope to see more posts about the development aspect of the site.

[Nice idea!]
Source: Riding Rails

Falling in love with material things.

frontLeft.jpgIf I were buying a violin…(or viola, or cello) I would buy it from David. I was once on a list to buy a guitar from him, but things got screwed up and I never did. At the moment it makes no sense for me to sink that kind of money into an instrument. Anyway, his sense of style, and sculpture is what lures me in, and the attention and study of qualities of sound keep me there.

Gestures, the iPhone, and Standards: A Developer’s Questions

Gestures, the iPhone, and Standards: A Developer’s Questions: Who will step forward with that leadership and be followed? Will Apple try to maintain a sole position as a platform or will it encourage the whole industry to follow its lead? Will Microsoft go the Open route, and follow its previous examples evangelizing XML and other very open standards, or will it try to create its own proprietary following? Will some members of the academic or FOSS community do the legal legwork, interface design, and initial coding to mimic the success of the Berners-Lee and later the W3C vs. proprietary systems such as those from AOL, CompuServe, and Microsoft? Who will fund that? Google? Nokia? Will there be inward-looking greed or industry leadership? [Good stuff.]
Source:

Twitter as a Utility Service

Twitter as a Utility Service: Evan, focus on reliability, at least until jokes dry up. Twitter has implementation flaws you need to flush out. Don’t just leave it to someone to handle it somehow while you enjoy the creamy part of engineering. Did you know that Twitter client developers are abandoning condition GET because Twitter servers frequently lies? Fixing just that problem (and letting developers know so they can return to using conditional GET) will reduce server load significantly. [Interesting.]
Source: Don Park’s Daily Habit

TidBITS Blog Post: The Best (and Worst) of Leopard

TidBITS Blog Post: The Best (and Worst) of Leopard: Quick Look and Cover Flow. Together, these offer file previews on steroids. They’re utterly silly (“waste cycles drawing trendy animated junk” was my first thought) until you need them, and then they are just terrific. Being able to flip through a bunch of music or photo files looking for the right one, right in the Finder without starting up any other application, is really great.
Spotlight, Spotlight everywhere. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t mention what I think is the most important change to Spotlight, so I’m not allowed to tell you what it is. Suffice it to say that previously I didn’t like Spotlight very much, and now I do, so obviously they must have changed the thing about it that I didn’t like, right? Plus, I will now be able to search the past! With Safari, I can search for Web pages I’ve viewed, using whatever text within those pages I happen to remember. With Time Machine, I can search for files that no longer exist. Now if I can just find that $20 bill I had a week ago. [It should be good stuff… looking forward to it.]
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WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage

Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage: The current working spec for the HTML5 standard has a lot of exciting features we would eventually like to implement in WebKit. One feature we felt was exciting enough to tackle now even though the spec is still in flux is client-side database storage. So for the last few weeks andersca, xenon, and I have been cooking up an implementation![Interesting. Finally? Maybe.]