When we were approached by the Oregon Research Institute to build a classroom survey for the State of Oregon using portable devices, we immediately thought of the iPhone. The slick interface and ease of use seemed like a natural way to encourage kids to interact with the device and get them to complete the surveys. The per unit cost for the iPhone was a bit too high - so we settled on the iPod Touch instead. The devices are functionally similar and both run Apple’s iPhone OS.
The notion of the iPod as a classroom tool is rapidly gaining traction. Unsurprisingly, Apple encourages educators to make use of their technology - and a number of prominent educators are actively discussing the pros and cons of classroom use. A recent issue of the “ezine” iLearn addressed many of these issues in some detail.
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We recently launched Michael Moore’s new online community at MichaelMoore.com - just in time for the opening of his new film - “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
The website is designed from the ground up with a social media focus, integrating Facebook, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 technologies. The audience is quite large - the site is in the top 10,000 websites in the United States by traffic and receives millions of hits. The social media footprint is also sizable - 313,289 Twitter followers, 131,253 Facebook Fans and numerous integration points with distributed social networks.
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The term “Web 2.0″ returns nearly 100 million search results on Google. But what is it really? Can you look at something and say definitively that it is Web 2.0? And does it matter? In this post we explore these questions in some detail - but to properly frame the discussion, we must start with a related question. What was Web 1.0?
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Not surprisingly, there are several ways to answer this question. One way to think of the size of the Internet is to count its users. China recently announced that they have reached 298 million users - a number just shy of the entire population of the United States. Using this same methodology to count all Internet users, we can estimate that there are about 1.6 billion Internet users - or put another way, about 24% of the world’s population.
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JavaOne is happening this week. One of the primary highlights is the Java Store - recently announced on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. The Java Store is the largest developer-to-consumer software distribution channel to date and shows great potential. It is a powerful entry into the market and could be a game changer in both the desktop and mobile spaces.
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Many authors and thinkers have posited the benefits of a digital currency backed by gold. Currencies backed by gold have been historically stable and not as subject to inflation as currencies that can just be rolled off the printing press at will. For many years I’ve been fascinated by the notion of such a currency and by partnering with GoldMoney, I’ve been able to help bring that idea to life.
GoldMoney has patented a process by which small units of gold and silver can be securely exchanged electronically. By taking this system into the mobile space, we are able to offer individuals and businesses a chance to make real-time, face-to-face financial transactions in units that have intrinsic value. This should not be underrated. By using the GoldMoney system there’s a huge reduction in counter party risk: You no longer have to rely on your bank to stay solvent - or on your government’s ability to borrow money. GoldMoney holds physical metal in secure vaults located in London and Zurich. All of the metal is audited quarterly by a third party and is insured by Lloyds of London. It’s as close as you can get to having your own personal Fort Knox.
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TechStart, a non-profit organization founded by the Software Association of Oregon, launched their new website recently. TechStart’s mission is:
To promote technology education to strengthen the teamwork, critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills of K-12 students and, in so doing, awaken a passion for technology among all Oregon students.
I had the pleasure of working with President Chris Brooks and his team to develop TechStart’s new website. Working with non-profit organizations is personally gratifying; my frequent non-profit projects are one of many reasons why I love working at Concentric Sky. I’m particularly happy to work with TechStart, and hope that the next generation of students will benefit from an early introduction to math and science as much as I have.
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As a Quality Assurance technician at Concentric Sky, I use a lot of tools to make me better, stronger, faster. Perhaps the most powerful tool is Selenium, a suite of products that records web activity and plays it back faster than the human hand can click.
I think about software Quality Assurance as, in essence, two big sides of one coin. Make sure the product does what it’s supposed to do, and make sure it doesn’t do things it’s not supposed to do. The first side is really pretty straightforward, and tends to say the same through the life of the product. Making the product do what it’s supposed to do is the realm of documentation, test cases and test plans. Order, structure, repetition. That’s where Selenium beats the heck out of a human tester.
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Nginx is an incredibly fast and efficient web server and reverse proxy system. It’s a step away from traditional web servers that attempt to directly incorporate support for many types of scripting languages. In fact, Nginx only serves up only static data - but it does it in a hurry. I know, I know - who only has static content? You might be surprised how much of it you do have.
Nginx has a concise and powerful syntax for determining how to handle a request. It first checks to see if a static file exists, and if one does not exist, it then acts as a reverse proxy and sends your request to another service. For instance, for a php script, nginx will determine that it is a dynamic request, and it will then kick the request off to a fastcgi server. For a ruby on rails application, it will send the request to a mongrel cluster.
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