Rudimentary Art of Programming & Development

I have a need for a simple hosted SVN solution for my toy project. I don’t want to make my own bug tracking system, and if I’m using other’s, I want it free (as in beer).

Thus, number one obvious choice is Trac. But it doesn’t really support more than 1 project.

Next is Redmine, an open source bug tracker and project management tool written in Ruby on Rails. Rails is not my cup of tea, but definitely easier to install than Trac. Redmine is pretty awesome, it has these features:

Other speakers at startup schools include:

• Paul Graham
• Jeff Bezos

Cuil claims that it searches 3x more web pages than Google, 10x more than Micro$oft.

Loud claim, but I supposed the founders can make such claims since they are well decorated ex Googlers.

But the main question is:

Will it be a better search experience (for me)?

Through out the whole evening I’m trying to search with Cuil. Youtube videos about soccer, mac pictures, online comic, Scion cars, Honda history, etc, etc…

So many things to search. Let’s see how Cuil fulfill my needs:

• I typed: “youtube scion xb video”. Where’s the youtube page?
• And then “soccer videos“, it searches some stuff, but not really online soccer videos of latest european matches.
• “Mac pictures“… First page is about Bernie Mac???
• Moving on, how about “naruto manga“, aha! Finally useful pages that shows me where to read the latest Naruto manga online.
• Next, “honda history” search term. I’m surprised that wikipedia page about Honda is not even on the first page.
• Finally, I typed “Cuil“. It cannot even find itself. Even Mahalo can find itself.

I don’t know what would be the scientific way of evaluating search engines. Overall, Cuil hasn’t been a very good experience.

Side Note:

Since they are ex Googlers, are they using Python?

And this is the YouTube video of it:

This is another not so new social networking site, but its idea is somehow refreshing and original.

• There are a lot of fashion blogs/magazines…
• There are a lot of gossip blogs…
• There are a lot of social network sites…

But there’s not a whole lot of those three combined in 1 site. It definitely has high advertisement values.

Popsugar is built using Drupal, one of the oldest open source CMS. It has tons of modules. A social networking app can easily be built on top of Drupal.

Detailed conversation about Popsugar’s technical specs & Drupal tips is recorded here.

Granted that Drupal source code is somewhat funky, along with its hook architecture, but it is well known to be flexible and capable to withstand medium-sized traffic.

References:

• The Popsugar Site
• Drupal page about Popsugar
• Drupal page about TeamSugar – The social network component of Popsugar
• More Drupal powered sites

Reference: 

This is the link to Webware Top 100

Friendster might be a yester-year trend (I certainly don’t think so since IT is the major social network site that I use), but its up and down story is the kind of tale that fascinates me.

In case some readers didn’t know, they rejected $30 million dollars buyout from Google in 2003.

Their super fast growth was probably 1 of the biggest problem, they couldn’t scale as fast as they grow.

It’s best for readers to simply read the articles. It’s very interesting read.

References:

• NYTimes full coverage on Friendster
• Wall Street Journal Video – The Fall of Friendster
• Wikipedia – Friendster

This is an essay written by Gordon Moore one of the co-founder of Intel (the other one is Robert Noyce).

He starts describing his journey after graduated from Caltech PhD program. His sight was first set on Dow Chemical, but things didn’t pan out.

Then he moved on to: Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Not liking the job, he started to apply a couple other places before receiving phone call from Bill Shockley.

At Shockley Semiconductor, most of his peers were about the same age, late 20s.

After Shockley freaking out on several occasions, eight of the employees (nicknamed Fairchild 8 ) quit and set up Fairchild Semiconductor.

Setting up Fairchild Semiconductor itself was pretty accidental. All 8 of them were just looking for another job but later approached by a group of people from Hayden Stone Investment Banker. They told Fairchild 8 to set up their own company instead.

One interesting lesson to learn from early days of Fairchild Semiconductor:

Fairchild 8 hired an engineering manager because they don’t want to repeat Shockley’s mistake. Then, they got Ed Baldwin. This guy taught the young entrepreneurs various things, but in the end he left to create competing semiconductor company. Yeah, that must felt sucked.

A couple of years later and $150 million worth of business later, things started to go bad between Fairchild and its parent company. This resulted in Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild and setup Intel.

The Fairchild tale as well as each individual founder stories are awesome. It is safe to say that they bring silicon to Silicon Valley in a big way.

References:

Main Article

Eugene Kleiner’s Bio at Wikipedia

Gordon Moore’s Bio at Wikipedia

For readers and all fellow developers: Finding documentation has become less of a pain. Thanks to Gotapi.

Currently they have:

• HTML/CSS/Javascript. Too bad they don’t have MSDN Javascript.
• Javascript UI libraries.
• XML
• C/C++ libraries.
• PHP
• Ruby on Rails
• Python (Reading from blog.gotapi, Python is 1 of the first documentation)
• Perl
• Erlang
• MySQL
• and much more…

I highly recommend readers to go check Gotapi. RTFM has just gotten easier.

References:

• The Site!
• The site’s Blog
• MSDN Javascript Language Reference

I knew sooner or later someone would have going to make this: geni.com

It’s ajax family tree!!!

Just to inform readers, I attempted to create family social network called bbster (pronounce: baby-ster) last year, in which the main feature is AJAX family tree.

The project failed half way because divorce made re-drawing the family tree rather difficult. Thus, I wonder how geni would handle divorce in their family tree. I was using cakePHP as the project’s framework.

Wow, I knew that someone would thought of it sooner or later, but not this soon.

Congratulation Geni team!

UPDATE:

Obvious glaring fact that I overlook, Geni.com use Flash as opposed to AJAX. Thanks to Scott (smhill) for pointing it out.