Shall we put blame on Ruby on Rails ?

June 29th, 2008

I am not a twitter user but I know there are lots of fans around. These days Twitter is not working smoothly and some friends such as Bamdadi has blamed Ruby on Rails as an inappropriate and too inexpensive choice for a such heavy duty site. My first suspected person is a weak business plan that does not plans for enough funds when the expansion (both in software and hardware) is needed. Also from a technical point of view I shall say that I cannot agree so easily with this as:

  1. PHP is also free and inexpensive but it serves lots of internet websites and I remember years ago when Yahoo! Changed from Yahoo Pages language to PHP as sign for me that the real requirement has higher priority than the fame. Also don’t forget that Wikipedia is also all in PHP (actually Mediawiki is on PHP). Java might fight better the complexity in large scales but that does not mean inexpensive (and fast) solutions such as PHP and RoR are less appropriate for heavy processing (not necessarily complex) or large scale (again not necessarily complex) projects.
  2. Database has more degree of importance here (besides the hardware and algorithms). What kind of database and database structure or load balancing strategies is being used?
  3. A good design allows us to change some heavy duty and critical mission parts of the software to a more appropriate platform, so in a good business vision one can begin with a low-cost, fast to market platform such as RoR and then switch totally or partially to a more robust platform when the funds are available.

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What Iran’s record of Firefox 3.0 downloads tells us

June 29th, 2008

I should express my surprise of the record of Iranians who downloaded Firefox 3.0 on the download day (more than 500K) ( http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord ). Being suspected on bot manipulation is no more easy to insist on without any valid reason for this suspicion , actually I think we may think more seriously about a crawling but effective population of enthusiastic and tech-savvy internet users in Iran. This is what we should consider as an important business and social fact.

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Digital Physics

April 30th, 2008

At last I found it! Yes! Since when I was a student I had this thought that some people around the world should have considered this idea that “information” is the most basic unit of the universe. I tried to find it whether anyone has made such suggestion or is there any published paper or not. Asking some people around involved in physics was not helpful and when searching the internet I always got conducted to Shanon’s “Information Theory”. I had even some guess that “Set Theory” might be also an implication of what I want to know. Also I tried to find and set some basic rules for my lost “Information Physics Theory” mostly mapping space and dimensions into world.

But then today I came across the exact phrase which I wanted to hear. And of course I found it in Wikipedia! And the key word is “Digital Physics” nor “Information Theory” or my “Information Physics Theory”:

“Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this “it from bit” doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world”.

When I was at high school I had good enthusiasm for reading Science things especially Physics. Here again I feel that I need to add it again to my hubby list.

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Commenting symbol and black holes

April 30th, 2008

Just was browsing O’Reilly Ruby Programming Language where noticed the first thing to be introduced in this book is commenting! Reading this I thought that probably because commenting symbols are the black holes of a software and quite important. We usually consider them as non-existing parts of a running software but as we usually do not consider black holes as non-existing ones , the same should be considered for commenting symbols. They have one dimension, no meaning and occupy zero space and of course nothing even the light ray can escape from their field of gravity.

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