Archive for October 31st, 2006

Googles new zen-like philosophy: Be the Internet

Random Thoughts | Posted by apokalyptik
Oct 31 2006

Picture the internet

Picture yourself as the internet

Now be the internet

At least thats what I figure google is doing. From dark fiber, to databases. From word processing to spreadsheets. From blogs to email. From widgets to wikis. From web ads to web stats. From videos to version control. Google is looking to BE the internet. It makes sense too. If you have to choose between spending the time to actively acquire new information in a space growing with the ferver of the internet versus passively already-having the information, which would you choose? I’d choose passive ownership!

What better way to be able to search the worlds information than to have that information already passing through the very arteries of your network of its own volition. Google turns into the worlds most advanced stateful packet sniffer. Poof. Google is now not more than one relationship awway from almost every single information resource on the planet.

What would google have to do to complete the coup? First “finish” and “polish” its products to get a large enough userbase on all of them for the viral-style-marketing-by-necessity “advertising” (but thats not the right word) to work. Next buy amazon, and e-bay (?) outright. Third. Work on not getting “acquired” by various governments itself (otherwise we will have something like a very dangerous big-brother on our hands).

Is this a far fetched conspiracy theory? Probably. But thats what you get with a mind that doesn’t have an off button and “downtime” in the shower. Heh. Is it likely? Maybe not, maybe. But is it an intriguing idea? Definitely!

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Ruby, Rails, and brute force

Random Thoughts | Posted by apokalyptik
Oct 31 2006

I’ve started teaching myself to work with Ruby on Rails. And since I’m a hands on guy I tend to get myself into odd situations and have to brute force myself out. For example last night I was dealing with trying to display a number of records from a database (there were only 3 records) and all I could get it to display was

###

Well it turns out that when using embedded ruby (eRuby) these two blocks of code are VERY different.

## This works
<% for i in Network.find(:all) %>
  <%= h i.name %>
<% end %>

and

## This doesnt
<%=
  for i in Network.find(:all)
    h i.name
  end
%>

Ahh, it’s always the little things in life which give you the greatest joy and the greatest frustration!

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