The Ruby on Rails web application framework has built up a tremendous head of steam over the last year. Fueled by some significant benefits and an impressive portfolio of real-world applications already in production, Rails is destined to continue making significant inroads in 2006. Simply put, Ruby on Rails is an open source tool that gives you the advantage of rapidly creating great web applications backed by SQL databases to keep up with the speed of the web. And with the release of Rails 1.0 kicking off the new year, there's never been a better time to climb aboard.

It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. A popular text editor used by many Rails programmers is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs.

This article introduces you to Ruby on Rails by building a trivial web application step by step. Consider it a ride on the express train—an overview of what Rails can do, including a look at features new to Rails 1.0. In the end you'll be better equipped to consider the advantages of powering your web application with Rails.

Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X

zsh is one of the unix shells that comes with OS X. I've written a few comments about why you might want to make zsh your default user shell. Briefly, it is most like ksh, the user-unfrienly but powerful shell prefered by serious shell programmers, except that it is in fact the most user-friendly and powerful interactive shell. In other words, it is simply better than everything else. zsh is to the other unix shells what OS X is to other operating systems. If you appreciate OS X, it is likely you will appreciate what zsh has to offer.

My zsh startup files for OS X

This morning at the CeBIT conference in Germany, we revealed the new visuals for the Office 2007 user interface.

You can see a few screenshots of the new look on the Office 2007 UI Preview Site. If you've got a craving to see even more, I've created a mini-gallery of full-size screenshots from a recent build of the product below.

A New Look For Microsoft Office

On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Joshua Spanogle who tells us about his new thriller, "Isolation Ward." It's a fully-formed biotech thriller -- from the fudging of scientific data, to xenotransplantation, to bioethics and the lure of the big money in biotech.

IT Conversations: Joshua Spanogle - BioTech Nation

The motion picture and television industries have seemingly declared global war on copyright infringement. This is understandable, of course, most of us want the creators of works to be able to enjoy their rights and profit from their efforts. But in the enduring battle for stricter restrictions on usage, the rights to create technology that's potentially infringing is caught in the crossfire. Cory Doctorow argues that these battles have little to do with the real intent of copyright and stresses that open source developers have a real stake in the outcome of this battle.

European mandates such as the Digital Video Broadcasting organization's Content Protection & Copy Management are similar to the American broadcast flag but possibly more draconian in scope. Doctorow argues that digital rights management (DRM) is based on the notion that you can design a safe "so strong you can leave it in the robber's living room" and that DRM technologies treat users as attackers. According to Doctorow, DRM does little to protect copyright and is not a contract, as some might argue. At stake, he believes, is the open source community's ability to write software, understand and improve technology, and disrupt markets with new and better way to create or distribute creative works.

An active question and answer period follows Cory's talk.

IT Conversations: Cory Doctorow - Europe's Coming Broadcast Flag

David Brin debates Brad Templeton on "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?"

IT Conversations: Transparency - Accelerating Change 2004

The technology marketplace has changed in the 10 years since Netscape 1.1 was first released. Some relatively new internet technology-based companies now service more customers than their 'more established' non-internet counterparts.

Mary Meeker's presentation looks at data points that help us understand what has happened in the internet industry within the last few years, and the most likely places for substantial growth in the next phase of this industry.

Meeker shows why communication is key to the continued growth in the internet industry and how the Broadband Internet and Mobile Internet areas will lead the way in the next 10-year computing cycle. For example, Google and Yahoo!'s combined revenue from advertising is now supporting a huge ecosystem of other internet-based companies. The data in this presentation illustrates how the US is lagging behind other countries, and how the biggest growth in the internet-related market is just starting.

Meeker describes some of the $4 Billion deals that happened towards the end of 2005 and why these deals and the huge capital expenditure of the internet market leaders are necessary. She also talks about where the Broadband and Mobile markets make their money and what this may mean for companies moving from one of these markets into the other. The presentation ends with an illustration of how the internet is becoming pervasive and what this means for future developments that will drive continued growth and increased sales.

IT Conversations: Mary Meeker - Internet Trends

One of the standard arguments one hears against network neutrality rules is that network providers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to certain kinds of traffic, such as video. If QoS is necessary, the argument goes, and if net neutrality rules would hamper QoS by requiring all traffic to be treated the same, then net neutrality rules must be harmful. Today, I want to unpack this argument and see how it holds up in light of computer science research and engineering experience.

Quality of Service: A Quality Argument?

Today I want to continue last week’s discussion of how network discrimination might actually occur. Specifically, I want to talk about packet reordering.

Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination, Part 2

One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of traffic discrimination. I think that in reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand how discrimination would actually be put into practice. That’s what I want to explain today. Don’t worry, the details aren’t very complicated.

Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination