Not too much going on this week.

Sun and Oracle
Does anyone not know about this? Is anyone nervous?

FacebookStatus.org
Hilarious! I’m gonna use the Facebook status generator for a week as a social experiment.

Ubuntu charges forward with 9.04
Great stuff. Mac people, stop trying to convert me!

Sponsor Aloha on Rails
This is going to be the best conference ever. If you haven’t been to Oahu, this is your perfect excuse to come. October is the best time to come.

Is this one viral?

Dad smashes daughters phone after 10,000 texts
My high-quality, thought-provoking story of the weak. 10,000 texts in one month. That’s 333.333 text per day. Assuming an 8 hour sleep schedule, that’s 20 texts an hour. Seriously. That’s not that much???? Calm down, DAD!

Jruby on Rails on Google App Engine
Some people work fast!

Why I don’t object to Array#sum and My Objections to Array#sum
Great discussion here. Start by checking the reddit comments on the link. I’m glad they brought this issue to the forefront. My next blog post will detail how my vote can be bought for or against Array#sum. As you may know, anything can be bought.

San Diego Ruby Podcast
In case you haven’t seen it, these guys have some videos of their presentations. There’s a choppy Paperclip plugin Presentation. I’m all about Paperclip now.

ALOHA ON RAILS
It’s official. We have a date: October 5-6, 2009. All the Rails geeks will be packing their board shorts and sunscreen to come to our awesome island. Seth didn’t hold back, settled on the Marriot in Waikiki. It’s 1 block from the beach.

App Engine Java Overview
As predicted here, Java will now be supported by the Google App Engine. Now, we just need a Java version of Mysql and everything will run like it does at home…

Microsoft fined by German, 9 Million Euros for monopoly style pricing
I wonder if paying out fines for anti-trust fines is built into Microsoft cost structure. It must be by now. Matt Asay talks about how much influence Microsoft can have by controlling the user’s first experience on the web. Too bad msversus.org doesn’t keep his site up to date anymore but if you haven’t read it, check it out NOW.

Google Contact
Found here:www.google.com/contacts. I have a lot of my contacts in my Yahoo! address book. I am slowing moving them over to this one.

TechCrunch Layoff Tracker
This is eerily reminiscent of the old fuckedcompany.com. That Pud guy was pretty damn funny.

Japan’s Wacky Indoor Beach
Do you think the wave is more crowded that Waikiki? I wonder why come here when they can just go to this awesome place!
More pictures of the Miyazaki Ocean Dome.

RubyMine 1.0 Beta
I found this on the a Ruby Inside post I’m gonna try to use it for a week and see how it goes. The only problem is, if I’m using flex builder in Eclipse, why not use Aptana?

Playing with Ubiquity
My co-worker turned me on to Ubiquity, an amazing Firefox Plugin. If you don’t know what ubiquity is, watch this video. Be prepare to be blown away:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Today, I installed the Facebook Plugin for Pidgin. Pretty basic, just downloaded the .deb file and double clicked on it.

One caveat was that I had the Pidgin MusicTracker plugin enabled and this caused Pidgin to crash when I set up my Facebook account. The MusicTracker can be disabled for selected acocunts and it must be disabled for Facebook. The solution was to disable MusicTracker, setup the facebook account and go back re-enable MusicTracker and disabling it for Facebook.

It took me a while to figure this out but it’s really a no brainer.
I was getting:

>> "biodatabases".singularize
=> "biodatabasis"

To fix this, I edited config/initializers/inflections.rb and added:

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
   inflect.irregular 'biodatabase', 'biodatabases'
end

I know this is in the docs somewhere but I put in on my blog so I don’t forget.

‘Jaunty Jackalope’ Ubuntu springs into beta
Sounds like some good new features for my OS of choice. Full details here.

Java: Coming Soon to Google’s App Engine
Sladd got me all excited about App Engine last year. However, we quickly discovered that coming from Rails, using Python (Django or Pylons) is like going back to FoxPro. If Google’s App Engine allows Java, we can use JRuby instead of this ridiculous hack for Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places.)

Open Bio Google Summer of Code
If you are student and jobless, apply to Google Summer or Code. I’ve heard great things about it.

ReQall Goes Pro: Smarter Task Management for the iPhone
Geo-based tasks and task reminders. This was Tyler’s idea and these guys stole it. That’s the downside of being jacked into the Matrix: others can read your thoughts.

Php Women
I would have never switched to Ruby if I knew that chicks dig PHP. They need to add a Personals section. I could relate to “Experiences of a conference virgin” because, sadly, I too am a conferences virgin.

Sansa SlotMusic for $20.
Screw you, Ipod Shuffle! Seriously, this thing could be a good audio book buddy.

Create db from fasta file:

formatdb -p F -i EST_Clade_A.fasta -n EST_Clade_A

This will create a 3 files: EST_Clade_A.nhr, EST_Clade_A.nin, EST_Clade_A.nsq. If you omit the -n option, it will create EST_Clade_A.fasta.nhr, EST_Clade_A.fasta.nin, EST_Clade_A.fasta.nsq
Blast example:

blastall -p blastn -i EST_Clade_C_1.fasta -d EST_Clade_A  -e 25

Singing a classic with his more mature, less nasally voice…

I’m gonna try to post a running commentary on tech news once a week….

What IBM might gain by buying Sun Microsystems
Interesting article. Too bad we have Dells and Apples everywhere. I’d like to see a demographic breakdown of who buys IBM and Sun servers. I would guess that people that came into the industry in the 70s and 80s are all over IBM while the early dot-commers from the 90s think that Sun is the bomb. Tools like me just want a Dell that they can throw Linux on. I know, I know: what about all those cool enterprise wide applications (that nobody knows how to use or install.)

Lenova’s new Pocket Yoga
I could see it as a good roadside hacking device as long as it runs Linux. I like the name too. Honestly, I was expecting to a see a small version of my first Yoga instructor, Vanessa. She used to make us hold poses for 10-15 minutes at a time. A pocket version of her would really help with my posture.

Android vs IPhone 3.0 Showdown
The only way my blog will ever go viral is if I mention the iPhone. I’m not much of a smartphone guy but this a good read.

Rackable’s New Servers Like It Hot
It’s amazing where server technology is going. Check out this one, it can run at 104 degrees. Boom! I hope never have to set up another server. Just have some guy maintain these and I’ll access everything in the cloud.

Lending Club
Wow. Social Lending. This is a pretty neat concept. They only lend to people with FICA scores over 600 and claim to only have a 3% default rate.