Industry Zero: One man's thought on software, business and life

Are we still number one?

Leo — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:09:11 +0000

Looking at the Olympic medal count, it reflects the new world order. US is no longer the super power if sport is an indication. Even sports were used to be dominated by US such as tracks and boxing, US is no longer the powerhouse that it once was. Yes, we can say we still have the highest medal count but if you look closely. It is China that has the most gold modals (almost double of what US got so far). US is getting weaker and weaker. It is time for change. The country has gone wrong in so many way because of our government’s bad policy. It is time for a big and real change. Vote for change.

ShareThis

Three Pillars of a modern society

Leo — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:07:57 +0000

Here are the three pillars of a modern society: Energy, health and education. We need to have sustainable renewable energy so that all of our modern industries and life can depend on. Health and education is the basis of human capital. We need to a healthy population and a health care system that can provide health care to all citizens. We need to have the best education system that will continue educate his citizens throughout their life. That means it doesn’t end at college. If we have these three strong pillars, we can build a sustainable modern society. That should be our priority. Nothing else.

ShareThis

Google map broken today

Leo — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:55:09 +0000

Google map’s infowindow is not showing up today due to a bug in Google map. Here is the thread.

ShareThis

Use clearspring to develop and publish widget

Leo — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:47:05 +0000

I tried out clearspring’s platform today to develop and deploy a widget. It is as easy as drinking milk and eating cookie. In less than 15 minutes, I was able to develop a widget and publish it to major platforms like facebooks, Yahoo, Google, MSN and Netvibes. If I were to do this for each platform, it will probably take me days. They clearly have a wonderful platform. The question is how they are going to monetize it. If it is going to be based on advertising, they will probably need to put some ads on all the widgets that they host. If it is not based on advertising, they will need to charge a fee but that won’t be happening because the service is now free and users will scream if they start charging. The other revenue model could be charging Enterprise. Assuming that business might want to create business widget and used them within their intranet, clearspring might provide them a good platform to do that with a fee.

ShareThis

How to install ruby-xslt on Ubuntu

Leo — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:02:31 +0000

I was trying to install ruby-xslt on my Ubuntu laptop after I installed on my Mac. When I do a sudo gem install ruby-xslt, I got the following:

gem install ruby-xsltBuilding native extensions.  This could take a while...

ERROR:  Error installing ruby-xslt:

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension./usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb install ruby-xslt

checking for xmlParseDoc() in -lxml2... yes

checking for xsltParseStylesheetFile() in -lxslt... no

checking for exsltRegisterAll() in -lexslt... no

extconf.rb:4: command not found: xslt-config --cflags

creating extconf.h

creating Makefile

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/mkmf.rb:1102: warning: global variable `$preload' not initialized

make

gcc -I. -I. -I/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-linux -I. -DRUBY_EXTCONF_H=\"extconf.h\"  -fPIC -g -Wall -I/usr/include/libxml2  -g -O2 -DUSE_ERROR_HANDLER -DUSE_EXSLT  -c xslt_lib.c

In file included from xslt_lib.c:19:

xslt.h:36:27: error: libxslt/extra.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:37:26: error: libxslt/xslt.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:38:35: error: libxslt/xsltInternals.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:39:31: error: libxslt/transform.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:40:31: error: libxslt/xsltutils.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:41:29: error: libxslt/imports.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:44:30: error: libexslt/exslt.h: No such file or directory

After I do some Googling, here is the solution:

sudo apt-get install libxml-ruby1.8 libxslt1-dev
sudo gem install ruby-xslt

That is it!

ShareThis

My first commercial rails app died with a bang!

Leo — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:31:44 +0000

No software can last forever. My first commercial rails app (revolution health’s symptom checker) has been retired. The reason for the retirement is that we want to replace one that doesn’t require paying license fee for the backend and data. The original one used rails as front end and talked to a Cold Fusion backend app (which we licensed through Mayo Clinic) through web service. Just 3 days before we retired the old app, the old symptom checker get mentioned in Rachael Ray (the TV show). Yes, very ironic. It reached its highest moment and then it died. But better die at the top then live at the bottom. Here is the segment:

ShareThis

Why big oil companies will become obsolete

Leo — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:00:56 +0000

My sister-in-law works for one of the big old companies. She told me the bureaucracy and weird policy in her company. She has to take a safe driving course (every employee have to do that) once a year because the company are afraid of lawsuit in the even if an employee get into an accident during traveling for company business. The also installed a software called Workpace which force the user to take a break every 5 minutes. I didn’t make this up. The reason is that there was a lawsuit from an employee complaining about repetitive motions (I ask using a mouse or typing) causing his/her injure. The big oil companies have too much money that they are targeted for many lawsuits. They can’t move or change because of bureaucracy and the fear of being sued. The only reason that they are still here is that we haven’t changed. We still depend very much on oil. Once that is changed. All the big oil companies will go under. They won’t change to an energy company which can use other energy resources beside oil. No, they will die because they are dinosaur. I don’t know when this will happen but I think it is going to happen within a couple of decades.

ShareThis

Got Groovy installed, up and running

Leo — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:16:50 +0000

I was able to get Groovy installed on my Mac installed, up and running in no time. I can now start playing with it. It is pretty simple, just download, uppack and change two environment variables and you are good to go. The only thing about Groovy is that there aren’t many good examples or tutorial yet so show case the language. I will spend more time to play with it and see if I like it. I will also spend some time check out Grails also.

ShareThis

JRuby or Rubinius

Leo — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:25:16 +0000

We (the place I work) are having a debate on if we should move our infrastructure to VM that run ruby instead of default Ruby interpreter that is built natively for different OS. Running Ruby on VM can provide a better security and simplify the upgrading and deployment process. So there is a business case for it. One bad thing about Ruby is that there are a lot of compatibility issues between releases. So that will complicate things more. Anyway, so if we do want to go with running Ruby on VM, then we need to make a decision on JRuby or Rubinius. Rubinius is a Ruby VM that built specificly for Ruby so there is probably some advantage of using it because it will be optimized for Ruby. But Rubinius is still very beta. Recently they just rewrite it in C++ from C. Also there is probably no other language will be running on Rubinius (at least for the near future). So JRuby might be more logical choice because it is more mature and there are many languages now running on java VM. So it seems to me that JRuby will probably a better bet.

ShareThis

Microsoft and Google agrees on Electronic Heath Records (EHR) standard

Leo — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:09:10 +0000

There is an article yesterday that Microsoft, Google and some other major players have agreed on EHR standard. The standard is drafted by Markle foundation’s connect for health. The standard document is here. This could be very interesting. It covers a variety of principle and guidelines on Consumer Policy and Consumer Technology. I am going to spend sometimes to read through the documents. I am sure that I will be falling into sleep but I need to read them to build a better PHR.

ShareThis