Waldo Jaquith has set up an aggregation of Charlottesville VA Blogs and has included me in the aggregation. You’ll find my friend Erik Hatcher on that list also. He is the one who pointed out Waldo’s aggregator after I whined that no one was commenting on my posts. Then he reminded me of the distributed dialog that happens with blogs and it is quite possible never to get any comments but to that doesn’t mean you’re not being read. Erik used to blog alot on his personal blog but now he is obsessed with Lucene and spends all his day keeping up his Lucene Blog. Thanks Erik and Thanks Waldo.

David St Lawrence’s Mission Statement “Why I write” page is a very good start on the reasons why I might blog. Mostly I am interested in working out my thought on a variety of subjects. (Its cheaper than therapy:). But seriously, it helps me communicate with others about subjects and topics that are on my mind. I don’t want to stimulate thought as much as just discuss these issues with like and not so like minded individuals. I love the picture on david’s blog today. It beautiful.

I’ve been lucky to have very few relatives that are close to me who have died. My mother’s father died when she was 6. I don’t remember much of my father’s father because I didn’t see him much before he died when I was 7. There have been other family members that have died but wasn’t close to. The most recent was my great uncle Bob, my father’s uncle. Actually, both my parents were close to him. He was the matriarch of my father’s family up in Massachusetts. We would go visit him, he come visit us, and my parents would go to the Azores with him on vacation 5 years ago to visit my father’s grandparents ancesteral home. So when he died from pancreatic cancer 4 years ago, it hit my parents pretty hard.

Cancer seems to be a big threat in my family. Besides my great uncle, I had two other great uncles died from cancer (smoking), several other aunts and uncles develop forms of it, and even my mother had cervical cancer after I was born. She couldn’t have any more children after that. Now cancer reers its ugly head again.

I found out yesterday that my grandmother has cancer. When I talked to her today, she told me the doctors said it was in her spleen. I don’t know how that compares to pancreatic (100 % deadly) but she seems to be doing alright now. I don’t know if they can do anything for her at the moment except give her drugs for it. She’s a fighter though and it doesn’t seem to worry her though. With all that she has gone through in her life, cancer to her seems to be a piece of cake. She’s the type that doesn’t complain about nor would talk about it, but I can only wonder how she feels. Only those that go through this can.

I asked the following question about RoR on the NOVA JUG. I received no responses but that is not too surprising since it was after all the NOVA _JUG_ not RUG. But since it was within the thread I thought I would give it a shot. Now I am asking it here.

I have a question about product development shops using RoR for a product that they sell to other clients. How do you protect the code? Now one suggestion is that you host the application and that will prevent users from modifying your code and creating support issues for you. Now that is one option but how about those cases where the client insists or we insist that the client host the app. Before our recent conversion to Java we were a building an app that used Cold Fusion for the web VB/Access for the desktop and backed by Sql server. The support requirements to support the mods the client would make were killing us and strangling our development efforts. So we switched to Java and provided a way for the clients to configure the app instead of modifying it. We use Swing for the desktop side and J2EE for the appserver with struts and then later Tapestry for the web. How would an organization avoid the pitfalls of visible code that RoR has in our environment but gain the benefits of increased productivity?

So there you have it. I think Ruby is great as an embedded scripting language. But amist all the buzz, can it be used by product development shops or is it just another buzz that will die down or an opportunity to sell books or only useful for departments wishing to write their own in house apps?

What do you think?

What the French (and yesterday the Dutch) are saying by voting against the Constitutional Treaty in Europe reflects the same concerns incorporated in the USA Patriot Act …. ‘non” - keep them pieds noirs ou’ a here! ‘No” - keep them non-Judeo- Christians out! In both cases, pulling up the draw bridges may actually do economic harm. A smarter approach would be to open up to more outside resources and cooperate more fully with “them others”. How about this idea? We could save money, reduce the loss of American lives, and take the focus off of the the head Crusader in Washington by following what the British did when they went into Mesopotamia in the early 20th Century… hire foreign troops to do the fighting for us. Why wait for the Iraqis to be fully trained when there are already trained Indians and Pakistanis who might be willing to work for us? And we could do it all with a US contractor like Blackwater.