b(ond)log

Microsoft and Yahoo potential merger is being billed as the largest tech merger. When such large software companies merge, it worries me.

There are many facets to the merger including markets, web presence, customers, communication tools, employees, work culture, among others. When financial companies that have money in their accounts merge they just become bigger institutions with larger capital to play with. When manufacturing companies (and others who make stuff) merge, they can optimize their making process and put together their product portfolio. However, when software companies merge it means they have figured out they are not able to complement their portfolio by building it themselves.

Most big software houses can afford to build a piece of software in terms of people and development cost. The harder part is stealing customers and mindshare away from products that already exist. You are effectively buying the other company to get the customers. Software companies do not really have any redundant operations to save on except the employees who work on duplicate efforts in both companies.

Everyone including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Myspace are just fighting for the same crowd of people spending time on their pages for pretty much the same thing – mail, search, news, socializing – and hope to get the rest of the industry to pay for their eyeballs. Microsoft and Yahoo have a large pool of smart people in the house who have built many different technologies. But, they do not expect to put a few hundred people to a project on their own and create something that attracts and retains customers or eyeballs (to get the advertising money). There are not too many ways you can slice and dice and present those same features (at last that is what MSFT and YHOO think if they are merging).

You can hear them thinking: “We cannot really think of do anything else to create to get more customers, let us just put your customers and my customers together and see if we can hold on to all of them”

I was LMAO ROFL (enjoying it immensely) when I saw the announcement of the Apple iPhone price cut to 399 all the way from 599 (or to 400 from 600 as your brain should really see it). Whatever be the reasons for the price cut, the joke is on those guys who stood in line less than two months ago to have the privilege of paying 50% higher price just for the sake of owning it a few days earlier than the rest of the crowd. I bet a whole bunch of them just bought it for the cool-factor than really needing to zoom in and out of their pictures with two fingers instead of pressing keys. I do not remember anything falling so much in price after so much hype like the iPhone. Some call it a ripoff of the early adopters! Snazzy interface with handicapped functionality only extracts so much from only so many lusers users wallets.

I know geeks take immense pleasure in staying at the cutting edge of technology by buying the latest gadgets. Phones are not the only such gadgets where early adopters pay the huge premiums. Computers, Blu-Ray/HDDVD players, Televisions and most other equipment charge a premium when they are the top-of-the-line. I remember someone at the recent Hotchips 2007 conference announcing at the mike that he regularly buys $8000 systems to play games. BTW, he looked more than 50 years old!
I said in a previous post of mine about shopping that I Forget the Features to avoid paying too much to future proof my purchases but focus on what I want in basics. However, I am deeply indebted to sheeple people who pay through their nose for bleeding edge technology since they partly contribute to keeping the technology industry (ergo my job) humming.

I did the whole bleeding edge thingy when I bought my first cellphone, a Sony CMD Z1. I bought it when I was a student (when a dollar is worth more than $1) for more than $200 and after just one year it was priced at $39. My last two cellphones were exactly the type of purchases that vampires vendors hate. I bought the Treo 300 (ugly beast of a phone) when the rebates dropped so low that I made $30 when I bought it on Amazon (and made $50 more when I sold it on craigslist a couple of years later). I realized I did not really need the keyboard as much when it made the phone so bulky. The next purchase was when I bought two Audiovox SMT 5600 Windows mobile phones for $20 each from cingular when it was being phased out.

I reckon I saved about 600 dollars in total by waiting an year from the prime-time of those phones. Dropping the price of an iPhone does not do much for me. My Audiovox plays mp3s very well through its speakerphone speaker. It also syncs very well over my vmware installation of windows to my corporate Exchange. Imagine saying that with iPhone in one sentence – sync, vmware, Exchange! The one I lust after is the HTC Vox (interestingly at the same $400 price point currently as iPhone) with a slick keyboard underneath a candybar form factor. I am still waiting for it to be released and become obsolete…

I was looking for a quick way to build a hierarchical navigation tool in Ruby on Rails. There are good examples to build your own tree in Ruby when you use acts_as_tree and Single Table Inheritance etc., but nothing very easy to do otherwise.

A little bit of searching led me to the railstree plugin (source). Unfortunately, the documentation and any notes I found were in Portuguese so I thought it will be useful to illustrate how to use it in English. You could just try the Google translation of the Portuguese page and get most of what I have below (and get a few laughs at the translation while doing it).

First download railstree plugin from one of the rubyforge mirrors and install the files into the appropriate directories. You might need to hack the RAILS_ROOT path in the install.rb to correctly install the files using the install.rb script. You could also just repeat what the script is doing by manually copying the files yourself. (The script/plugin method of installation mentioned in the homepage of railstree did not work for me).

Now you have to include the javascript standard files with the two additional lines at the bottom in your view.rhtml file:

(Note that I have not figured out how to show HTML tags inside my snippets so remember to add < and > to HTML tags in the snippets.)

You could always do a simpler version


< %= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
< %= stylesheet_link_tag ‘tree’ %>
< %= javascript_include_tag ‘tree’ %>


Now you need to construct the tree in your controller. In my RoR project, the navigation tree is displayed in all controllers so I just put it in app/controllers/application.rb:

Now the explanation: The above code is constructing a navigation tree for a two-level hierarchy with a Parent Model and a Child Model. The Child Model has a parent_id attribute linking to the Parent table. The default action when someone clicks on any node on the tree is to call the show Action for that node. This is done by setting the pnode.link_to_remote and cnode.link_to_remote with the parameters as above. The update attribute points to the div of the view to be updated when the node is clicked in the tree. The base attribute is very important since that reference is used internally in the railstree plugin to callback so it better be not null.

I did not try modifying the images for the icons of the tree but you can do that by using the pnode.icon method. You can also set the open/close status of the node by calling the open method but we will come back to that later.

Now how do you show this in your view?

div id="dtree"
< % if (@menutree) %>
< %= @menutree.to_s %>
< % end %>
/div

Viola! Now you have the tree just like it shows on the homepage of the project. For an additional tweak, I managed to figure out how to show/hide the tree by clicking on a link. Just add this at the top of the code snippet above (check to make sure the div ids are the same, dtree in the example here):


script type="text/javascript"
//< ![CDATA[
function hideTreeMenu(){
Element.toggle('dtree');
if (Element.visible('dtree')) {
Element.setStyle('content', {marginLeft: "210px"});
} else {
Element.setStyle('content', {marginLeft: "5px"});
};
};
//]]>
/script

a
href="#" onclick="hideTreeMenu();">Show/Hide Tree
/a


The extra adjusting of the Element.setStyle is to just move my content into the space where I had my tree so hiding actually gives more space in the code for the content div. If you do not care about moving the content to reclaim space, you could just do a Element.toggle call. Note that I am a javascript noobie so others might have better ways of doing this.

Also, since I am a javascript and cookies noobie I could not figure out how to set a cookie to save/retrieve the state of the tree when someone actually clicks on a node in the tree. In the current form, when someone clicks on any node in the tree, it updates the content div and then curls up and shows a fully collapsed tree than the last state. I do not think I managed to even save/retrieve the Show/Hide state before and after a click on a node. Other than telling me to try cookies, let me know if you can explain how to do it.

It did not have the slashdot effect but Marc Andreesen linked to the http://www.softwareinterview.com website in his post on recruiting and the traffic jumped a few hundred visitors the next couple of days. I guess the site showed up in some google search he tried (if he uses google).
See the post here: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html

I sometimes feel like I am living in a cave when I keep reading all the magazines and webzines about social networking sites. It is not that I am not online. I have a web presence, developed a website in Ruby on Rails (the current hot thingy) and show in enough Google search pages. But, I seemed to have completely skipped the whole connected on the web generation.

Other than email, the amount of internet connectedness that I do is pretty low. A little bit of rec.music.indian.music (RMIM) in 1996, a little bit of Yahoo chat in 1999, and currently, a little bit of LinkedIn.

I know all the sites that are talked about all the time like here: Slashdot | Friendster\’s Rise and Fall. Not only have I not been active, but I can also count on my fingers the number of times I have been to MySpace and YouTube.

The only time I went to MySpace was when it was linked off this interesting story about a guy who lost his Sidekick and tracked the people who found it but did not return to him. He found they were taking pictures on the phone that were synced to the online site and he tracked down their MySpace profile. I think I did browse around to YouTube for some fun stuff (Darth Vader videos), but it gets pretty boring after about minutes of video.

I do believe in Networking. I once even religiously read the “Dig Your Well Before You Are Thirsty” book and quote from it often. (The frequent one is that the USC Alumni Network is mentioned as the best example of alumni network). I use LinkedIn for my professional and alumni networking and see some useful professional referral traffic flowing around.

Who are all these people who find time to spend time chatting, sending messages, commenting on myspaces and having a “Second Life” ala Linden Labs? Shouldn\’t professionals be working, students be studying and socialites be dancing at the clubs? Are we too busy to live and party live nowadays?