Casualty Maps
Today Google announced their API to Google Maps, and Yahoo! did for their maps too by the way. Lifehacker is already reporting about Casualty Maps, which shows where the people from the US lived that died in the war on Iraq. Powerful.
Looking at Ruby
I am currently looking at Ruby and Ruby on Rails for further web development and what I read so far looks very good. Check this post by the main Odeo developer: Anarchogeek: Rails, how does it scale for larger projects.
I also talked with some friends who really like it and with the language now being 10 years old, it’s starting to be mature or even is. I’d love to hear from other people out there who have worked with it, possibly coming from PHP. How was your learning curve or how do you think it will be?
Why Google does Billing
Google has already announced that they are doing a billing platform and today in the tram it made all the sense in the world as they really don’t have to do a lot. They are already working together with Bertelsmann Financial Services for AdWords and AdSense and this thing can be easily extended. Just look at the feature list of what they can handle. Of course, Google will have to pay money to BFS to handle things but they can let them handle the credit risk, billing, and whatever else is involved and have a huge company to rely on. They are doing an amazing interface, something scalable and just aggregate payments handled via BFS if they want. Looking forward to seeing what they have developed in this partnership, if it goes that far.
Geeking Out
I just had a wonderful weekend with friends in Hamburg. On the way back I was getting bored on the 4 hour train ride and need some long lasting, numb work. Half an hour was then taken up by installing Ruby on my web server via Putty on my Nokia 6600. Worked like a charm 
cracy frog?
In a magazine on the back none the less. Oh jamba oh jamba
