This morning, I found out that NLB online catalogue (Vistaweb) has enhanced its site to limit the number of connections per IP address or you can also say per PC if have no idea what IP address is.

Basically, if you create more than 5 sessions from the same IP, you will get this message below, and you are asked to reuse your last session. Note that a new session is created when you click on Easy Search or Advanced Search button from the main page.

Obviously this is a good step, it helps to reduce redundant sessions which could be easily created and not used while waiting to be timed-out.

A good step by NLB, but a bad news for BookJetty. BookJetty needs at least 10 sessions in a pool to operate smoothly. Couldn’t bear to see this baby dies, I managed to work out an interim solution. I can still create at least 10 sessions, but I’m not sure how long this will last.

Screen scraping is obviously not the way to go for a mash-up application. I know this day will come, I just don’t expect it to be so soon.

My hope is that one day NLB will be able to provide a simple plug to access library catalogue through REST service (XML over HTTP) just like xISBN, Amazon, eBay, and Flickr services, this will help more creative applications like BookJetty to tap on library information. And I wouldn’t mind to help out in anyway.

We can’t blame the additional security layer put in place, it will come soon or later, it helps to protect Vistaweb from denial of service attack. But, it is really a pity to see an application like BookJetty gone in waste. Anyway, just hope that the interim solution is going to work for a while.

If the marriage of Amazon and NLB really comes to an end, I will have to figure out what to turn BookJetty into. A book exchange site? Hm…maybe. Though I’m sad, I just have to keep a positive mindset, that there is always something that we all can learn from things that happen in life, be it good or bad.

Just managed to grab a copy of The Art of Start by Guy Kawasaki.

After a long day, before bed, I picked up the book, and read the first few lines, a quote by Halford E. Luccock. I thought it is quite enlightening, though confusing at first.

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: “Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.”

– Halford E. Luccock

You can use Module as a helper to store common methods to be shared across different classes.

By including the module in your class, you inherit its methods. But, problem pops up, when on some cases you need to call the helper method from a class mehod instead of an instance method. And you know you can’t call an instance method directly from a class method.

So this was what I did.

module Helper
    self.included(base)
        base.extend(self)
    end

    def hello
        "Hello world"
    end
end

class Service
    include Helper

    def instance_call
       hello
    end

    def self.class_call
       hello
    end
end

Service.new.instance_call # returns 'hello world'
Service.class_call        # returns 'hello world'

After months of relentless work, finally my body rebelled and said, “Give me a break”. And it succumbed itself to the attack of mild flu and fever. I fell sick yesterday.

Last nite, after popping a pil, I tugged in to bed early. And it was one of the rare good-and-peaceful sleep that I opportuned to have; thanks to my wife who massaged my head while I was on bed. This morning I woke up feeling better, and… well, work must go on again. There is a dateline to catch.

The new BookJetty is finally out. It is now on Ruby On Rails with some new interesting features. Well, indeed a hard work finally pays off when you see something out. Anyway here are some highlights on the new features.

I love the book scroller. You can scroll left and right the featured books and recently added books. Was inspired by Moo.com.

You can now bookmark your books as Wanted, Reading and Read. So gone are those days when you need to jot them down on papers. The next time you need to go to the library, just view your wanted list.

Well, you are the king, so you tag what you want. Group your books with any names.

Tag ‘loveit‘ to recommend a book and to show it in the featured list hall-of-fame scroller.

With your bookmarks, now you are able to see, who else wanted, is reading, or has read the same book. And finding popular books in town will just get easier.

So if need a book that is wanted by lots of ppl, you should know what do.

Top searches are now in CLOUD format, due to peer pressure. Neah..from usability perspective, they are just better. You can select top searches for today, this week and this month.

NLB catalogue and xISBN book editions are now cached for 30 minutes. So first request maybe slower, but subsequent requests are much faster, no round-trip to NLB and xISBN servers.

There will be more features added along the way, meanwhile I’ll be tidying up those bugs spotted so far. For you, why not just try it out. Suggestions and feedback are most welcome.

Pluit has just embarked on a new Ruby On Rails project with Exploit Technologies Pte. Ltd., a commercial arm of
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) that helps to identify, protect and exploit Intellectual Property (IP) created by the Research Institutes (RIs) funded and managed by A*STAR.

This project marks the beginning of Pluit’s involvement in commercial project using Ruby On Rails (RoR), and Pluit’s second RoR project after BookJetty (the next release, coming up real soon). Although I am happy for this achievement, but behind it, it was a tough job to push RoR to the corporate world who likes the word ‘Enterprise’.

You can say RoR is still relatively new, as version 1.0 was released in December 2005; but in a hot open-source world — a year is relatively very long. Lots of stuff can happen within a year, just look at how much RoR has changed since v1.0.

In fact, RoR has spread like a wild-fire in US, Japan, Europe and Canada. But in Singapore, people and companies are still very careful about RoR. So questions like this are common, as I was also asked:

“Who is backing Rails and Ruby?”

“Are they going to be another abandoned open-source project in the next few years?”

Well, you can’t blame them, there’s a common saying here that says, You don’t love, because you don’t know. But does BIG always mean good? How about looking at EJB 1.0 and 2.0, JSTL, and Java Server Faces, are they good? I am not sure about you, but people do question, even though it is backed by big company. And I meant really BIG company.

With this project going, I hope in the next couple of months, there will be greater acceptance for RoR. And speaking from devleoper’s perspective, it is NOT the end result that counts, but how do you achieve the result that really counts. With RoR, all I can say is HALLELUJA.