I had been living as a modern-age nomad since 1995. The day when I finished high school, as I stepped out from the comfort zone of my hometown, I knew that life is not going to be as easy as before.

Freedom that used to be a shackle with its keys guarded by my parents were then passed to me. I was on my own that day onwards.

But never in mind, I would have thought that I had to live from one rented room after another, sharing houses, apartments and flats with landlords, friends, strangers for the past 11 years; a period long enough to see Asian financial crisis, September 11, Afgan and Iraq wars, Tsunami, two general elections, jerebu (haze) once each year, friends getting married and having babies, one divorce case and the eldest daughter of a high school friend is now studying in primary school.

It is not that living in a rented place is no good. Things like you never have to worry about repainting your house, paying property tax and convervancy charges are good points, and you get to meet a lot of people too, good housemates like you, not so good ones and even some weird ones.

But since you don’t own the place, no matter how good the place is, it will never feel like a home. A place, where you can just come back from work, and shout “Honey, I’m back!”. And try to do that with your housemates around, see what you get.

A couple of days ago, the day before Chirstmas, after 16-hours packing non-stop and a mere 4 hours sleep, my wife and I moved to a place where we can finally call our home. A small flat, with one room booked for home office, open-concept kitchen, a small dining table, and a three-seater sofa. Nothing beats this feeling of having a home again after so long.

Now, I wish I can say “Honey, I’m back!” each day, but since I’m working from home, it seems like I’ll be the one hearing it from my wife more often. Either way, I’m glad that I finally find home again.

Thanks to SinGeo for spotting this. GoogleMap finally supports Singapore map, it is now up to our creativity to make full use of it. :)

It was about a year ago when I read a similar article by SYS-CON about the predictions for Internet technology in 2006. That was the time when I read about the prospect of Rails, AJAX, and Web 2.0. That article intriqued my curiousity.

Looking back, a year has passed, I was glad that I jumped ship, and picked up Rails and AJAX, and polished up my Javascripts skills at the same time. The skills will come in handy in 2007, as next year’s prediction is pretty much similar, i.e. expect richer experience in Internet applications, stronger adoption of Linux, and the possibility of Jonathan Schwartz open-sourcing Java. Do you think he will do that? I bet so.

Click here for the predictions of Internet Technology in 2007.

Update: Another article from Readwriteweb.com on 2007 web predictions, touches on vertical search engines, again rich internet apps (watch out for Adobe’s Apollo platform), Interenet based TV and mobile web.

When I planned to migrate BookJetty from Java to Ruby On Rails (RoR), I looked around for a ruby library to access Amazon E-commerce Service (ECS).

The first library I found was Ruby/Amazon, a very easy to use API, but supports only version 3.1 API. While I need the latest version, ECS 4.0.

There are no other ECS ruby library out there, so I turned to SOAP4R, afterall I used SOAP on Java platform.

A happy man I was, but not for long. Coding with SOAP generated classes was not so pretty, when an element is not available, calling the attribute will throw method not found exception, so you always need to check if an attribute is available or not. What matters most is Ruby SOAP performance is quite slow, especially when retrieving large data set.

So I needed a Ruby Amazon E-commerce REST Service API that supports ECS 4.0. Since I couldn’t find it, I wrote the codes 2 days ago, I have just open-sourced it as amazon-ecs. Happy Amazoning!!

Click here to start exploring amazon-ecs.

I know this is trivial, but if you are new to RoR, you may get confused, coz they all come in different shapes and sizes.

For mongrel (other options taken out for clarity purpose):

mongrel_rails start -e production

For rake command:

rake [task] RAILS_ENV=production

For ruby console:

ruby script/console production

Website has been playing a greater role in the face of business lately, especially with the emergence of blogs and content management system (CMS), companies and individuals have been more upfront about who they are and what they do.

With a high Internet penetration rate in Singapore, 58.9% broadband and 35.5% dial up service in Sep 2006; whether you realized it or not, people do google, and visit your web site before visiting your store. And your site is most likely the first contact with visitors, readers, and potential customers.

Thus what you put up there on your website is important. The design, layout, and content play an important role to build trust with your potential customers.

So what makes a website more trustworthy than others?

It all voices down to the dos and donts in web design. Sourced from User Interface design newsletter, November 2006, published by Human Factors International,
in a study of trust and mistrust of on-line health sites, the design and content were the most prominent factors, specifically as follows:

I was looking for an Interior Design (ID) company some weeks ago for a small flat that I have just bought (Yeah, finally my first home ever). I found out that many of the ID companies, in fact a lot of companies in Singapore, do not pay enough attention to their website. With shoddy design, haphazard layout, and poor content, they are really missing out on potential customers to their competitors.

I ended up visiting IDs whose websites convey trust that they can do a good job for me. And whether you can close the deal, it is now up to you, the customer is now at your door step.