I don’t usually design logos, other than for my own business and application logos.

Having been busy coding for the last couple of weeks, my brain yearns to do something creative. So I took a break yesterday and designed a new logo for Indonesian Professionals Association (IPA), a pro-bono work that I have promised to do some time ago.

These are the two drafts that I’ve come out with, one has a more fun and fresh feel, while the other is more traditional, formal and sleek. Hope they’ll like it, probably still need to touch up a bit here and there.

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.

Neah..not another jobsite, that could be your first thought. But in reality, I think we seriously need at least another jobsite that looks at a different perspective of doing things.

The jobsites in town are either too expensive, or free to use, but not very nice for your eyes, yet they are usually quite complicated and troublesome to use. I remembered how I hated signing up for a jobsite because of amazingly long list of fields I have to fill up. Is there a better way? Yeeah, honestly I think there is.

JobJetty aims to be a simple, fun, and pleasant jobsite to use. It aims to avoid complicated data entries, provides no-brainer forms, and minimises clicks. Come on, life is hard enough when have to look for a job. Why let a jobsite makes it harder for you.

For recruiters, JobJetty will be affordable. Pluit Solutions is the leanest organisation that you can possible think off, and it will stay lean and effective. That will keep the cost affordable.

Btw, it is FREE to post job offers during BETA release. Sign up here to be notified of its BETA release.

I was very excited yesterday because SimpliCity, a simple template that I designed for a contest was voted third.

And what excites me most is I am getting a 2GB iPod Nano. I have been eyeing an iPod for quite while, and nothing beats getting it this way. Though I wish for a 4GB Nano, I am a happy man with just 2GB. :)

The design contest was organised by Matt Raible, the developer for Appfuse, an open-source full-stack Java framework. The design follows a CSS framework published in Content with Style, and the winning themes are to be released to Appfuse users.

Thanks Matt, for organising the event, and thanks to those who have voted for SimpliCity.