There may be times when you don’t want documents to actually get deleted from the database, but “flagged” as deleted. Mongoid provides a Paranoia module to give you just that.

Mongoid Document

NoSQL is really making a huge wave in the Web development world. Facebook is using NoSQL, Twitter is using NoSQL, Disney, foursquare, github, disqus are all using NoSQL.

In his talk at RedDotRubyConf 2011, Alex Nguyen, co-founder of Vinova, explained how MongoDB, a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database, helped him reduce complexity and easily adapt to changes in Web application development

The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it’s not whether they prefer Python or Java. It’s whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless.

Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow. In 2005 he wrote an article named “Advice for Computer Science College Students” in which he gave “Seven Pieces of Free Advice for Computer Science College Students”:

Learn how to write before graduating. Learn C before graduating. Learn microeconomics before graduating. Don’t blow off non-CS classes just because they’re boring. Take programming-intensive courses. Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India. No matter what you do, get a good summer internship. Despite being a 7-years old article, I find it still very useful for graduating CS students like me.

I recommend reading the original article in Joel blog, you’ll find many other great posts in there, too.

Several months ago I had a chance to work on a Machine-translation project in which we use Moses for Statistical machine translation (SMT).

I had a hard time try to figure out how to make Moses run properly on my system (Ubuntu 10.10), since I was new to Linux OS at that time. This is a note I wrote for myself of how I did successfully install Moses on my machine.

Hope it will help someone ;)

Just something I’ve noted down months ago, almost forgot that I intended to dive into later.

• Node.js: server-side javascript - http://nodejs.org
• Cappuchino: Objective-J, building web-apps that look & feel like desktop apps
• Brunch: A lightweight approach to building HTML5 applications with emphasis on elegance and simplicity
• Lessframework: Less Framework is a CSS grid system for designing adaptive web­sites.
• Radi: doing animation, effects,… the HTML5 way (no Flash!)
• Website Tour with jQuery: a little script that allows to create a tour on a website with jQuery.