I heard about the ice trade a while back and always meant to look into it.
In the Victorian era, though the fridge had not yet been invented, there was still a great demand for ice. It was used to preserve goods, cool drinks, and yes, make ice cream.
So entrepreneurs sprang into action. These companies would harvest ice from frozen lakes, glaciers, etc. and ship it to large metropolitan cities where it would stored and sold.
It’s amazing to think that something as efemeral as an ice cube was worth enough to warrant cutting it from a lake, loading it onto a ship, and transporting it hundreds if not thousands of miles (e.g. across the Atlantic).
Here’s a description of the Norway/London ice trade (with pictures!). I’ve also put The Frozen Water Trade on my reading list.
So I was googling for Mt Diablo tarantulas with my son Thomas (6) and as soon as the search results appeared, he said “Google!”.
I turned ’round, pointed to the logo, and asked him if he was actually reading the word “Google”?
“I’ve been reading that for a long time” he answered.
Off we went to www.microsoft.com. I pointed to the logo: “What does this say?”
“Mee… Mee… Crow… Saft… Soft… Crowsoft?!”
Hmmm… Not quite as successful.
Let’s try www.yahoo.com. I point to the big “Yahoo” logo at the top of the page. “How about this one, what does it say?”
Thomas looked at it for a long time then exclaimed “Yipee!”
I nearly fell off my chair laughing. Clearly Google is winning six year olds’ mindshare.
I was on Alexa today and looked at their top sites, i.e. the most traffic’ed sites on the net. In the top 10, four sites were Chinese and one Japanese. Very impressive. Obviously internet growth mirrors economic growth.
When I was in China a year ago I was impressed by the amount of construction going on. Huge cranes congregate in large numbers in cities. Four to eight lane roads run through the countryside with comparitively little traffic, awaiting the future onrush of cars (parking lots are for some reason still way too small though). We were even overtaken by a Lamborghini one day!
I expect most websites will have a “Made in China” logo in their footers before long :-)
We use a lot of Microsoft technologies at work, so I was curious to see how well ActiveRecord would work with SQL Server 2005 (I tested against the CTP edition).
Why not stick with MySQL? Well, though I use MySQL personally for some applications, SQL Server 2005 is significantly more sophisticated. If it works well with AR, then I get the best of both worlds…
The feedback is mixed. On the plus side, getting up and running was painless. You won’t be able to do windows integrated auth but SQL Server auth works fine and once the user is created, you’re up and running.
On the downside, the SQL Server adapter is broken. I logged a bug in the Rails tracker (see link for more details). In some cases, the adapter can confuse data in the query for its instructions, and end up running the mangling the query. We either need a much more sophisticated set of regexs or (preferrably) a way for an adapter to get the information it needs without resorting to parsing the query.
Interestingly the MySQL adapter doesn’t need to resort to regexps at all, nor do most (all?) of the other adapters. For the moment, I’m sticking with Rails on MySQL!
Amusing quote by Sam Ruby speaking to a group of Java developers:
- Rails is the 80/20 rule applied twice
- 64% of the function for 4% of the complexity
- What about the “other” 36%?
- If anybody here doesn’t believe that J2EE has 36% fat, I’m talking to the wrong audience.
