Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET Job Comparison

I don’t do RoR….yet, I hear the good things about it so I’m really close into diving into it.  Before I do I want to make sure RoR is going to be something I can use professionally too.  Here is a 30 minute research into the jobs out there for RoR compared to Asp.Net & PHP. I searched for the phrases “Ruby on Rails”, “PHP”, “ASP.NET” and radius of 100 miles from the zip code. There is no doubt some overlap of job posting but this is pretty clear indication of where things are.

8/25/2008

Where I live - Cincinnati Ohio, Midwest

Site	Zip	RoR	PHP	ASP.NET
Monster.com	45102	4	35	114
Career Builder	45102	1	36	89
Hot Jobs	45102	1	12	7
Total		6	83	210

 

Second up New York City, East Coast

Site	Zip	RoR	PHP	ASP.NET
Monster.com	10270	29	357	621
Career Builder	10270	8	184	356
Hot Jobs	10270	18	176	180
Total		55	717	1157

 

And now for the West Coast - San Francisco

Site	Zip	RoR	PHP	ASP.NET
Monster.com	94130	23	216	135
Career Builder	94130	17	123	67
Hot Jobs	94130	31	521	107
Total		71	860	309

 

So for me ASP.NET makes the most sense by far (almost 4x that of PHP).  A surprise to me is on the West Coast, were it looks like ASP.NET is much smaller then else where.  It seems that Ruby on Rails is very much in the incubator stage still, I guess I’m not turning on RoR anytime soon after all.

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Written by Tim on August 26th, 2007 with 64 comments.
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Amazon S3 & Koders.com

I had a vision today when signing up for Amazon S3.  Here is the background: Amazon s3 is great, cheap storage, API, scalable, reliable, accessible from anywhere (Internet capable), etc… I plan on using it for my personal backup center putting things like my personal source code library, photos, & important documents. I get everything a enterprise company gets but at my rate.  Great.

The one thing I’m dreading is maintaining folders.  Lets be frank, directories/folders are anything but proficient compared to say search.  That’s why Google beat Yahoo!.  Yahoo! was a directory, you had to drill down to find results where as for Google you searched for them. Yahoo! later changed to be a search engine but people are starting to forget the thing was directory of links, users would submit links and Yahoo! people would categorize (not so automated would you say?) 

So for Amazon S3, I’m going to have act like I work at Yahoo! back in the day, this is going to suck big time.  That’s when the revelation hit me. 

What if I could point Google or even better Koders/Krugle at my directory and search it?  That would rock except some things I don’t want public BUT I still want it searchable just by me. 

I already have my personal backup center in Amazon S3 now I need my personal search engine. I could easily write something that populates a simple html page with a directory listing of all the files I have stored/want indexed.  I would then want to login to koders to search for code/files/documents etc….

Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Amazon S3 for Backups

I’m really looking forward to Google’s version of S3, Google tends to do things better plus free ;).    Until then I’m going with Amazon S3 for my personal backup strategy.  Right now I have a media PC with a 100 Gig hard drive, that is mirrored that serves this purpose but we really don’t use it enough to justifying it running all the time.  Plus in the bigger picture of things, this just fills my life with more work that I don’t want to do. 

Links

• A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools - Mostly these are tools that work via Linux/OS X
• elastic8 - A nice list of these tools
• S3Fox - Firefox plugin - I’m probably going to be using this for my ad hoc client
• S3Drive - Provides a drive on your my computer that is your Amazon storage
• S3Browse - Uses a web interface to interact with your S3 storage.
• PutPlace - Promises to publish to S3, Flicker, etc… Still in beta
• Jungle Disk - Looks to be the premier paid software to give WebDAV support.
• I really like http://filicio.us ideas with tagging but it looks to new for me to rely on.

My Setup

I’m looking for a way to automate backups of certain folders at certain times, tag folders so I can search later on, an ad hoc way to get files.  I’m looking to backup source code files, pictures, and important documents.  For now I think I’m going with S3Fox until I find something more automated and with tagging/searching.

Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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YSlow & Improving Speed

Yahoo! came out with a FireBug addon - YSlow, that takes a look at your web page and offers a score on performance. Most of the recommendations are easy enough to follow, below are 3 that take some Apache httpd.conf hacking to get working:

1) Configure ETags

Add this to your httpd.conf

 

2) Turn on Expiration Headers

 

3) Add Gzip compression

Install mod_gzip for Apache, add this to your httpd.conf to configure mod_gzip to handle files/settings

 That’s it, those 3 changes improved my score from F (60) to a respectable B (81).

Written by Tim on August 16th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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iPhone Development Podcast

Who knew datapoohbah could be so insightful on a iPhone Development Podcast?  Check it out, it pretty well done, and he makes some real good points.

I’ve been playing around with writing a iPhone web application, more to come on this soon.

Written by Tim on July 24th, 2007 with no comments.
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about:cache

Thanks to the Atlassian folks for letting us know about this gem, finding cache info in firefox just got easier - type about:cache in your browser:

 

Written by Tim on July 12th, 2007 with no comments.
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Google vs Microsoft Search

Is there really any doubt Google has Microsoft beat by 10 folds for search results?  Here is a search I did on a Microsoft Great Plains error: “No TaxScheduleKey, but TaxAmount  was passed in” Apparently Live.com doesn’t index Microsoft’s own newsgroups. Google does. Also Live.com the suggested alternative searches are based on the word “passed” which is a giant leap to assume my entire query revolves around 1 word.  Google suggested TaxAmount as two words.  I recently listened to Adam Bosworth MySQL speech in which he said how Google comes up with their “Did you mean” algorithm.  It has nothing to do with a dictionary lookup, but instead looks at the past queries and what suggestions users ended up clicking when presented with choices for “Did you mean”.  It really means Google is becoming a better search engine without any code changes, something Microsoft should take a qu from.

Written by Tim on July 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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xajax - PHP Notices/Warnings

Today we were playing with xajax trying to eliminate some redundant page reloads and also keeps some divs hidden based on user input without having to manage their state.  All was working as expected on our Linux box (Fedora) but when we tried to get it running on IIS it was dying.  It looked like no response or anything was coming back from some simple AJAX calls.  So we did as every good web developer should do - bust out FireBug.  Looking at the NET results we noticed we were in fact getting a response from our request but with an additional “PHP Notice undeclared variable message” (not show in the pic). It didn’t really dawn on us that this was the culprit until we opened IE 7 and it returned with a dialog box saying it could not parse the XML because of a space, pointing out the “Notice” message was returned before the XML response.  A closer look at our PHP.ini file resulted in use turning off Notices and turning on Errors only.  This was the issue.  Goes to show you having two browsers for debugging is a good thing

Written by Tim on June 25th, 2007 with 5 comments.
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Safari on Windows

Thanks to Scott for clueing me in on the Safari 3 for Windows Public Beta.  I must have been hiding in a hole, cause I did not see this coming at all.

First Impression

• When I click on the top bar to expand the window, the dang thing disappears. Wait - Actually if I move it to my dual monitor and click the expand button the dang thing disappears.  Guess the dual monitor code hasn’t been put in.
• It is fast, very fast.  Although reports are FF is faster then IE, I’ve found IE to render quicker (maybe because of the extensions I have going on FF), but this thing is really fast.
• Finally, no more VNC to a MAC to make sure things are working correctly on Safari.  This is great.
• Font rendering is nice - not clear type, but pretty close.
• Hey the backspace keyboard doesn’t move you back in history - not cool.

I’m not switching from FF because of the extensive plugins I use but for some fast web browsing this might make take over my IE.

Written by Tim on June 11th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Subdomain Cookies and Localhost

So I have a site - we’ll call www.site1.com that sets a client side cookie named CookieName1 and I need a subdomain test.site1.com to be able to read that value. Using php’s standard setcookie() method I set the cookie on www by using:

setcookie( “CookieName1″, $CookieName1Value, $CookieExpDate, “/”, “.site1.com” );

This works, no problem.  Now test.site1.com uses .NET to read in the value and do something.  Pretty standard stuff here:

 

Build > Debug, set a breakpoint on the if block, skips right over it.  Huh?  I make sure IE has the cookie, try again.  Nope, Request.Cookies(”CookieName1″) is Nothing.  Can’t be an IE thing can it?  Run same scenerio in FireFox - same result.  Then it dawns on me, I’m not running this under test.site1.com, I’m running this under localhost.  Everything was working as expected, cookies can only be read by *.site1.com.  So how am I going to test this thing on my local machine? I do have a sandbox, test1sandbox.site1.com, but what if I didn’t?  A simple solution is to change the host file found at %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ with:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 test1.site1.com

Run another Debug, change the http://localhost to http://test1.site1.com and now I’m able to read cookies from *.site1.com. Nifty.

Written by Tim on May 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
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