Tim O’Reilly reports that according to Nielsen Bookscan, sales of Ruby books have passed sales of Perl books.

It should be noted that sales of Ruby on Rails books is counted along with Ruby and also that these sails are “driven by recency”, and sales of Perl could spike when Perl 6 comes out.

This is interesting news nonetheless.

PHP still rules the roost under the web’s hood, so to speak, but Ruby is now definitely more than a lightweight contender.

Developing Rails applications with Eclipse running on a laptop with 512 Mb RAM means that being economical with processing power and memory is crucial.

Just over two decades ago John Gage coined Sun Microsystem’s slogan “The network is the computer”. Only recently has this become a reality to some extent on a consumer level and thanks to various web services, saving RAM and CPU cycles by outsourcing them to the network has become possible.

The above screenshot shows four programs running in KDE’s system tray. Starting from the left they are: a calendar program (KOrganizer), an instant messaging client (Kopete), an RSS feed monitor (Akregator) and a gmail inbox monitor (KCheckGmail).

Until recently, I was running Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client instead of the GMail notifier. Thanks to Google and the authors of KCheckGmail, I can halve the memory allocated to email by shutting Thunderbird down and turning to KCheckGmail, which does nothing but check my email and send me to GMail.com when I want to read or reply.

The other applications mentioned are still running locally, not on the network.

Google is a pioneering force in providing open and reliable APIs for programmers to access their databases. An obvious motive for this is to have people stop using whatever office tools they currently use and outsource more to the network, i.e. Google.

A KCheckGmail equivalent for Google’s blogreader and calendar would provide the means to outsource even more of our office tools and it is only a matter of time until someone writes them.

I was compelled to buy the Independent newspaper today, only because the front page illustration was so clever.

A graphical representation of such facts can be very compelling and carry a strong message.

Speaking of graphical representations: A book recently added to my Amazon wish list is Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. I’m already so enthralled by the sparklines idea that I’m tempted to put them into any web application I’m working on regardless of functionality.

I won’t though, as this would be very non-Tuftian.