Business Week has some of the most interesting podcasts around. Their cover story podcast is often quite entertaining especially since the host, Business Week’s executive editor John Byrne, has a sceptical and humorous interviewing technique.

Another BW offering is the CEO’s guide to technology which featured a Tim O’Reilly interview earlier this summer. Tim is quite candid regarding the “web 2.0″ buzzword and he makes some interesting points regarding the tech industry.

Moving from business to technology, another podcast I recently discovered is The Linux Action Show. These guys are of the pragmatic school of Linux (as opposed to the more ideological one) and are defectors from OS X.

Other interesting podcasts include the various BBC offerings (most notably Digital Planet, In Business and Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time) and finally IT Conversations.

Google is now allowing the creation of custom search engines via personalised search. At the Ruby Inside blog, Peter Cooper has provided a much needed service with Google Ruby Search.

Extremely useful.

Ever since Google made Google Trends available I’ve been meaning to blog about one of the first searches I typed in. Jack Schofield at the Guardian Technology blog beat me to it at the time. It’s the last link in his article. The trend I meant to blog about is the difference between the Linux distributions Ubuntu and Suse (Jack throws in Fedora for good mesure).

Another trend which might be interesting to watch is Microsoft’s new CTO Ray Ozzie. Checking out the trend for Ray vs. the dynamic Google duo is interesting.

I recently came across a killer ruby application called autotest, which is part of a package called Zentest.

Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Nuby on Rails blog explains how to use autotest with Rails. It’s pretty simple, install Zentest:

gem install ZenTest

and from the Rails project’s root, type:

autotest -rails

Monitoring a console for failed tests is annoying and keeping an open console on-screen is too screen real-estate expensive on a 14 inch laptop. Enter KNotify and DCOP.

Create a file called .autotest in your home directory and paste the following code into it:

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#!/usr/bin/ruby
module KDENotify
  def self.knotify title, msg
    system "dcop knotify default notify " +
           "eventname \'#{title}\' \'#{msg}\' '' '' 16 2"
  end
  Autotest.add_hook :red do |at|
    knotify "Tests failed", "#{at.files_to_test.size} tests failed"
  end
end

Once autotest is started and coding has commenced, a passive pop-up window will appear as soon as a saved file has caused a test to fail.

This is all made possible by autotest’s excellent design along with the genius that is KDE.

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.