Well… We are now just a few days from LinuxCon. For the unapprised, The Linux Foundation will be hosting this high-tech event from 21 to 23 of September in Portland.

The aim of this conference is to create awareness about open-source technologies. It would also serve as a platform for open-source people to meet and interconnect with each other.

As far now, the confirmed keynote speakers include Linux Torvalds (from the Linux Foundation), Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu), Joe Brockmeler (from openSUSE), Bdale Garbee (from Hewlett Packard), Imad Sousou (from Intel) and Bob Sutor (from IBM). Apart from keynote speeches, 75 conference sessions and various roundtable sessions are scheduled as well.

Like myself, don’t get disappointed if you cannot manage to make it to Portland. Linux foundation will be providing free live video streaming sessions for the keynote speeches.

Mozilla Firefox has already crossed 6 million downloads. How do we know this? Because Mozilla has launched a real-time tracker, where live downloads are being shown.

Additionally, you can also see how many downloads there have been by any country, currently United States, Japan and Germany lead in this download race.

As this is a big start again, it seems unlikely that the launch will match that of Firefox 3.0 which had 8 million downloads in its first 24 hours. These 8 million downloads also caused a couple of restarts to Mozilla Firefox downloads server. That’s not surprising given all of the hype for 3.0, but still the current marks shows the huge commitment Firefox fanatics still have for the browser.

More to Follow: Top Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Features

Well … whenever I find myself caught in this predicament, I ask myself one question: Is my use case model comprehensible? That is, do my stakeholders understand it without me explaining it to them?

I consider use case modeling more useful during the analysis phase. Although UML (Unified Modeling Language) allows us to use various design level elements in use case modeling, the basic purpose of use case modeling is to help us communicate with domain experts (people who understand the business) to stipulate various business workflows. For design, we can go for more accurate models like class and sequence diagrams.

The key to a functional use case diagram is its simplicity. If its comprehensiveness and detail obscure the understanding of end users, we need to revisit our strategy. The basic purpose of UML is to bridge the gap between the understanding of end users and developers. However, if our models fail to do that, then the whole effort of modeling serves no purpose.

In my projects, I usually include the most important functionalities in my use case diagram. In this regard I replace all the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) use cases with a single use case like Manage Data or something like that. It helps me establish the priority and importance of most important use cases, which later helps me find the critical path to develop a fully functional product within the least amount of time. I also avoid monolithic use case models that try to encompass the full functionality of systems in a single diagram. As per my experience, monolithic use case diagrams are practical for only small projects with less than 10 use cases. Anything bigger than that requires the use of subsystems.

To me, given the plethora of web programming languages, the emergence of Ruby on Rails (RoR) as an eminent web development platform seemed like yet another good marketing strategy at work. However, after careful analysis of features provided by RoR, I recognized that my assumption was wrong.Now I believe that RoR has realized its rightful place as the new agile web development platform and in future we will be seeing more RoR-based applications around.

RoR is a ruby-based framework and it operates on two major principles. The first principle is Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY). The implications of this principle are quite clear. RoR favors reusability of components at its very core, thus making it easier to manage code. The second principle of RoR is Convention Over Configuration (COC). This means that RoR relies heavily on conventions instead of configuration files. This principle allows RoR to generate various models automatically that we will be discussing shortly.

RoR also implements MVC (Model View Controller) for all its applications. MVC is a design pattern and it provides a clear segregation of data, application logic and presentation tiers. The data in the MVC model is represented by Model, application logic by Controller and the presentation by View.

Given the basic principles of RoR, and its implementation of MVC, it is very easy to create very complex web applications using simple commands in the ruby environment. It minimizes the development effort of the programmer while conforming to high object-oriented principles. And the most beautiful part is … it is open source!!

For the sake of brevity, I have spared the details on this topic for my coming posts. If you guys are interested, we can start out a series of articles covering application development in RoR from a beginner’s level.

More to follow later….

Its just the second week and bing looks grown up so much, Bing users are increasing day by day and its becoming the next big thing. Compared to the week prior to launch. Bing now has 16.7% searcher penetration and a 12.1% share of search results pages among all US workday searches. Those numbers are also both up compared to its first week in the wild.

Microsoft has spent approximately $80 to $100 million on a campaign to advertise Bing. The current popularity of bing shows that Microsoft’s advertising campaign is at driving a measurable number of users to bing.

Compete confirm the same what comScore is saying- Bing’s number of searches is growing. But Compete also declared that number of searches per user for bing is quite low, which implies that Microsoft has been able to entice people to try Bing out, but so far, it isn’t getting a measurable number of new searchers to stick around.

It may also be the case that search results are too accurate and users do not find it necessary to Bing it further. If its really the case then its good for Microsoft.

The competition is going to be very tuff now, If Microsoft really want users to switch from Google or even Yahoo, they quality of bing search results will have to be at top from the beginning.

So far bing has done good. It will be interesting to see how Bing’s growth continues, and if it does, from where they are taking users.

What happens when you do a search that doesn’t have branding. Are you swayed by the branding of your favourite search engines? Take the Blind Search Engine Test.

Michael Kordahi, which I feel compelled to disclose is a Microsoft employee, has set up such an experiment, dubbed “BlindSearch” which you can try here.

On the site, you enter a single search query which results three sets of unbranded results. After viewing the results, you are given an option to vote on one set of results, which then reveals the provider and adds it to the tally.

On the site, you enter a single search query which results three sets of unbranded results. After viewing the results, you are given an option to vote on one set of results, which then reveals the provider and adds it to the tally. I searched for The Windows Club and voted for what I felt were the best results.

At the time of writing, Google was leading at 40%, followed by Bing at 38% & Yahoo at 22%.

A lawsuit was the final thing required to push twitter into launching verified accounts now. Twitter has been dealing with a lawsuit from St. Lous Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. The lawsuit is about an individual impersonating La Russa on Twitter. Twitter still does not have any systematic way to verify if any tweets were real or bogus.

This seems to be the reason that Twitter has announced verified accounts beta program so they do not have to handle any future lawsuits for such reasons.

Twitter Accounts Beta

Yesterday, Twitter stated the following on the La Russa case:

Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.

Actually, Twitter did not settle on this case but it pushed them to announce for these verified accounts program.

So what and how exactly will this verified account system will work? According to the Twitter blog, there will be a special seal on any account that is verirified by Twttier as being authentic. You can see this very seal in the image above, will appear at the top right of profile pages. This is targeted towards public officals, public agencies, athletes, celeberities and other high-profile indviduals.

As to how actual verification will work, it seems that Twitter will look to see if an official channel of the person in question links to his or her Twitter account from a place like an official website. This is a perfectly logical way to verify accounts, in our opinion. Details are scarce on the full plan, though.

The Verified Accounts program will begin as an experiment this summer and will expand as Twitter gets more feedback. We’re glad to finally see a system in place that will hopefully put an end to impersonators and expensive lawsuits.