The registration for the – again – biggest Ruby-on-Rails conference in the US is now open: RailsConf 2009. O’Reilly organizes the conference again. but this time it’s not Portland but Las Vegas where the rails community meets again. Las Vegas is not only the US center of gambling and entertainment – it’s also one of the much sought-after conference locations
If you register before March 16th 11:59pm you’ll get an early-bird bonus and save 200 USD.
All rails-pros who want to share their knowledge and give a presentation at the conference, the Call for Participation deadline is extended to February 17th 2009. So you have to be fast!
The conference will be at the Las Vegas Hilton from May 4th to 7th 2009.

Viva Las Vegas!

Sources: rubyonrails.com, RailsConf.com

This step certainly wasn’t easy for Steve Jobs: He takes a medical leave until Juni to recover from his health problems – which are more complex than he thought. It’s probably a hefty step for him and his family to share this private information with public interest. But the history and also the future of Apple stick tightly to his name. This tight relationship is also reflected in the stock price, which dropped down more than 7 percent in extended trading when the news was spreading.
The Chief Operating Officer (COO) Tim Cook will work as CEO until Steve gets back in June. Cook ran Apple also for two months in 2004 when Steve was recovering from his cancer surgery – and he has a great reputation.

So, again: Get well soon, Steve!

Sources: Yahoo.com, Spiegel.de, Apple.com

Deutsche Bahn and T-Mobile extend their traveling WiFi HotSpot service at the ICE train routes. Now, also the route Frankfurt am Main – Hanover – Hamburg is covered with WiFi internet access (“railnet”). Overall, we have WiFi internet connection within the train on most of the ICE routes in Germany:

• Dortmund – Düsseldorf – Cologne (also via Hagen and Wuppertal)
• Cologne – Frankfurt am Main Airport
• Frankfurt am Main – Stuttgart – Munich
• Frankfurt am Main – Hanover – Hamburg

The service offers laptop and especially iPhone users an internet connection even if the train travels at a maximum speed of 300 km/h – more than 180 miles per hour! Im always impressed about the quite stable and fast internet connection even when traveling that fast. And the best thing of all: as a (German T-Mobile) iPhone user you don’t even have to pay for the WiFi connection in the train!

Source/picture: Deutsche Bahn

Tim Pritlove talked about the iPhone and the native application development for that mobile phone with Martin Pittenauer and Dominik Wagner. Mac users may be aware of Martin and Dominik as the Coding Monkeys with their first Mac OS X masterpiece: SubEthaEdit, a collaborative text editor for the Mac. In 2008 the Monkeys also developed some iPhone applications, like Circulator or Big Clock. Tim, Martin and Dominik all together realized Blinkenlights Stereoscope a simulation of the Blinkenlights Installation Toronto 2008. That’s why they all can tell a lot of stories of the similarities and differences of programming for Mac OS X and the iPhone OS. Overall a great mixture for those interested in iPhone developement as well as experts.

The only downside for all international blog readers: The podcast is in German only. Here’s the link to the podcast!

Apple just published the Quicktime video-on-demand stream of the MacWorld Keynote Address 2009. So, if you want to tune in and watch Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple Inc. …

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/keynote/

iLife’09, iWorks’09, DRM-free music on the iTunes Music Store and the 17″ unibody MacBook Pro … great news