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

Great! Now, also some German universities publish some free podcasts, videos and scripts via “iTunes U”. Until now, you can find content from the following universities from Germany:

• Hasso Plattner Institut / IT Systems Engineering / University of Potsdam
• RWTH Aachen University
• Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
• University Freiburg

Perfect! Especially high school graduates can get a first impression of the different universities. At the end there is no getting around visiting the favorite universities to make the decision, but the iTunes U content is another first impression.
But also for students, post graduates and alumni, there are quite interesting contents – and some real gems also

Source: Macnews.de (only German)

It’s quite interesting to go into the browser / OS marketshare statistics Net Applications is gathering.
Within the last 12 months, the marketshare of Apple Mac OS X powered computers increased from 6.38% in Feb 2007 to 7.57% in Jan 2008 – a growth rate of about 19%. This great news for the Mac community – but what’s really surprising is the significant marketshare of iPhone surfers in the last month. The iPhone was introduced to the US market on June 29th 2007 – and in Jan 2008 it’s internet surfer worldwide market share is 0.13% according to the Net Applications. Focussing only on the US market it’s share is even higher at 0.20%!
It looks like the iPhone really fuels the use of mobile internet.

Source: Net Applications

A short message to all Wordpress-bloggers: The actual security update version 2.3.3 is strongly recommended. Here at codedifferent no problems occure while upgrading.
Taking this upgrade as an opportunity – the anti spam plugin was also exchanged: In the future every commentator at codedifferent has to prove to be a pattern recognizing human. And by using the reCAPTURE-plugin we aditionally help others: The CAPCHA codes used here are not only some generated graphics – they represent words which could not be recognized by OCR-software. reCAPCHA was developed from Carnegie Mellow University and they actually support the project Internet Archive.

That’s a big one: It really looks like Steve Ballmer want’s to get into the search engine and online advertisement market. Today, Microsoft announced, that the company proposes the acquisition of Yahoo! at a premium of 63% to the current trading price.
It’s a teamup for competing Google – but we’ll have to see whether this transaction will be allowed by the anti-trust authorities and whether joining the forces of Microsoft and Yahoo! development teams will lead to innovation as they want it to be.
How should we call that company in the future? Microhoo!?

P.S. I hope they’ll now hire Ms. Dewey for the future Microhoo! search engine

[Update] You can vote for your favorite name of Microhoo at engadget