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

Really amazing to read these new figures: 500,000,000 app downloads. Never heard of a number like this at one of the mobile operator portals of the pre-iPhone century Vodafone life or T-Motion would have dreamed of numbers like this.
But the 500 million app downloads can not be compared with the number of songs, sold on iTunes: Apple only revealed the complete number of app downloads – free and payed apps. So there is a fundamental difference between the number of (paid and free) apps and (only paid) songs.
More than 15,000 apps is also quite impressive – but it is getting harder and harder to find the apps you really like on the AppStore. There is a lot of room for improvements to meet the needs of consumers as well as developers.

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

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)

Problem: After updating the blog to WP 2.7 everything was running smooth. But when opening some of the plugin setting pages the server responded with a “500 Internal Server Error” – especially when using plugins like “XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress” or when uploading pictures. When I activated the “StatPress Reloaded”-plugin non of the admin section was accessible anymore.

Diagnosis: PHP is running out of memory.

Solution: If you are running your own root, dedicated or virtual server this is an easy bugfix: You just have to change the php.ini of your server and provide more memory to your PHP installation. On a shared hosting server – like at the webhosting solutions at 1and1 you often don’t have access to that central php.ini. But there is an easy workaround:

Create a text file and name it “php.ini” (without the quotes ) and with a single line of code in it:

memory=20MB

This file has to be placed into the directory /wp-admin/ within your WordPress installation.

That’s it!