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Rebol – Internet Programming Language

REBOL is a proprietary scripting computing language…messaging language that is succinct, quick to learn, and almost heroically portable.

Rebol Home Page
Rebol overview
Rebol Links
Rebol Review
Rebol Review #2

From what I can tell, Rebol seems to be
a viable language for internet programming.
However, I don’t know that I could recommend it.

1. First there is the cost.  It costs money to develop for it and server versions of the software
costs thousands of dollars
2. You would be
committing to a platform that is dependent on the viability of a small company. 
Since it isn’t open source, the future of Rebol is in the hands of the company
behind it.
3. Though their may
be a vibrant community supporting it, it is not widespread.  Trying to hire for
Rebol support unless you are willing to work remotely, could be a challenge. 

4. Compared to other
tools/technologies, the documentation, sample code and support is not
large.
5. I don’t know any
significant programs/companies that use Rebol.
6. Most of the
articles I read on the web, especially those touting it, are 4 years
old.

An example of its
"power".  You can send an email with a command similar to:

send someone@email.com "The message."

Cool, a single
line of code to send an email. But that Rebol
command ’send’ had to be written (in C I believe). That same function could have
been written in C and made available in a library and the syntax might look like this:

send("someone@email.com"The message.");

Pretty much the same
thing.  The fact it is "built-in" to the language, and makes the language "expressive", people will argue is a
wonderful thing, and it IS nice, but that argument is not sufficient to motivate me to learn a new programming paradigm..

PHP Programming

Simple Tutorial
Email with PHP  With forms

DefShed.com PHP articles:

All
An Introduction to PHP
PHP Application Development Part 1 and Part 2
PHP Sample Scripts
PHP.NET

Zend – Founders of PHP
Why PHP 5.0 Rocks
PHP Helpful Links

PHP Scripts

Virtual Companies

I wonder how many virtual companies are out there.   With the explosion of the internet, the barrier to start a company has been all but removed.  A minimum requirement could be a web presence. With an online connection and an abundance of workgroup and communication tools, one or more people can start a company overnight without even being in the same town.  Companies don’t need an office building if the people involved are self directed and are disciplined enough to communicate via phone/mail/im and other tech tools.

Here are some more references on the subject:

Virtual Company Advice
Becoming a Virtual Company
Art of running virtual companies
Palmedia-Virtual Company Solutions
Why I started a Virtual Company

The employment needs of talented professionals with home-based responsibilities are not being met despite the low unemployment rate

How to Start a Startup

How to Start a Startup by Paul Graham

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they’re not transferrable. They’re not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.

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When nerds are unbearable it’s usually because they’re trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don’t know," "Maybe you’re right," and "I don’t understand x well enough."

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We never even considered that approach. As a Lisp hacker, I come from the tradition of rapid prototyping. I would not claim (at least, not here) that this is the right way to write every program, but it’s certainly the right way to write software for a startup. In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

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The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on    their reactions… In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where.    The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

Other Essays by Paul Graham

delete[]

In C++, you free memory that was allocated using the keyword new, with the keyword delete.  If you allocated an array using:

char* pDataChars = new char[100] ;
char* pDataObjs = new CString[100];

then you include brackets in the call to delete:

delete[] pDataChars;
delete[] pDataObjs;

If you wrote:

delete pDataChars;
delete pDataObjs;

the compiler would not complain but the results may or may not be reliable.

You should make it a habit of always matching up new[] with delete[] and your code will be more robust and portable.

So why the brackets?  As I understand it, when calling delete on a pointer, the compiler does not know whether is is a pointer to a single object or an array of those objects.  A pointer to an array of objects, after all, is the same as a pointer to the first item of that array.

The brackets serve as a "hint" to the compiler so that it knows the structure of the allocated block of memory.  A user should NOT think of delete as equivalent to free.  You should not assume anything about the implementation of new or the record structure on the heap of the allocated memory.

Update: Here are the details of a scalar/vector new/delete implementation

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload

Can’t say I would do all the items suggested on managing emails but there are several good suggestions

Limewire

I don’t spend a lot of time using a P2P application but when I do, the latest one I’ve used is Limewire

This page reviews various P2P apps looking at how much bundle-ware and EULA payload each program contains. The study was commissioned by Limewire.

LimeWire has no EULA and no bundle-ware. If you already have the Java Runtime
Environment installed, it also has the smallest install footprint of any of the
apps (cuz it’s a Java application).

Prefer Statesman over re-election

In my post What do statistics mean I commented that the news is often not presented fairly.
The site Change This strives to educate people using a nonstandard media distribution, mainly word of mouth via the internet.  It hopes to leverage the social  aspect of  weblogs

Product Marketing using blogs

Scoble offers suggestions how you can leverage the blogsphere to get the word out about your product.

I like how he describes using blogs as they were intended, inobtusive online relationship building on your terms.  You should never ask for links or expect them, just start the conversation via a link or mention in your own blog, and let things go from there.  If your product is worth mentioning it will get mentioned.  If bloggers were to link just because they were asked to, they would lose credibility. 
Just like the established media, bloggers build a reputation and build a following based on it.