Callie has already started blogging on Tag My City. The blog is about music, art, fashion, food and culture in the Dallas area.

Ximda team is working hard on getting Tag My City website lunched by the end of August. We are planning on having a website launch party by Sptemper. If you are in the Dallas area and like to come to the party, contact me to send you an invitation.

BarCampTexas (BarCampAustin, BarCampDallas, and BarCampHouston) will be held in conjunction with BarCampEarth , Saturday August 26th to Sunday 27th at Thistle Cafe in downtown Austin.

Propssed Sessions (summary)

• Agile Development experience reports
• Scalability.
• Designing for Mobile/Portable Devices
• Workshop on Audacity
• Deploying a Commercial Web Application/Product
• Tips for Building Community & Attracting User Contributions
• Ad Management Tools: Options other than Google?
• Calendaring (Caldev, hcalendar, tool comparisons, Outlook exports)
• Microformats: Commercial Uses
• Server Virtualization
• Why XSLT is sweet for Ajax Widgets
• Search Engine Optimization
• Setting Your Mac Up
• Moving your life or business from desktop apps to webapps

See you there ..

Finally RadRails 0.7 is available for download. It’s built on top of eclipse

If you are a Ruby on Rails developer, this IDE is your second best choice after TextMate Actually it’s your only choice if you don’t have a mac.

I use eclipse almost every day for my Java/J2EE development. It’s a very good tool but it eats a lot of my computer resources.. I’ve never liked Java desktop application anyway.

As for RadRails, well it’s much slimmer than my RAD (IBM Rational Application Developer) but still uses a lot of memory.

TextMate is much faster and lighter. It’s a powerful text editor like Vi and Emacs with a very user friendly interface.

I think TextMate is perfect for interpreted languages since you really don’t need an IDE. However, I wouldn’t want to use it for Java development where eclipse is better fit for it.

At the end .. what tool to use depends on the task you need to achieve..

Ok finally I bought my MacBook Pro last weekend. I’ve been a Linux user since 1998 using it on my servers, desktops and laptops. I used almost all linux distros but my favorites are Ubuntu and Open Suse

I’ve always been a big Linux advocate at school, work and home. I started using Linux when it was almost impossible to get any of your new hardware configured without spending hours and hours compiling your kernel, installing missing libraries and hacking configuration files…

Things now are much better thanks to the open source community and to the support of some big companies and entrepreneurs.

So why did I buy a MacBook?
Not because I don’t like Linux desktop anymore; in fact, Linux desktop makes more since to me than OS X. I think Linux desktop has the best of both Windows and OS X. Yeah it still lacks integration between its applets (drag and drop doesn’t work sometimes) but overall it’s decent and much prettier than Windows.. My real reason was the fact that I needed to use some commercial software which was only available for Windows or OS X.. of course I chose OS X over Windows.

OS X is very convenient in the sense that it’s based on Unix which means I can still install all my open source applications and use command line and shell..

So the move wasn’t very radical after all ….

I was looking for Ruby On Rails meetings in Dallas and I found this Dalasrb

The group meets on first Tuesday every month in Addison, TX Google Map. See you there next month..

37signals announced today that they raised venture capital from Jeff Bezos (the guy behind amazon.com)

The move seemed to upset a lot of 37signals followers. 37signals has been a successful business model for small startups. They built very popular web 2.0 projects (Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Tadalist, and Writeboard) and initiated the development of RoR (Ruby On Rails).

I totally understand the reason behind their move and I think Bezos is one of the most innovative entrepreneurs and his input will be very crucial to take 37signals to the next level.

Congratulations to 37signals..

I’ve been working lately on my newest website TagMyCity.com. The website will allow users to do the following:

• Create user profile
• Add places e.g restaurants, spas, clinics..
• Review places according to service, price, dress code, parking…
• Upload pictures of places and users
• Create events calendar for each city
• Create groups and social networking

The website will also provide users with maps and driving directions using Google maps APIs. All the activities are real time which means when a user creates a place, the place will be created right away with no moderation (like wiki)

I usually like to push a slim version v1.0 as fast as possible because it keeps me excited about the project and it provides valuable feedback from first wave of users. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with TagMyCity.

I felt yesterday that I was getting intimidated by the size of the project and it’s taking me too long to finish it. So according to the time, budget and scope triangle I have no choice except to scale back the scope.

Here I am trying to define the most important parts that I need to have in v1.0.

1. Create a place, review it and upload pictures (place pictures)
2. Create user profile and upload user’s pictures
3. Limit searches for places by city with no distance predefined
4. Get longitude and latitude of the place address (using web-service SOAP or XML-RPC) and locate it on Google map

So now that I have my new requirements written down, I am going back to my trusty Ruby on Rails (RadRails) IDE to continue coding. I will update this list weekly and document my progress.