Opera Software has decided to offer the full version of their Opera browser (i.e. without ads) for free from now on. I don’t quite I understand how they are planning to make money, but they explain some of the reasons for making their browser free here. I have used Opera for a while a couple of years ago, and it’s definitely a good browser. But frankly, I’m not sure why anybody would choose to use Opera over Firefox these days....

Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas (aka PragDave) has started a new series of articles about comparing Ruby to other languages. The first article looks at one of the biggest perceived issues, performance. As usual Dave is pragmatic and points out that Ruby is not always the best choice. In most cases however, the relatively small linear performance loss of Ruby compared to, say, J2EE, is negligible when you consider that for a typical enterprise application that does some data shuffling and maybe some basic arithmetic operations, only a small fraction of time (he estimates 5%) is actually spent in code that you write, while the rest of the time is spent on data transfer, database operations (possibly using some kind of object/relational mapping framework), etc....

It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, bookmarks, news, arbitrary RSS feeds, search history, and more. I’m not quite sure if I like it, even though it could undoubtedly be useful....

As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about YAML, here are some links to add YAML support to your favorite editor. Unfortunately, I have been unable to hunt down YAML mode files for vim and emacs, although I saw a vim file mentioned a couple times. Perhaps this is because YAML itself is so lightweight and readable that it really doesn’t require any syntax highlighting. Anyway, if anybody knows the location of these files (or if you are aware of other editors that support YAML), please leave a comment and I’ll update this list....

Google has just launched another beta service: Google Blog Search. It looks pretty good already, and for example searching for relevant phrases brought up the expected postings from my blog. There is no way to explicitly submit a blog to Google, and the key to getting your blog listed is to submit it to relevant blog lists, which is most easily done by pinging a service such as Ping-o-Matic. If you’re using a nice blogging tool like WordPress, it should automatically take care of this for you....