MetaGreg

The keynote is about Rails 3.0 and the many enhancements it bring to make web application development more fun. The improvements in writing database queries (via ActiveRelation), routes, ActionMailer are really neat and I believe would make it easier for developers to get on board with Rails.

The official release will be available in a few weeks but the current version is already good enough for production use according to DHH.

Last week I created a Q&A website for things related to Canada work visa. (This is actually a project of my wife’s cousins and I’m just helping them out sort out the technical details.) If you have questions about getting a work visa or issues with your Canadian work permit,  just post your questions and the nice people over there will help you out. Here are some popular questions:

• Do I need a lawyer to get a work visa in Canada?
• Do I need to show proof funds to get a Canada work visa?

Interesting because my wife and I came to Canada under a work visa two years ago but we neither needed both. Our situation might be different than yours, though.

The Canada Work Visa site runs on Shapado – an open-source software based on the popular StackOverflow model.  It’s like a forum where members can post their questions and members can answer. The problem with forums is often the best answer is buried somewhere in the myriad of responses.  A member, especially a new one, would have to read every replies until he finds the best answer.   In Shapado, members can vote for the answer like in Digg and the answer that has the most votes will go to the top of the thread along with the number of votes. This approach makes it much easier to find the answer.

Members  can only also vote down an answer. Take that spammers!  I think the ability to vote-down an answer is as important as voting-up to filter the noise from the signal.  One time, I was browsing a forum related to Canada immigration and there’s one member who posted that he’s working for the Canada Immigration Center and asking members to share their email and  application details.  Later in  the discussions,  somebody warned that the Canadian government doesn’t ask for this kind of information. Unfortunately, some took the bait. In the Canada Work Visa website, this answer will be voted-down and would go all the way to the bottom. And with all the negative votes it had, every visitor is warned immediately.

If you know somebody with  Canada work visa related question, please share this website.

If you want to start a question and answer website, I highly recommend Shapado.

This is an interesting use of pie charts. A pie chart is usually used for quantitative data but here Shahee Ilyas used the pie chart to show color proportions of a country’s flag.

Philippines:

Canada:

Visit the website to see all the flags.

via flowtown