Rails for Java Developers- beta book

I just started reading the early beta of Rails for Java Developers. It's a new book published by the Pragmatic Programmers and written by the Relevance guys- Stu and Justin. Perhaps the most shocking thing is that they have time to write a book. I have been lightly involved in the review process for O'Reilly's upcoming "Rails Cookbook", currently available as a Rough Cut. It's a lot of work to stay current with a moving target and make sure all of the code works.

As far as the book goes, I think it really is going to fill a gap in terms of being a reference for people that know how to do something in Java, and want to know what the equivalent thing is in Ruby on Rails. It's like those options in a new version of a product to see the menus for the prior version, so that you know where to find things. Of course, I haven't tried much in the book yet, so I can't speak to it's quality, but I like the tone and the approach so far. It appears to be just over half way to their 300 page target, so, there's a lot to do before Nov.

Google Enterprise Professional- on earth

Google's expanding their partner program to include "Google Earth Specialists" Spatial Energy. Noah D. wrote a brief note on the enterprise blog. Our company joined the partner program initially to do things with the search appliance, but maybe the earth appliance is around the corner.

Spatial Energy looks like they have an interesting angle. It's a good match for companies with a lot of experience in imagery and orthorectification to get involved with Google Earth Enterprise. If you want to make a good looking globe, you need some good looking data. Their focus is in the energy market, where perhaps the inability of Google Earth to look underground will be felt more acutely? If anyone in the energy community is in Houston on Oct. 18, they are doing a seminar that is going to cover a few topics, including SketchUp integration.