We the nerds actively push ourselves to be on the cutting-edge of current technological happenings. So it was no surprise that when CouchDB appeared on our radar, we jumped at the opportunity to try it out. A flat document-based model for data storage seemed like a good fit for some of our products.

And although CouchDB has an extremely elegant REST API to store/query/view documents, the Ruby-ists here at Bezurk will baulk at the sight of parentheses and braces. Death before inconvenience.

Enter ActiveCouch

ActiveCouch is an open-source Ruby wrapper for CouchDB developed in-house at Bezurk. In Jobs-ian style, version 0.1.0 is out and it ships…today!

Some of it’s functionalities include: convenience methods for creating and deleting databases from a CouchDB database, a Ruby DSL to create permanent views for a CouchDB database, the ability to query and retrieve CouchDB documents in concise ActiveRecord semantics, the ability to persist and delete documents from a CouchDB database and callbacks which enable you to execute methods at specific points in an ActiveCouch object’s lifetime (for e.g. before/after saving).

Like CouchDB itself, this is beta software, but is a living, breathing organism which is constantly evolving.

(more…)

We recently partnered with Amadeus to implement their new Meta Pricer product as an extension to our exiting flights search engine. Meta Pricer is based on the next generation Amadeus Web Services Interface and is designed to help travel search companies like us, efficiently and cost-effectively retrieve accurate information on flight availability and prices from airline partners.  If you have 30 seconds to kill you can watch the Amadeus Meta Pricer corporate video here 

A couple of bloggers have asked about the motivation for meta search companies to partner with GDS companies. Tims Hughes the man behind the (in)famous Tims Boot blog had an interview with Martin Symes our CEO and asked some great questions. Click here to read the interview    

What do you get when you mix Beryl, Bezurk and a developer who recently jumped on to the Ubuntu bandwagon?

(more…)

The Great Singapore Sale is almost over and my closet is now packed with loads of stuff, most of them I got 50% less than their normal price. Getting them is not easy though, I had to brave throngs of people in the mall and endless taxi queue, plus I invested hours of walking and checking out every single store to make sure I’ve made the most out of the sale season.  Realizing the amount of effort I gave into finding good deals brings me to ask: Up to what extent will anyone go through to get the most out of their purchase? Some people, mostly guys, will not go through the same length and just get anything that fits, while others will make sure their purchase is worth every cent. That is why Bezurk Deals exist.

Bezurk Deals are for people who want value for money but dont have time to rummage through several travel sites to find the hottest travel bargains. The deals are compiled and updated every 3 weeks, making sure our visitors get the freshest offers from different travel sites in one click.

So next time you want to travel, check out the Bezurk Deals Section and save those extra pennies for a nice romantic dinner or better yet, save them for the next Singapore Sale.

We’ve been aware of a bug in our Hotels search for some time that affects Safari 1.x and 2.x users. Well, ahem, basically Safari crashed unceremoniously whenever you did a hotel search. We were stumped, to say the least. There was much wringing of bodily appendages.

Only recently did we realize that the Safari browser crash bug was caused by Prototype 1.5.1, when I chanced upon the Prototype 1.5.1.1 bug fix release on the Prototype blog. Thankfully this fixed the crashes for Safari as advertised. HAI again Mac Safari users, and apologies for the downtime.

What was billed as a heavy-weight bout ala Rocky, turned out to be more like Notting Hill than anything else. The conversation between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D5 conference was still however, an interesting insight into the minds of two of the most durable technopreneurs in the business. Steve Jobs’ wise-cracks made him look like a mean, high-school bully and Bill Gates seemed like Bambi lost in One Infinite Loop.

What struck me the most was however the difference in the way Gates and Jobs view technology. Bill Gates, undoubtedly a shrewd businessman and a great tech visionary, in my mind appeared to have a disconnect with the world around him whereas Steve Jobs seemed more rooted to reality. Jobs seems to talk about how technology can be used to make his life better, (even the iPod and the iPhone were supposedly born out of Jobs’ frustration with the status quo) whereas Bill Gates always thinks about how it would make a customer’s life better. My point is that while it is absolutely essential that companies listen to customers, if your product isn’t useful or exciting to you (and not just from a ooh-I’m-working-on-cool-stuff perspective), you lose a lot of the motivation to improve it.

We at Bezurk strive to make travel search not just better for the world at large, but for ourselves. And we’re sure that as we refine our core products over the coming months, the pride that we take in developing them will shine through!

The tools – odd I’m the one writing this, I’m still inextricably linked to Textpad and Google when the stuff hits the fan. But I figured I’d give a rough lowdown on the building blocks the whole team uses here at Bezurk. Let’s see, Ruby on Rails (king for internal applications, soon to be enterprise as well!), Java, MyEclipse, MySQL, a variety of messaging queues (which are a troublesome lot and prone to replacement depending on which one is stable at any given time), there’s the aforementioned Ubuntu running in our office “reading room”, which is shortly going to become our standard server environment, some various flavors of Red Hat/Fedora – really old and not fun to find binaries for unless you like ‘em from 2003, ummm… Apache, JBoss, drips and drabs of PHP, Subversion (absolutely a requirement for source control), and then Photoshop, Dreamweaver and GIMP (my kingdom for a better interface, god love ‘em).

Anyway, that’s the short list. Hopefully in the next weeks and months we can give some more details on what works, what doesn’t, which way we’re going and random musings on whatever strikes us. Until then, back to Warcraft…err.. work.

Over in the Bezurk office (located in right smack in the middle of Boat Quay, Singapore), we run about 13 machines at any one time. Desktops, laptops, servers, Macs, Linux boxes, and even Windows machines. Recently, even our toilet got an upgrade and now runs on Ubuntu Linux, allowing us to ping washroom for availability, run cronjobs to flush away any, er, residue to keep the “garden freshness”, and of course, to defrag the hard disk during regular maintenance schedules.

Well, not really. I just took one of the Ubuntu stickers the nice guys at Canonical sent me (together with the free CDs I ordered) and stuck it on the toilet flush. Sure it’s not as impressive as sticking an Apple sticker on your Windows laptop, but I thought it’d help spread the word. Or maybe it’s just compulsive sticker behavior – I still have 2 stickers left and constantly think about where to stick them (the other one went onto our in-house server, which does run Ubuntu Linux).

It’s safe to say I don’t have any converts yet, but at least everyone in the office sure knows about “that Ubuntu thing”. Still, being able to ping washroom is infinitely nerdly – someday we’ll have to setup a ping-able washroom.

Hardware we use to develop Bezurk

We use a variety of workstation hardware to develop Bezurk. Some of us like Mac OS X, some of us are (regrettably) attached to their Windows boxes, and one of us uses Ubuntu Linux.

Trung, our resident Java head, uses a Ubuntu Feisty Fawn workstation. I remember it took Trung days to get X working properly, but he definitely feels it’s worth the effort!

Arun has the misfortune of having to use a Windows Vista powerhouse machine (it even has RAID on it) when all he really wants is a Mac. Sometimes he brings in his Powerbook to get things done.

Gary uses a Windows box and is happy with it. Sometimes he lapses into brief periods of Mac lust…

Wei Tat and Steffen use Windows machines as well. It works so I assume they’re happy with it.

I’m a full-time Mac user who converted less than a year ago from Windows. I dig my MacBook but hate that it had to come with a mini-DVI slot, which means more money to buy an adapter :”(. My opinion is that the natural progression for OS of choice for most techies is: Windows → Linux (of course, struggling with X configuration for days is unavoidable) → going back to Windows because the damn drivers just won’t work with my favorite game → checking out PearPC (now defunct) → crawling back to Windows → Linux (again) → Mac OS X on Intel machines. I’m convinced Mac OS X is the middle ground between running a UNIX box and having a pretty GUI.

Everyone has dual LCD monitors since, as everyone knows, multiple monitors increase productivity. Well, at least most of us still do – some monitors have since joined the garbage heap.

bezuntu, our in-house server, runs on, you guessed it, Ubuntu Linux. We use and abuse it for testing purposes.

And of course, someday we’ll get Linux into our toilet.