Chris Wanstrath: "Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit, and usually more fun than listening to keynotes."
I just totally love this kid. Chris explains the future and past of, uh, everything that matters, and gives good, solid, practical reasons for why contributing to free and open source software projects is something worth dedicating a large chunk of your time to.
Dare Obasanjo is a machine.
Just great stuff.
Assaf Arkin: "There’s also some back-end processing going on, and I think that part is using DRb for now. But maybe the next update it will switch over to RMI or UNIX pipes or whatever. I don’t much care because the library does the talking, and besides, it’s only distributed in the sense that we have two pieces of code running with different PIDs. Not particularly important what’s happening on the wire, as long as it’s fast."
Bill de hÓra knocks one out of the park: "I think sometimes that the problem people have with REST is that it's so well-defined; it's not witchcraft, it's not a cargo cult. You can't argue with it on a relativistic basis or apply clever rhetoric or continuously redefine what it means. An architectural style isn't 'good' or 'bad' - you have to decide if it's the right fit for your problem space and if not, you have to come up with a more appropriate one."
"Unlike the lower court, the appeals court seemed to understand that reciprocity lay at the heart of free software licenses. Just as traditional software firms thrive on the exchange of code for money, free software projects thrive on the exchange of code for code."
One of the better pieces on Feynman I've seen. First aired February 2, 1975 on NOVA. I know what I'll be watching on the Muni for the next few days :)
Adam Wiggins on Sinatra's blasphemous approach to controllers and routing. AKA: the thing that makes Sinatra my web layer of choice (well, that and throw :halt).
Still too much work but it's nice to see some support for conditional GET making its way into the framework.
Jonas Arnfred: "This theme is a sleek and simple minimalist design for wordpress made to bring the content forward, and everything else out of view. The theme is designed with a focus on typography and effective whitespace ..."
"You can specify CSS based on viewport orientation which you determine via javascript and update the orient attribute of the body element. Target the browser with body[orient='landscape'] or body[orient='portrait']"
Koshi's been hanging out at the legendary San Francisco dive bar, "The Zeitgeist," every day for thirty days now; takes photo's and blogs about the picnic table discussion.
"... the caganer is often tucked away in a corner of the model, typically nowhere near the manger scene. There is a good reason for his obscure position in the display, for 'caganer' translates from Catalan to English as 'pooper', and that is exactly what this little statue is doing — defecating."
Interesting. This is the first time I've seen mention of Firefox shipping with Ogg Vorbis and Theora built-in. That could definitely change the horrible pace of adoption we've seen thus for.
Single points of failure always suck. Always, always. There's five billion songs out there that depend on a very small (comparatively) number of key servers owned by a single company. It's just horrible engineering.
I threw this together a few weeks ago and now I'm not sure how I lived without it now. I know you people have cool bash/git hacks sitting in your ~/.bashrc -- hand them over.
Very nice and functional JavaScript based timeplot library. Looks good, shows data-points on mouse over, approachable API. Good stuff.
This is why I have a really weird fetish for graphs. It's not the colors and shapes, it's the fact that any data has an infinite set of potential visualizations and some are vastly better than others, depending on your needs.
An all around great post from Bill de hÓra. Wow.
joshua schachter on Rabble/Kellan's "Beyond REST?" presentation, with an interestingly simple HTTP-based callback system.
Great look at varnish and concerns around putting a front-end reverse proxy cache in place.
Who says legibility and correct punctuation aren't street?
Awesome. I didn't even know there were such things as Firebug Extensions.
With your host, Joe Gregorio.
Sam Ruby on how DVCS + mailing list has removed the need for bug tracking systems on some projects. I'm feeling a similar pull in my own work.
My feelings exactly. I can't believe I'm going to consciously purchase something that's so over the top defective-by-design, but I'm definitely going to buy it.
if any - Another hella-great minimalist design.
A minimalist's WordPress theme. Focus on typography and simple markup. Various configuration options and a print stylesheet.
The greatest thing I've ever seen on the internet.
Christian Neukirchen announces Bacon, a ground up reimplementation of test/spec + test/unit. (EDIT: this is not test/spec as I had previously reported. Sorry.)
"We’re born as unreal people but somehow get turned into respectable members of society with good cover stories."
Awesome idea. Nice syntax highlighting. (Via Simon Willison)
Not sure how I've never stumbled on this before. You can remove items from the list to cause require to reload a file.
Nice review of the various typographic tact found at Jon Tangerine's Pith & pulp http://jontangerine.com/
"Jim Meyer, manager of LED says that Rails scales like any other web application: 'That is to say you need to take into account all the components from the moment the request is received at the load balancer all the way down and all the way back again.'"
The man was a genius: "'the unlikely event of a water landing,' discussed in every preflight safety lecture, sounds suspiciously like 'crashing into the fucking ocean.'"
Rafe on Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project: "... a catalog of media formats that are no longer in use. In many cases, media stored in these dead formats can no longer be read because readers are no longer available for them."
Right on time.
Hilarious! What Mark doesn't know is that much of my "minimalist redesign" was ripped directly from what he's had in place for 2-3 years; "administrative debris" was just a convenient alibi.
Nice TOS: "We are engineers, and we, like you, know very well how you want to be served by us, just as you know very well what not to do here."
Letter found hidden beneath a backyard pond to the person who would eventually remove the pond. One of the best pieces of writing I've seen all year.
"This plugin will alert you if you accidentally stumble onto MySpace.com, and take you back to the site you came from."
Agreed. I've been a lurker for going on a year now. Solid mailing list.
Free (as in beer). Built on WebKit. Simple. Beautiful.
An initial version of RDiscount's API docs just published on rubyforge...
Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I've ever come across and then some...
Yossi Kreinin: "But I miss virtual functions. I really do. I sincerely think that each and every notable feature C++ adds to C makes the language worse, with the single exception of virtual functions."
Good idea. Solve the "concurrency problem" for dynamic/scripting languages and the "language syntax problem" for Erlang, without sacrificing the benefits of either. Someone needs to keep an eye on this.
There's way more new stuff in here than I thought. 20%-30% of ActiveSupport's core extensions, Enumerator support everywhere, Object#instance_exec, byte vs. char stuff, documentation, and more...
If you move the slides quickly, it feels a bit like playing Desktop Tower Defense.
Sometimes! Or, fork(2) is a very fast operation on legitimate operating systems. I didn't realize it could be as fast as spawning a thread, though.
"... the fact that [Twitter has] a nifty error page is a bonus really."
"It is against the law to break the law in these premises, or anywhere!"
Justin French: alias push?='git cherry -v origin' -- beautiful.
cschneid has been helping me get the collection of hacks I've come to call a weblog into shape for some kind of release. He's also been writing a lot of great Sinatra tips and tricks here. Check it out.
Interesting. I've been using the jquery-1.2.3.js hosted on google code for a few months now. Maybe I should have read the TOS...
This is the template used to generate the HAML RDoc. It's a massive improvement over the default template shipped with rdoc. I can almost stomach rdoc with this -- almost.
Support for HTML4/HTML5 output, more control over whitespace, option for implicit HTML encoding, and now faster than ERB.
Interesting thread wherein Linus describes the need for various types of Git workflows for leaf developers vs. maintainers. Lot's of talk about the pros and cons of rebasing in different situations.
Short and exceptionally well written take on Microsoft's Vista DRM strategy. I'm really enjoying the FSF going on the offensive with sites targeting very specific issues (badvista.fsf.org).
An implementation of Markdown in portable ANSI C that's roughly 28.5x faster than the canonical Perl implementation on a 179K test file. Looks like a complete implementation; includes smarty and footnote extensions.
Aristotle Pagaltzis: "Not exactly as fast [as SBCS strlen], but if you write it in asm, it only takes one extra instruction to count characters in UTF-8 vs those in an 8-bit encoding, per character."
Nice ApacheCon EU '08 presentation (warning: video + slides, no transcript) covering various blue sky stuff on Roy's brain for Apache and HTTP.
Interesting look at evolution of UI and the semi-recent trend of adopting the web's content oriented interface. Definitely overlaps with the fundamentals of "admin debris" and related ideas.
Sold! All my stuff will soon be non-NC.
And I was just starting to get used to the Minefield icon... I've been running the nightlies for about three months now and FF2 is really feeling a bit like legacy software.
"You (and I) suck. Plan for it. Expect it. Get over it."
Ola Bini on def vs. define_method vs. eval for defining methods in Ruby. There really ought to be a simple way of getting stuff like this from blogs and into the standard Ruby doc.
... and other freakishly large animal pr0n. Awesome. (via sogrady)
Boo! Horrible name collision imminent. Is REST really that unknown or do they just not care?
What Mark Pilgrim has been working on at Google for the past year or so: an encyclopedia of web development.
Oliver Steele details his (and others's) Git workflow with a bunch of illustrative graphs, emphasizing one of my favorite aspects of Git: There's More Than One Way To Do It.
"Apple calls these songs 'iTunes Plus', because it sounds so much better than calling everything else 'iTunes Minus.'"
"... in every one of these processes and diagrams there is a box which basically says 'write the code', and ought to be subtitled '(and here a miracle occurs)'."
This was the first year in a long time that I didn't make it over to Kent to see the memorial and pay my respects. Growing up a few miles from where all this went down is still one of the most sobering experiences of my life.
Reading xkcd has become one of my last regular forms of physical exercise. My abs are burning right now from violent guttural reactions to this one.
"I still haven't found anyone who knows how you implement Scaling in a language, so I guess that LRM will never have it... Anyone who care to enlighten me, please send me a detailed email with an implementation of Scaling."
"Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken."
A gem for your project is automatically built each time the project_name.gemspec file is changed on your master branch.
I think I may finally be able to get rid of Colloquy.
I finally watched "There Will Be Blood" a few days ago and the milkshake line practically jumps out of the movie at you. I have no idea what the hell happened in the movie but that line made it all worth while.
Ethan Vizitei with a great piece on people's misconceptions about what coders do and the difficulty with which they do it.
eWeek: "... Nearly every Microsoft executive associated with the Windows Vista launch has left the company. Vista has proven to be a career-ending enterprise ..."
In response to Virgin Media CEO stating that he considers Net Neutrality to be "a load of bollocks" and promising to put any website or service that won't pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the "Internet bus lane."
Ethan Vizitei on the difference in productivity found in the middle of the night vs. any other time of day. Nails it, IMO.
All manners of good stuff here.
"... the 'new reality' is the realization that Dynamic Scripting Languages are ready for prime-time and that REST is a simple, yet scalable architecture to build a servers on." - I'd say that's definitely a new reality for the enterprise, Bill.
Now this is the kind of direction I hope to see GitHub and Gitorious go in the future.
Erik Engbrecht: "Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading."
Stephen O'Grady with the obligatory Q&A, which is excellent as always.
The Python REPL running on Google's infrastructure.
Ian Bicking: "Many people are excited about how far up you might be able to scale something based on App Engine, but I’m excited about how far it could be scaled down."
A nice solution to "The Tangled Working Copy Problem" for VCS's that don't allow you to pluck out portions of a working copy to commit. Allows editing the diff that's about to be committed.
There are some great tips for owning your local workflow in here.
I've since went to sleep and reawakened. I'm typically fairly curmudgeony when I wake up but I'm still having the same reaction.
I can't say whether this is an accurate description of hg but he nails a lot of the things that makes git interesting, IMO.
The more interesting aspects of life described using only venn diagrams, an occasional line graph, and a scatter plot here and there.
