Ryan Tomayko

Fedora Legacy shutting down —

This seems like really bad news to me.

IEs4Linux —

Whose going to get this running on OS X? I guess it doesn’t really matter. I can always X over to a Linux box…

Vienna —

Nice looking Newsreader for Mac OS X (F/OSS with an Apache 2.0 license and public subversion repository).

Where were you on Saturday, November 9, 2002? —

Crazy.

Twelve Days —

“For n = 12 we perform a total of 364 reps! Thank goodness there aren’t 13 days or we’d have to do 454.”

Graffletopia - Stencils for OmniGraffle —

Rock on.

Law of Demeter —

Follow it.

ngrep - network grep —

“strives to provide most of GNU grep’s common features, applying them to the network layer. ngrep is a pcap-aware tool that will allow you to specify extended regular or hexadecimal expressions”

Mr. CooL ICE —

Oh my.

The perils of avoiding heresy (or "What are Design Patterns") —

In fact rather than being subtitled “Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”, it should have been “21 reasons C++ sucks; 1 embarassment; and an Abstract Syntax Tree”.

Ajax Start Pages Suck [redmonk.com] —

Anne isn’t pulling any punches :)

Reinventing the WS Stack —

“Should machine-to-machine, multi-hop, RESTful communications expose a need for additional functionality, then, and only then, will the need be addressed. This is opposed to the WS style of standards creation where solutions are created that go in search

OpenID for non-SuperUsers [intertwingly.net] —

Sam with a very simple, step by step tutorial on using your site as an OpenID identity provider.

Software Development: Simplicity tops the agenda [infoworld.com] —

We won on my birthday :)

Is anything ready for the enterprise? —

“I would rather take an easily modifiable, open platform that I can make do what I need in a specific environment.”

Text email clients revisited [linux.com] —

I’ve been using a fetchmail, procmail, and mutt setup on my Mac for a few months now in an attempt to get control over five different mailboxes and it’s working pretty well. If you’ve got some free time and lots of mail, consider playing around with one o

demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible Microsoft HTML —

“The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.”

Creating a password to convince yourself you have traveled back in time —

Brilliant!

CASEBUILDER™ SOA —

This is too funny: “… provides you with the verbiage you need to explain SOA to non-technical people and ‘sell’ its long-term strategic benefits.”

Proposed Solution To Global Warming —

Fix it at the source: “… Thus I propose that we turn off the Sun for roughly 0.2% of each solar day, or two to four minutes every 24 hours.” Brilliant!

WSDL - Why Services Don't Launch [addsimplicity.com] —

Oh snap!

The (Unofficial) Digg Soundboard —

Cute. The latest Digg flames all in one place :) Kind of Digg zeitgeist, I suppose.

The Morning News - MetaFilter in the Ruins —

“When the apocalypse comes, when the world ends as we know it, you can bet someone will be updating Metafilter.”

You write free software, therefore you... write free software. —

“The thing that unites the free software developers, and the only thing that unites us, is that we make free software.”

What Mongrel Isn't (Or, Write Your Own Damn Web Server) —

“All you have to do is change the internal processing, add 200 more methods to the HTTP parser, serve Bittorrent over Ethernet, and have it save Korean orphans while eating a Mango in the back seat of an El Camino driven by twenty midget clowns.”

Microsoft exec called software developers 'pawns' —

“I mean, all through this presentation previously, I talked about how you’re using the pawns and you’re going to screw them if they don’t do what you want, and dah-dah-dah. You can’t let them feel like that.” and “So you can’t let them feel like pawns, no

Bill de hÓra: Mercurial, Part I —

Nice look at one of the better distributed version control clients picking up mindshare.

An OpenID is not an account! —

OpenID solves the identity problem, not the trust problem. When a user authenticates with OpenID, what they are doing is stating “I have the ability to prove my ownership of this URL”.

Everybody LOVES a math joke —

“A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician were sitting in a street café watching the crowd…”

Lose, Lose, Lose —

“You and I — private citizens not in uniform — are asked to do nothing but fret. The sacrifice expected of us is, once again, minimal. Enjoy your iPhones.”

Web APIs Are Just Web Sites —

Well done.

TeleTech / Verizon Exit Interview —

Q: Did you learn all you needed to know to be capable of doing the job? A: Yes, bullshitting through the interview provided me with the skills to effectively bullshit to customers…

Proposing URI Templates for WebForms 2.0 [whatwg.org] —

Oh, hell yes:

Steve Jobs iPhone on Weekly Update [youtube.com] —

Nails it.

New Ipod!!!!! (SNL) [youtube.com] —

The original SNL / Steve Jobs skit. This is a classic as far as I’m concerned.

Lines From Alanis Morissette's "Ironic," Modified to Actually Make them Ironic —

“A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break… at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco corporate offices in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”

PHYS771 Lecture 9: Quantum —

The second way to teach quantum mechanics.

Martin Luther King "I have a dream" [youtube.com] —

Completely, insanely, utterly, amazing. Every single time.

random thoughts on being an entrepreneur —

Wow.

Can't save in Google Docs? Disable Firebug! —

Grrrrr. This has been driving me crazy for almost two weeks. I don’t understand why the main google search doesn’t include google groups – I thought the whole point was to put everything behind a single search box. Bha.

Fully licensed —

“I hope you can wipe the screen off!” — I fell off my chair.

Access localhost via name from Parallels Desktop [macosxhonts.com] —

This is another thing that’s been driving me crazy for a while now. I’m going to try the bonjour technique mentioned in the comments.

Trapped in sobriety [dive into mark] —

I beg to differ Stephen. Mark is clearly on his own planet, too!

Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style —

Nice little style guide on the web and nicely indexed hyperlinked.

Ruby book sales growth plummets again [bitworking.org] —

That’s sales growth not sales.

Are we gonna bash Restlet next? [brandonwerner.com] —

I’ve been meaning to spend some time in Restlet for some time now. Looks like it’s gaining traction with the EE crowd. Err, well, uhh, some of the EE crowd, anyway.

Prototype Javascript Framework —

Documentation, finally!

All Wikipedia Links Are Now NOFOLLOW —

Boo – links are made to be followed.

subtlety : a remote subversion excursion —

Put in a subversion URL and get back an RSS feed for tracking changes.

In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment —

“… but I gave up after optimizing AWT, implementing drag and drop, and trying to make 1,200 pages of crappy APIs do the right thing on the Mac. Then I took a one-week Cocoa training course, and wrote the first prototype of iChat.”

Jan. 22, 1984: Dawn of the Mac [wired.com] —

“But the company’s board of directors balked and ordered the ad withdrawn from its Super Bowl slot. Only the intervention of Steve Wozniak, who said he’d pay for the spot personally if the board refused to air it, saved the day.”

W3C Markup Validator Results for "You, me and the W3C (aka Reinventing HTML)" —

Chairing the WG is one way to fix your validation issues! (yes, I’m just being mean now — ignore me. no but seriously.)

Greg the Architect - SOA This. SOA That. —

“Buhdooy!”

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without —

Very nice list of CSS techniques.

Baron VC —

“Most of the sites that suffer from Digg are blogs that are trying to establish ongoing dialogue with their readers. The authors are more interested at developing ideas and sharing them with people that come across from organic channels.”

What's New in Prototype 1.5? [xml.com] —

Nice review of new features.

Tartar Sauce [cooks.com] —

We’ll be giving this recipe a shot tonight at a fish fry. Nothing too crazy but the lime juice and garlic salt should add a nice touch.

Amos O. Olagunju / St. Cloud State University —

This is the “home page” of a professor who teaches web design at St. Cloud State University. Don’t go there.

My Life As An RSS Junkie [medialoper.com] —

Bob Saget: RSS is not a drug! I used to [expletives deleted] for coke. Other Guy: I saw him! Bob Saget: Now that’s an addiction, man. You ever [expletives deleted] for RSS?

Best use of film including Bob Saget —

Funniest part of the movie; hands down.

3 pillars [dehora.net] —

“the version control system is a first order effect on software, along with two others – the build system and the bugtracker. Those choices impact absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by comparison, don’t matter at all.”

Mr. Gosling - why did you make URL equals suck?!? —

Wow. Much worse than I thought.

HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST) —

Nice activity diagram describing the resolution of response status codes given various request methods and headers. Full res GIF, JPEG, PNG, and SVG.

your clever screen name is not clever —

“There’s a time and place for a penis decal on your forehead and the Monday morning staff meeting is not it.”

The End is Nigh: Help Squash Rails Bugs —

The JRuby guys are real close to 100% passing Rails' unit tests. I think I’m going to sign up for PostgreSQL testing/hacking. What are you doing?

Updated vim binaries for OS X 10.3, 10.4 —

Vim 7.0.188 Universal and PPC binaries are up.

Implement getElementsByClassName [bugzilla.mozilla.org] —

Awesome. Robert Sayre just checked in his document.getElementsByClassName implementation to mozilla trunk.

I don't know how I will tell my wife —

“I know that there are those out there who would have me go AWOL or refuse to deploy. I cannot do that. I have a family to feed, and soldiers to take care of. I can do neither from prison.”

Aristotle Pagaltzis takes both sides of the XML 2.0 debate -- my feelings exactly —

“There are cases where you really do want that. There are cases when you don’t. There are cases where it’s half this, half that; cases, say, where you only want charset sniffing. There are cases where you want a pony. Not every document has the same g

Lifecycle of a bad idea [dive into mark] —

While not all bad ideas include a PowerPoint presentation, all PowerPoint presentations include at least one bad idea: PowerPoint.

Bill Gates (clearly on crack): "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day." —

“Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

Why do we still use C? [dadhacker.com] —

“Maybe if we took away these PL theorists’ Emacs and LaTeX packages for a while we’d get better results.”

More Thoughts on The Renaissance, Agile and developers —

“I tell you one thing for sure: Far more developers understand the business they work in than business people understand the technology that drives them forward.”

Gyre - The open source, web-based IDE and debugger for Rails —

Interesting concept. I’ll have to check this out once it comes out of “pre-pre-pre alpha” (which doesn’t really make sense, btw. There’s nothing more alpha than alpha).

Making Fedora RESTful —

Wow, I’m surprised I’ve never seen anything about this before.

Vi Input Manager Plugin —

“Essentially, this add Vi command functionality (albeit a small subset) to any (and all) text editors that use the Cocoa text system; e.g., Safari, TeXShop, XCode, etc.”

How much is inside Ramen noodles? [answered] —

Great research like this is what I love most about the internet.

The window.onload problem (still) [peter.michaux.ca] —

Nugget of wisdom: “… developing for the web is frequently about accepting small compromises to big philosophical ideals.”

Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know —

Anyone who doesn’t know every single one of these probably hasn’t been developing for the web very long. Probably a useful crash course for newbies making their way over from FrontPage or ASP.net though.

HBO turns 'Fire' into fantasy series —

George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” is coming to HBO as a three-four year series. I’d be happy just to get my hands on the next book but this is outstanding (via tkington).

Please drop SVN —

Oh wow. The concept of logical patches is something I never considered before. Darcs has a “record” command that let’s you split multiple changes to a single file (or files I assume) into logical changes (“hunks”).

Knowledge Acquisition —

John Panzer: “Software development is a knowledge acquisition activity, not a manufacturing activity.”

int getRandomNumber() [xkcd.com] —

// guaranteed to be randon :)

Open Source Conversations: Stephen O'Grady —

Nice.

Schneier on Video: Security Theater Against Movie Plot Threats —

Oodalolly!

Oodalolly! A Disney's Robin Hood Appreciation Thread —

Friar Tuck was a complete bad-ass, son.

The BileBlog: Good riddance, Marc Fleury. —

“What Fleury contributed to the world of Java is a personality; love him or hate him, the man certainly deserved to be hated.”

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel —

Aaron Swartz reviews a newish book on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Insanely good topic, bad book?

Multi-Select Lists vs. Checkboxes —

I’m real close to hating multi-select list boxes right now. Using an overflowed UL of checkboxes has some interesting pros (and cons).

Sun proposes to apply Web service standardization principles to REST —

Elliotte isn’t pulling any punches :)

When You Wish Upon a Beard —

Wow.I shudder to even observe the brilliance that is _why. There’s an actual Cut-out Adventure Beard here.

Fun with Vista's Speed Recognition [innoq.com] —

Press caps locks. Press caps lock. PRESS CAPS LOCK! Press capital I. Delete I. Press capital I. DELETE I SCROLL THIS CONFLICT. DELETE ADULT SCROLLS CONFLICT FOR C … THANK YOU! Delete THINK YOU.

Lisp [xkcd.com] —

:)

Less sucky multiple-select lists —

Another interesting take on multi-select lists that uses checkboxes with labels and colors.

UNIX® Load Average Part 1: How It Works —

Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn’t understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.

Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal [youtube.com] —

Oh man. This song was not this horribly bad when I was a kid.

What's cooking for FreeBSD 7? —

Lots of stuff from Sun (ZFS, dtrace), Linuxulator translates Linux syscalls to BSD syscalls with not performance penalty, lots of performance enhancements to the network stack from the card up, and a new malloc.

getopt and getopts —

A complete look at the little used utilities for processing arguments in scripts.

REST Issues, Real and Imagined [mnot.net]

Sun joins the Free Software Foundation —

Bravo.

Define - /etc? —

“et see” :)

Why You Need a Degree to Work For BigCo [raganwald.com] —

:)

Google gtags version 1.0 —

Best idea ever. EVER!

Improve this Script and Win $100USD —

exec 3<> /dev/tcp/$HOST/80 What?! How cool is that.

Planet PostgreSQL —

How long has this been here?

How the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft —

“It looks like you are trying to do a regular expression. Do you need some help with that?”

XRuby Already Faster Than Ruby 1.8.5? —

“… the results for YARV/Rite are still streets ahead in terms of raw performance, and where I’m placing my bets for the next de facto Ruby interpreter.”

7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 [video.google.com] —

Recent presentation by Mr. Bram Moolenaar on how to be a bad-ass with Vim.

PUT is not UPDATE [cafe.elharo.com] —

Hence the multiple disclaimers in the article, such as, “I hesitated to include this table. … What I don’t want to happen is that you start thinking of web resources as SQL tables. Don’t do that.”

Primary sources? You don’t need ‘em. Trust us. [jonudell.net] —

I’m surprised to see that any of the news sites linked to the original report.

CS 61A The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs —

UC Berkeley Webcasts | Video and Podcasts: CS 61A.

Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy —

Being neither unhappy or intelligent, I wouldn’t know :)

Using mutt on OS X [linsec.ca] —

This is pretty darn close to my configuration but I used the mutt-devel port… Oh, and my ~/.procmailrc is pretty insane also :)

ruby-pg: Project Info [rubyforge.org] —

Matz’s ruby-postgres library has finally been forked.

Agile Enterprise Architecture: Why I Can't Take Smalltalk Seriously —

These people are still around? Amazing. Ooohhh, “tens of thousands of simultaneous users” — scary! scary!

ROA Maturity Model —

How did we ever get anything done without superfluous quadrants and models. Bring ‘em on. The trick is making something every developer would know is a joke but that could make it past a manager or architect.

A Faster Ruby. —

“Well if Ruby developers are so damn productive, why can’t they write a faster ruby?”

getting dirty with rubyinline [evanweaver.com]

README.EXT —

“This document explains how to make extension libraries for Ruby.”

snax :: evan weaver —

subscribed

Block Helpers and DRY Views in Rails —

I’ve been using this technique for some time with great success. Oh, and this site’s design is bordering on perfection.

leaving duke —

Seth is on the market. Hire him.

mjt —

Browser-side JavaScript template engine with concepts borrowed from Kid. Used by Freebase to drive formatting around JSON. Looks interesting.

You are kidding arent you? —

“Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve.” :)

Q&A: James Gosling, 'father of Java' —

Wow. I’m nodding yesly to almost everything said by Gosling in this article. Weird. Here’s a good one: “The number one biggest threat to enterprises is the inherent fallibility and laziness of humans.”

have u seen an idea even billGates shouldn't hear Mr.Guido ? please read because it's important. —

“also it could be disguised as a cancer research stuff should some disassamble its code. the use-free-computer-time type of thing they do on the net.”

Invasion Of The Dynamic Language Weenies [hacknot.info] —

Wow. Pretty solid anti dynamic language advocacy piece. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything longish so maybe I’ll try to put together something of response to this.

Ruby: intern.h Source File —

jackpot.

Hofstadter’s Loop —

Tim reviews the new Hofstadter book.

Lecture 7b: Metacircular Evaluator, Part 2 - Google Video —

“I consider being able to return a procedural value, and to have first class procedures in general, as being essential to doing very good modular programming.” — Gerald Sussman (PS: how come nobody told me you can link to specific time offsets in google

GNU Readline ChangeLog —

CHANGES

GNU Coreutils ChangeLog

Blogger’s Code of Boring Irrelevance —

“If I want to publish a picture that shows Ronald McDonald smoking a joint made out of the rain forests, I can.”

Blowing a raspberry [wikipedia.org] —

“In the terminology of phonetics, this sound does not appear to have an official name, but might be characterized as a linguolabial trill. It is never used in human language phonemically, but it is widely used across human cultures and by other primates”

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid —

Yes! I’ve been doing this for a few months now with the corp. assets and I won’t go back. You can really see the text snap into a vertical rhythm when you hit it.

ZFS Basics Screencast [opensolaris.org] —

I haven’t had a chance to play yet but you can consider me on the ZFS bandwagon. It’s coming to FreeBSD 7.0, too. Oodalolly!

What to watch out for when writing portable shell scripts —

Nice look at techniques for writing portable sh.

public-html@w3.org Mail Archives —

Looks like things are starting to heat up over here.

Life Support: Let the children go on foot and on bike —

“Although statistics show that rates of child abduction and sexual abuse have marched steadily downward since the early 1990s, fear of these crimes is at an all-time high.”

Sam Ruby: Genshi Filters for Venus —

“In the remaining four templates, the translation from XSLT to Genshi markup is straightforward. And generally, the Genshi markup is both more compact and more powerful.”

sneer.org: teapot << 'tempest' —

The entire Twitter Scaling Problems conversation in one place.

YAGNI Considered Depressing —

“I actually think YAGNI and Othello’s waiting moves embody the same concept. Both are brilliant, winning strategies. Yet, there’s a certain emotional side to YAGNI and software development. We tend to get attached to our good ideas.”

Koranteng's Toli: Crawl Before You Walk —

On JSF: “Waiting 5 years before you adopt the native architecture of the web is almost inexcusable. The web won’t (and didn’t) wait that long.”

The Truth About Lisp —

“Paul Graham originally wrote reddit, in lisp, on the back of a napkin while he was waiting for a coffee. it was so powerful that it had to be rewritten in python just so that ordinary computers could understand it.”

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Rails Developer David Heinemeier Hansson’s Response to Alex Payne’s Interview [dive into mark] —

Pppkkkeeeewwwww.. The happy universe explodes. This is turning into one hell of a discussion.

Type Inference: Another Bad Idea for Java 7 [cafe.elharo.com] —

“Type inference actually makes some sense in languages like JavaScript and PHP that are built around this, and had this feature from day 1. It makes no sense in a language that’s built around the opposite. It makes Java look weakly typed, but it isn’t

Running Ruby in the browser via script type="text/ruby" —

I no longer think applet support should be dropped from all major browsers. I’ve got links for anyone who produces a Jython version.

highlighting "weird" characters... (in vim) [nabble.com] —

Find all non-printable characters in vim (and I assume with any regexp engine) using the following: [^ –~] (that’s a char range between space and tilde). How convenient. I never noticed that the printable range ended at tilde.

Douglas R. Hofstadter Explains GEB —

“… let me try one last time to say why I wrote this book, what it is about, and what its principal thesis is.”

John R. Tomayko —

My only hero.

Rake CHANGES —

Rake ChangeLog

These are the systems and peripherals [Michael S. Dell] is using right now. [dell.com] —

Michael Dell runs Ubuntu 7.04 on his personal laptop :)

Comment j'ai expliqué REST à ma femme [pompage.net] —

“How I explained REST to my wife” in French!

Coprolitic Programming [thecodist.com] —

‘The next time you think to sigh, “this code is such a pile of crap” imagine what your grandchildren will say some day when they work on it.’

National Survey Reveals More than 70% of Americans Don't Know Plastic is Made from Oil —

Everything is made from oil. It’s crazy.

Squid is My Service Bus [mnot.net] —

Bingo!

Streisand effect [wikipedia.org] —

“Streisand Effect is a category of Internet phenomena in which an attempt to censor or remove a certain piece of information instead backfires, causing the information in question to receive extensive publicity…”

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 [google.com] —

“Results 1 – 10 of about 283,000 for 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0” – This is officially the craziest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet (with the exception of the Hasselhoffian Recursion).

The Day Digg Went Crazy —

“It’s a mutiny of sorts.”

Silly season [diveintomark.org] —

“Sigh. I used to have the strength to argue against such foolishness. Nowadays I’m reduced to nothing more than Grey’s-Anatomy-esque catchphrases. Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea?”

Why the 09ers Are So Upset [freedom-to-tinker.com] —

“Giving a private party ownership of a number seems deeply wrong to people versed in mathematics and computer science.”

Did Microsoft just patent sudo? —

What’s next? which(1)?

Growl Notifications Firefox Add-on [addons.mozilla.org] —

Perfectly done.

Fielding’s Dissertation [docunext.com] —

Section by section interpretation and notes on Fielding’s Disseration on REST.

Does Linux "Fail To Think Across Layers?" [slashdot.org] —

Slashdot has become a horrible discussion forum for most topics. Disk theory and UNIX sysadmin type stuff is an exception, though. This story on ZFS might have the most informational comments I’ve seen in years.

How to make a Ninja Mask with a shirt —

This should immediately supercede your present Ninja Mask technique.

Exploring the Mac OS X Firewall [macdevcenter.com] —

Awesome look at using advanced features of ipfw(8) on OS X.

Pop Quiz on the situation in Iraq [truthdig.com] —

I’ve been looking for a essay-sized historical account of the Shiite/Sunni conflict for a long time now. A former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector lays out what appears to be a fairly comprehensive story over three pages.

A New Way to look at Networking —

PARC’s Van Jacobson (traceroute(8), tcpdump(1)) on, well, everything that matters. Hands down best talk I’ve seen in years. I’m going to watch it again tomorrow.

Memorial honoring fallen soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan runs out of room [fortwayne.com] —

“In a grim sign of the times, the ‘Wall of the Fallen,’ set up by House Republican leaders in June, is almost full. The mounting death toll has forced U.S. House staffers to study how to reconfigure the display to squeeze in more names.”

Silverlight trumps Web Standards (and Flex)… —

“As for me, I’ll take some more Microsoft kool-aid, please.” — I said almost exactly those same words in 1997 regarding Microsoft’s OS/Browser integration (I’m quoted in an article on C|Net as proof). There’s nothing I regret saying more.

A Chat with Aaron Swartz —

Q: Are you working for Reddit as full-time programmer? A: No, I left reddit several months ago. Q: Why did you leave? A: My boss asked me to.

Iraq War Hampers Kansas Cleanup [kcbs.com] —

“The Kansas National Guard has about 40 percent of the equipment it is allotted because much of it has been sent to Iraq.”

Dell joins the Microsoft-Novell alliance, hopes for Windows / Linux harmony —

I’ve read the following line five times but it refuses to compute: “… and now it sounds like Dell will be buying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates from Microsoft …” Huh? Looks like I should have further researched the MS/Novel deal.

Does JavaFX Spell The End Of AJAX? —

Is anyone actually falling for this crap? “‘The goal is to make it so people never have to see code’, said Gosling.” — Gag Me!

RESTful Web Services (Paperback) : by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby [amazon.com] —

A site for sore eyes :)

Ten OS X Command Line Utilities you might not know about [osxdaily.com] —

About half of these will be well-known to the UNIX hacker but there’s a couple I’ve not seen elsewhere: lsbom, softwareupdate, screencapture, and lipo.

The future is yesterday [plasmasturm.org] —

I saw this same note on rest-discuss the other day and thought it struck a chord. :) Jon Hanna on SOAP, Web 2.0, other stuff…

HTTPanties [thinkgeek.com] —

“413 Requested Entity Too Large”

Open Letter to Jonathan Schwartz from NeoOffice.org —

Best Open Letter Ever. Add your signature!

Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice [studentprintz.com] —

“It’s easy to make, unpatented and could be added to drinking water. Imagine, Gatorade with cancer control.”

Charles Nutter - Big Plans [headius.blogspot.com] —

“And yes, I’ve seen the Microsoft news … If Sun did something like this I’d resign.”

Gonzales proposes new crime: "Attempted" copyright infringement [news.com] —

“Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including ‘attempts’ to commit piracy.”

Diavlo [demon.nl] —

Absolutely beautiful font … and free.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Etch —

Nifty combo.

Relevance: Silverlight, the DLR, and thee —

“The general thrust of this argument is that having a full-fledge rich-windowing experience in the browser is going to put a stop to all that amateurish mucking around with JavaScript and the DOM. … that’s hogwash.”

Microsoft 'evidence' turns against them [tectonic.co.za] —

“The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.”

sog’s (Unconventional) Highway Etiquette [redmonk.com] —

Beautifully done, sir. This should be required reading before anyone is allowed to hit an onramp.

Evolution of a Python programmer —

“Web designer” is dead on :)

Udell Interviews Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby on "RESTful Web Services" —

Ugghh, this is 7 days old now and I still haven’t had a chance to listen… It’s the best interview ever when I imagine it in my head :)

HTML Entity Character Lookup —

Oh wow. I’ve been trying to find a single page that has every unicode character on it with its hex counterpart but this is pretty fantastic.

E-mail is not a platform for design [zeldman.com] —

“But when I say HTML mail still sucks, I don’t mean it sucks because support for design in e-mail today is like support for standards in web browsers in 1998. I mean it sucks because nobody needs it. It impedes rather than aids communication.”

CNN 0wned during Paris Hilton Coverage —

Ha!

Ruby Unroller: A Ruby script execution tracer [rubyinside.com] —

Nice. This is going to save me some serious time.

JRuby 1.0 Released! [headius.blogspot.com] —

Rock on.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine —

“One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman…” — need I excerpt more?

Philosophy of numbers —

“So there you have it — lack of units in programming languages and the war in Iraq have a common cause: the lack of correct philosophy on numbers taught in schools.”

Words to Live By —

“Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a maniac serial killer that knows where you live.”

SSH for iPhone —

You had me at “SSH”.

Understanding Engineers: Feasibility [fishbowl.pastiche.org] —

Programmer definitions of impossible, unfeasible, trivial, non-trivial, hard, very hard, and distinctly non-trivial.

Bill de hÓra: Design for the web —

“… on Java, too many web frameworks – think JSF, or Struts 1.x – consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware…”

A look back: Bram Cohen vs Linus Torvalds [wincent.com] —

“…. But after closely studying Git I’m a little bit awestruck; Torvalds is a frickin' genius, a true visionary, and somehow managed to just "get it” and instantly, in a flash of insight, come up with “the solution” for version control."

Java's Overton Window [blog.case.edu] —

Oh, wow. Have we come that far, then?

3D Mailbox - FREE 3-Dimensional Email Software. Bring e-mail to life! (And put spam to death!) —

This just ruined my day. I’m going home. Absolutely horrible. Just horrible.

Last Harry Potter leaks online [boingboing.net] —

“With the last book, the publisher was so freaked out about ebook piracy that they refused to release an official electronic edition. The result? Fans made their own electronic text in 24 hours. And other fans translated the book into German in 45 hours.”

Bug 332174 – Drop SOAP support [bugzilla.mozilla.org] —

RESOLVED FIXED

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal —

An oldy but goody :)

David Heinemeier Hansson says No to Use of Rails Logo —

I must say, I’m a bit bummed that we’re having this conversation at all.

Prohibition Politics —

“Americans in 1920 embarked on a noble experiment to force everyone to give up drinking. Alas, despite its nobility, this experiment was too naive to work… This popular belief is completely mistaken. Here’s what really happened…”

Sci Foo 2007 Gossip Liveblog [aaronsw.com] —

WTF is going on here? Neil Stephenson, Martha Stewart, The Dyson Family (as in vacuums), The President of The Royal Society, Sergey Brin, Nat, and Aaron kicking it on Google campus? This is apparently actually happening right now.

Hiring Programmers and The High Cost of Low Quality —

“There’s no one programmer who does the work of ten other programmers. One uber-programmer does just as much work as one ordinary programmer. It’s just that the results solve ten times as many problems.”

Ten Strange Facts About Newton [neatorama.com] —

I’m in the middle of Newton infatuation having just finished the first leg of Stephenson’s Quicksilver. Did you know they’re publishing the Baroque Cycle in three smaller trilogies now? The first is worth reading without any further committment.

begthequestion.info —

“… it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must distinguish between the traditional and erroneous modern usage. This is why we fight.”

The IPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again —

“And the more I’ve been thinking about that argument, the more I realize that it’s exactly how Microsoft spun the proprietary, non-standard HTML features in IE 4.”

Content-Aware Image Sizing [youtube.com] —

Pretty amazing stuff.

FOX Attacks Iran [foxattacks.com] —

Wow. I’ve tried to stay away from politics here lately but this is pretty crazy.

Bo Jackson - Tecmo Super Bowl Run [youtube.com] —

Coast to coast… THREE TIMES! The original TecmoBowl soundtrack is fried into the deepest areas of my brain.

Java Native Access + JRuby = True POSIX [headius.blogspot.com] —

Java becomes 100% more viable. So simple — why didn’t someone do this in the very beginning?

Go away Ruby [bill.burkecentral.com] —

Bill Burke is an idiot. Wow. And then, after being an idiot, he actually calls someone “gay” in the comments when they dare suggest that Ruby is a strongly typed language. Huh? I thought Red Hat had better taste.

Less is more for Ruby on Rails, inventor says —

“We’re not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we’re encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails,” he said. “Come if you like it, stay away if you don’t.”

Hawking on the Simpsons —

Ha!

Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site —

Do not try to measure APIs vs site traffic… that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no APIs.

My baby's so sweet :-) —

My sister and her daughter—whom I’ve seen very little of in the past three years due to her husband’s multiple Iraq deployments—singing a beautiful song. An interesting contrast to the deeply upsetting Patraeus report videos I’ve been watching all day.

Programming Can Ruin Your Life —

“You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.” Aye!

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! [youtube.com] —

I just had this exact conversation with my wife. No one understands…

Adam Bosworth Leaves Google [searchengineland.com] —

I’m convinced that anything health related will be a tough space. It’s a bit surprising at how little the Google Health team put out, though, given that Bosworth has one of the best track records in technology. Weird.

Jottit —

Aaron is at it again. This looks like the perfect web based notepad.

Leaked Media Defender e-mails reveal secret government project —

“The e-mail was leaked to the public by a group that calls itself MediaDefender-Defenders.” … “Apparently, MediaDefender employee Jay Mairs forwarded all of his company e-mails to a Gmail account, which was eventually infiltrated.”

Joe Gregorio | Projects [bitworking.org] —

Aww man, Joe’s real project list looks like my wish-i-was-hacking-on list.

A little REST and Relaxation —

How long has this been floating around? Roy Fielding on building the web… (via Aristotle Pagaltzis on rest-discuss)

The Rest of REST —

Slides from the presentation Roy will be giving in about an hour at RailsConf Europe.

Sun surprises at RailsConf Europe 2007 [loudthinking.com] —

“‘Why are they doing all this?’, that’s a common concern with most Ruby folks … A Sun that’s heavily involved with Rails on the software side is a Sun that’s much better positioned to sell loads of hardware …”

Inappropriate "Talk Like a Pirate Day" remarks —

“Aaaaaaaar! Home a day early, ye are, husband. This varmint a poor stranger be who lost his clothes.” :)

Obie Fernandez : Ruby on Rails and More... —

“I’m not really much into evangelizing Ruby and Rails much nowadays. You know, since we won, I have to admit that it became boring and besides the point.” :)

Ruby on Rails Security Guide —

Comprehensive look at common Rails security concerns with links out to in-depth articles.

/sys/man/1/emacs —

The emacs(1) manpage from Bell Labs’s Plan 9.

unix domain sockets vs. internet sockets —

Pretty much what you thought but with great detail :)

Sun’s Ruby strategy - Engage and Contain? —

“Maybe I’ll start to believe when they start promoting Ruby on Rails at JavaOne, as opposed to promoting JRuby on Rails at RailsConf.”

Congressional Representation Or "Ass-Kissing Little Chickenshits"? —

MoveOn’s response to a congressional vote condemning their recent NYT / Patraeus ad. This is apparently going into the Times sometime over the weekend…

Cronic - A cure for Cron's chronic email problem —

“… cron’s pathological behavior has be petrified into the Unix standards. So if it isn’t broken, it isn’t cron.”

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL —

“… CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps…”

Why we should hang out: a mathematical proof —

“Clearly, after inspecting r guys, the expected utility of inspecting one more an continuing optimally is 1/(r+1) * the sum of b = 1 to r + 1 of U*(b, r+1). Call this expression Z.”

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails —

“But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-able with a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you’re really doing this.)”

Immature developer attitudes revealed in flames regarding CDBaby at Pervasive Code —

“What matters a lot more than choice of programming language is the ability to get the project done, meaning tested and correct and launched. Apparently for Derek, PHP is the way to get that done, and Rails ain’t.” — it really is that simple. Period.

Ola Bini on Java, Lisp, Ruby and AI: Rubinius is important —

“I’m getting more and more convinced that for the people that don’t need the things Java infrastructure can give you, Rubinius is the most important project around, in Ruby-land. More than that, Rubinius is MRI done right.”

Rails, the 15 minutes is Almost Up. Meet Erlang. —

“Every time some Rails fanboy starts peddling their hype, the approved thing to do is to respond with Erlang.” – Brilliant idea! That will bring some real substance to the argument.

HTTP Errors Poster —

Stefan Tilkov with a poster-size illustration of HTTP client errors (4xx series only).

The Mythical Business Layer —

“It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, ‘neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.’” — that is THE SINGLE FUNNIEST SENTENCE ever assembled in the history of english language!

How a non-Neutral ISP could work —

An extremely effective method of explaining the important of “net nuetrality”.

sane_transactions.rb —

Brings ActiveRecord’s transactions toward sanity and adds savepoints. The methods added to Object must go! — transaction, commit!, and rollback! will clash with existing libraries. e.g., PDF::Writer and Transaction::Simple.

Advanced Python (or Understanding Python) —

Thomas Wouters covers a ton of ground (quickly) on lots of Python’s interesting features. This may be the quickest way for newbies (or refugees) to come up to speed with the language.

Paul Graham Facts —

“Paul Graham can divide by zero — and the answer is ‘Paul Graham’” … “Paul Graham invented Al Gore” … “Paul Graham is a default constructor. He takes no arguments.”

What nine of the world’s largest websites are running on —

Linux, Apache, PHP, and memcached are the big winners. Nice to lighttpd represent.

r2check.rb —

Checks pre-Rails 2.0 apps for compatibility.

A Bunch of Phony US Soldiers —

“Brian Chevalier was going to reenlist but decided against it before he was killed on March 14 during our first mission in Baqubah. His phony life was celebrated in a phony memorial where everyone who knew him cried phony tears.”

Legislative Inaction Forces [Michigan] State Government Shutdown —

The State of Michigan will shut-down most state operations for 15 days beginning October 1 (tomorrow). Medicaid, State Lottery, VA, The Courts, Dept. of Civil Rights, Dept. of Education, State Police, etc. all impacted.

Iran Labels CIA 'Terrorist Organization' —

Iran’s parliament on Saturday approved a nonbinding resolution labeling the CIA and the U.S. Army “terrorist organizations,” in apparent response to a Senate resolution seeking to give a similar designation to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Unison File Synchronizer - User Manual and Reference Guide —

I’m gonna give this a try for managing home directories now that I’ve convinced myself that version control is the wrong solution. I moved my homes from CVS to SVN a couple years ago and just tried going with bzr but VCS just isn’t right here.

Rails 2.0: Preview Release —

“… Rails has picked a side in the SOAP vs REST debate. Unless you absolutely have to use SOAP for integration purposes, we strongly discourage you from doing so. As a naturally extension of that, we’ve pulled ActionWebService from the default bundle.”

The Rule of Least Power - W3C TAG Finding 23 February 2006 —

“There is an important tradeoff between the computational power of a language and the ability to determine what a program in that language is doing.”

Good Shell Coding Practices - Handling Command Line Arguments —

Very nice look at different methods (good and bad) for handling the command line in sh scripts.

Software Is Hard —

“Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we’ll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there’s a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.”

BoingBoing TV! —

This’ll be a fun ride.

The rsync(1) Algorithm —

Some detail on rsync’s “rolling checksum” algorithm invented by Andrew Tridgell.

Why Programmers suck at Picking Colors —

“Let me repeat this because it’s very important: contrast is the basic building block of UI design.”

USING COLOR IN INFORMATION DISPLAY GRAPHICS —

Color theory for computer interface designers.

An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today —

“Facebook isn’t the internet, dipshit.”

Defanging the Multi-Core Werewolf —

“… where’s the harm in spawning another process? Let the two halves of the program communicate over some IPC mechanism. That model is well known, well tested, well-understood, widely deployed and has been shipping for decades.”

If wishes were iPhones, then beggars would call —

“My current theory is that it’s some twisted form of wish fulfillment. ‘I wish this company understood the value of openness, but they don’t, so I’m going to keep buying their closed, crippled shit until they get it.’”

Overlapping Circles —

Sam’s Planet Intertwingly is my TechMeme.

NoSquint: Firefox Extension —

NoSquint remembers your text zoom level per site, so you will only need to adjust text size once for each site that uses text that is too small for your eyes.

The ESB Question —

This is a scary description of a small chunk of my tech career: “In a previous life, I helped develop ESBs. I’ve written about them and I’ve promoted them. But somewhere along the way, I lost the religion.”

Why I Hate Mission Statements —

“The easy and fun way to test whether a mission statement/purpose/motto is garbage is to negate it and see whether it still holds up.”

http://xkcd.com/327/ —

“Did you really name your son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;—?”

Submit a Twitter Bug —

Gets my vote in Best Bug Reporting Screen.

adamssl on anonymity —

Now this is an interesting theory on John Gabriel’s GIFWT.

Programming - You're Doing It Completely Wrong —

I know! Seriously.

Configuring Apache httpd —

Starting with absolutely no configuration file. This is why I’ve prefered lighttpd, because I can put together a separate config in about five minutes. httpd’s sprawling default config has always scared the crap out of me.

Fear and loathing at the command line —

“To average users, the suggestion that they use the command line – or the shell, or the terminal, or whatever else you want to call it is only slightly less welcome than the suggestion that they go out and deliberately contract AIDS.” That’s a damn sham

ManPageView —

Vim add-in for viewing manpages, perldoc (both system and embedded), help, info, and php files. Maybe I’ll finally be able to read all that GNU info doc I keep hearing about in the GNU coreutils man pages.

Rudy's Four Horsemen —

Giuliani to bomb everybody if elected. Iran, Palestine, Syria, Massachusetts, etc.

Hotwire graphical terminal —

Looks like they’re bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.

Employees Expose FOX NEWS Distortions —

It’s worse than I thought.

The New BackUp Commercial —

“… and mounts your shotgun flush at your bedside enabling access to your shotgun while in the laying position in your bed!”

pgAdmin III v1.8.0 Final Released —

“v1.8.0 represents nearly a year of development and testing to bring you a host of new features and improvements”

How Benjamin Franklin Made New England Prosperous —

Need more posts like this!

Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters —

“No one party has a monopoly on bullshit” … “it’s not just about talking bullshit, it’s also about living it…”

ZFS Puts Net App Viability at Risk? —

Schwartz: “… we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform, and to the legal defense of free software innovators.”

Prism —

Mozilla Labs finally puts some lipstick on WebRunner. This is extremely important to me.

Mac Fonts @ OSX-E —

Blatant license violation!

Mr. Peabody Explains fork() —

Brilliant!

Ian Bicking: Prism —

“… if all you can think of is reasons why the web is stupid and awkward, and you think it’s some giant step backward (from what?), then you haven’t thought very deeply about what’s happened in the world of technology and why.”

The Velvet Underground - Pale Blue Eyes —

Great tune!

Shipping Means Prioritizing —

“No important software for the Mac depends on Java.”

Fair use advocates hit back with copyright principles of their own —

“The Fair Use Principles for User Generated Content offer a set of guidelines that video sites should use in order to ensure that their attempts to keep infringing video offline don’t run roughshod over users' rights to fair use of the content.”

Anti-Terrorism and the Death of the Chemistry Set —

“Modern fascist states don’t even bother to kill those people, and pretending they’re going to show up in some stormtrooper outfit and start a gun battle with you is insane.”

Iraq, Afghan Vets at Risk for Suicides —

“The ongoing research reveals that at least 283 combat veterans who left the military between the start of the war in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, and the end of 2005 took their own lives.”

How to tell if a web page sucks —

Beautifully executed.

Technical Debt —

“… coined by Ward Cunningham to describe the obligation that a software organization incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that’s expedient in the short term but that increases complexity and is more costly in the long term.”

November 5th MoneyBomb #3 —

Whoa, Ron Paul’s on track to raise almost $3 million in the 24-hour period beginning 12:00 AM TODAY. He’s done $350K in the first three hours. I can’t imagine that’s going to sustain but he’ll end with $2.8 M if it does. That has to be a record.

Prism Prototype Now Available on Mac and Linux —

That was quick. IMO, the Mac needs this application more than other platform’s (including Windows) because of its document oriented application switching.

Bwana —

Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.

The Nerd Handbook —

“Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface …”

RESTafarian SOA killers? —

“We (the RESTafarians) are not stubborn zealots. We’re just right. Sorry :–)”

2,369,239 US Soldiers vs 11,770,000 Iranian Soldiers = DRAFT —

“At the risk of loosing all my credibility, allow my concern to manifest itself in a less than mature way: Our economy is &%$#ed. We have a -862,300,000,000 dollar cash balance. That puts us LAST in the world for cash balance of our own currency.”

Sinatra : Classy web-development dressed in a DSL —

something to dig into during a 1 hour conference call or whatever …

WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice —

Dare talks about his transition from WS-* to REST proponent. This mirrors a lot of people’s experience, including my own.

macvim - Google Code —

Absolutely beautiful new Vim port for OS X – sane GUI tabs, multiple windows, client/server mode, fonts look great. Stop building Carbon Vim from source!

Resources and the Kimball —

Patrick’s right: even if you never build a DW related application, Kimball’s articles on dimensional database design are enlightening and applicable to a million other tasks. Reading Kimball, for me, was not unlike reading Paul Graham or Richard Gabriel.

Changeset 8180 - Rails Trac - Trac —

“Ousted ActionWebService from Rails 2.0 ” :)

GNUpdf —

“The goal of the GNU PDF project is to develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format, and associated technologies. ”

Bourne Shell Server Pages —

“Installation is left as an exercise for the reader.”

What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams? —

“What if closures and meta-programming and expressive type systems and annotations and all of the other tools that give us the power to build powerful abstractions actually don’t scale to larger teams?”

Time Magazine's FISA Fiasco shows how Beltway reporters mislead the country —

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pulls the limbs off Time’s Joe Klein on his coverage of the FISA bill. I can’t imagine a clearer exposition on the mentality of most beltway “journalists”. I’ve been a Time subscriber for my entire adult life but that might end …

The Two Types of Programmers —

From IMil in comments: “Shocking statement #(n+1): 80% of the 80% believe that they belong to [the] 20%.” A recursively shocking statement! i.e., (0..Infinity).inject (0.8) { |x,n| x * 0.8 }

PEP 3117 -- Postfix type declarations —

“After careful considering, much soul-searching, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, it has been decided to reject this PEP.”

Depressurize the priorities —

“Most of the time you should be working on The Next Most Important Thing. But there are times when it’s okay to depart. Times when you need to depressurize after completing a dive in the stressful, complex pool of Big Problems.”

Run Internet Explorer 5/6/7 Natively in OS X —

This trumps Leopard for most important Mac development this year as far as I’m concerned. Words cannot explain the hatred I’ve developed for booting up multiple Parallels VMs to get at IE.

Am I a bad person because I basically hate everyone? —

“Watching the unfolding train wreck that is the 2008 preznidential campaign, I’ve come to the depressing conclusion that every major candidate makes me want to throw up [in my mouth and then swallow it] at least a little bit.”

Python —

“Whitespace?”

Google Chart API Developer's Guide —

I would use this ASAP if not for the privacy requirements around the data I’m charting. There’s really no good general purpose graphing libraries that use nice and simple vector shapes and styles.

CNN has postponed speculative documentary "We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear." —

That special was “based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,” said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson …

VMWare: Coming Out of the Cloud? —

EC2 is my current pick for most interesting / innovative tech development of the year. Everyone will have to have an EC2 clone by the end of 2008.

A Brief Introduction to REST —

Stefan Tilkov’s latest InfoQ article covers all the key concepts…

The solution is quite clear: each browser tab should have its own thread, in which a separate instance of a JavaScript interpreter executes... —

I had assumed that was already happening today. I really have to dig into the mozilla codebase someday… Seems like it would be worth it to get a better feel for browser internals – even if you weren’t planning hacking on the browser.

Postgres for the win! —

Yep. I can’t think of a single piece of technology that’s been less of a PITA than postgres. In fact, when I think about “solid software,” postgres is the first thing that comes to mind.

Merriam-Webster name "w00t" 2007 Word of the Year —

w00t!

In software, some developers take up residence on planet architecture, an otherworldly place where software is eternally planned and discussed but never actually constructed. —

Atwood’s had a great year.

GAO: "USA is living beyond its means" —

(Meta: Wow. The Government Accountability Office is vlogging on YouTube.) The money situation over here is what keeps me up at night these days. How am I suppose to explain this to my kids in twenty years?

Freedom 0 —

Ahh, those were the days… What’s left to fight for?

What has the government done to our money? —

“Why is the dollar the world’s reserve currency? How does the government fund it’s debt? and what the hell causes inflation?”

The Right and Lawful Rood —

… the primary activity depicted here is standards development, particularly the historically mandated procedure for determining the linear measurement known as the “rood”, related to the English “rod”, the German “rute” and the Danish “rode”.

Bazaar goes 1.0! —

New, faster repo format and a bunch of other tweaks make in during the RC process.

A RESTful version of Amazon's SimpleDB —

That’s much nicer. Amazon should adopt it immediately.

Prince XML: Generating High Quality PDFs from HTML + CSS —

Simple print typesetting using HTML/CSS. Targets the 80% of common print tasks w/ HTML/CSS. I’m going to be looking into mozilla’s cairo PDF output abilities within the next few weeks so it will be interesting to compare.

Using a Mac…why oh why? —

“It all started with Windows Vista”

moz-snapshooter.rb —

Like khtml2png but using the gtkmozembed Ruby extension library (which I haven’t been able to build yet).

War is over if you want it —

Sorry people, I’m completely sucked into this Ron Paul thing. Merry Christmas!

depressing —

“maybe try coding something in c”