Turn HTML off completely in Mail.app
HTML mail is bad enough when it works – it’s intolerable when it’s as broken as in Apple’s Mail.app.
Persistent NFS Automounting Under OS X 10.3 (Panther)
… are possible with a little work and a lot of patience.
Per Site User Stylesheets
A Firefox hack for styling specific sites using user stylesheets.
Gmail as Mailing List Aggregator
A report on my experience using GMail for mailing list activity.
Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design
Stefano Mazzocchi: “I have a much simpler and humble goal here: give programmers some tricks and some advice in how to proceed to make their web pages look cleaner, more readable and, hopefully, more professional, elegant and original than before.”
The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White
“Of course, Strunk and White, as the book is commonly called, has nothing to do with software (it was written in 1935) and everything to do with writing: grammar, composition, and style for users of the English language. But in its 100 short pages this book has more to say about the craft of software than many books you'll find in the ‘Computing’ section of your local bookstore. All you have to do is replace a few key words throughout the text and presto! Pearls of software development wisdom, delivered in near-perfect English.”
Graduating from Beer to Whisky: 10 Facts You Need to Know
“Beer is the people’s drink. Whiskey on the other hand is seen as a hard drink. It is a drinker’s drink. The sole preserve of men. It’s serious. It is the opposite end of the spectrum to fruit-based neon-coloured liquids sporting little paper umbrellas.”
Don’t overuse instance_eval and instance_exec
Ola Bini: “Using instance_eval changes the rules for the language in a way that is not obvious when reading a block. You need to think an extra step to figure out exactly why a method call that you can lexically see around the block can actually not be called from inside of the block.”
Having abused instance_eval in the past, I can say with absolute clarity that it’s usually The Wrong Thing. It can make DSLish code look really cool in controlled and scoped demos but it greatly increases cognitive complexity, making things hard to read and maintain.
Subtree merging and you
Very interesting alternative to git submodule, especially in “vendor branch” type scenarios. The other project is merged into yours at a specified prefix and can be updated with a simple git pull.
put a proxy in front
“… even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don’t waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected”
sog’s (Unconventional) Highway Etiquette [redmonk.com]
Beautifully done, sir. This should be required reading before anyone is allowed to hit an onramp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style
Nice little style guide on the web and nicely indexed hyperlinked.
Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004 learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design
A perfect article.
How to make multiple SSH connections to the same host faster
All you have to do is add a few lines to ~/ssh/config.
HOWTO: Be more productive
Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.
Process of Forming a Company
I guess it’s okay to say out loud now that I'll need all the information like this I can get.. :)
Emacs Keybindings for Firefox
This is one of the last things I've been waiting for before switching from Safari. Now if only the scrollwheel worked a little nicer and I could get a decent proxy-configuration plugin…
How do you whistle with your fingers in your mouth really loudly (or at all)?
note: trying to learn this at work seems to annoy people.
Ted's Macintosh Tips and Tricks
Excellent repository of OS X configurations, tips, applications, etc.
CSS Negotiation and a Sanity Saving Shortcuts
Some tips I haven’t seen before for dealing with IE’s broken CSS support. Using conditional comments for ie specific css, setting manual defaults, etc.
Ten Commands Every Linux Developer Should Know
ctags/etags, strace, fuser, ps, time, nm, strings, od/xxd, file, objdump
Help the Googlebot
Tips and techniques for helping Googlebot. If you are a symantic markup perfectionist, you probably already have most of these right.