Ryan Tomayko

It’s Faster Because It’s C —

That argument debunked for most real world applications.

I liked the way different types of boundedness were presented:

• I/O-bound. Completing a unit of work earlier just means waiting longer for the next block/message.
• Memory-bound. Completing a unit of work earlier just means more time spent thrashing the virtual-memory system.
• Synchronization-bound (i.e. non-parallel). Completing a unit of work earlier just means waiting longer for another thread to release a lock or signal an event – and for the subsequent context switch.
• Algorithm-bound. There’s plenty of other work to do, and the program can get to it immediately, but it’s wasted work because a better algorithm would have avoided it altogether.

As much as I agree with the thrust of the article, C programs really are faster in real life, but I think it’s because people who program in C are more likely to be familiar with common performance problems and tradeoffs. It’s hard not to be at that level.

pocco —

Python version of Docco, the quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator:

8888888b.
888   Y88b
888    888
888   d88P  .d88b.    .d8888b  .d8888b  .d88b.
8888888P"  d88""88b  d88P"    d88P"    d88""88b
888        888  888  888      888      888  888
888        Y88..88P  Y88b.    Y88b.    Y88..88P
888         "Y88P"    "Y8888P  "Y8888P  "Y88P"

All together, we have Docco, Rocco, shocco, and now Pocco. Jeremy observes, “It’s a whole little adorable family of midget programs now…”

Always ship trunk —

Paul Hammond’s recent Velocity talk on managing different code-paths for beta features, A/B testing, staff-only features, etc. in web apps. I’ve been interested in tools and techniques for doing percentage-based feature deploys for a long time. This is the first time I’ve seen someone talk about it in any detail.

HTTP Status Code Drinking Game —

Use this to get kicked out of the party.

Higher Order Mustache —

Mustache is my favorite template language by far. By far. This is a great example of why. It solves every problem simply and elegantly, or it doesn’t solve it all. Here’s the syntax in its entirety. In his post, Chris talks about how adding very simple lambda support solved the cache block problem. It’s just as suitable as solution for embedding Markdown in templates.

Sweet Justice —

New JavaScript based text justification library looks promising. The default HTML/CSS text justification built into every browser has always sucked, due mostly to lack of word hyphenation.

One of the places I’d really like to have good justification is in Ronn’s HTML based man pages. It uses text-align: justify currently, but I’ve been considering making it non-justified because it’s so horribly bad. Compare it to the proper justified / hyphenated text generated by groff when viewing manpages in a terminal. It’s night and day.

man.cx —

This is probably the nicest manpage site I’ve come across:

I haven’t heard of it. They imported 98,660 manpages from all available Debian packages plus some from other sources. The type is clean. URLs are short and sweet. Manual sections are presented in a nice TOC on the left. They have some other novel features like comments on each manpage.

I planned to do something very similar. I even registered mancutter.org. A great number of manpages are distributed under a liberal license. I wanted to throw up a nice and simple site and then ship a tool anyone could run to bomb roff up to the server for all manpages on a machine. You should be able to gather all Linux and BSD manpages fairly quickly with such a system. Or, you could push up a specific set of manpages so project maintainers could publish directly to the site. I might still but man.cx is a huge chunk of what I was looking for.

alandipert's ncsa-mosaic —

The sources for NCSA Mosaic v2.7 — one the first graphical web browsers (1993) and certainly the one that led to the World Wide Web as we know it — can now be found on GitHub.

You can even run it on a modern Linux. Here’s what the GitHub homepage looks like:

The team that built NCSA Mosaic (Marc Andreessen et al) would go on to create Mosaic Communications Corp., which eventually became Netscape Communications Corp., which open sourced the Mozilla browser, leading to Firefox.

I wonder if any of the original NCSA Mosaic code still exists in any form at mozilla.org.

The Mosaic Wikipedia entry has a thorough history.

Smack a Ho.st —

Tim Pope registered smackaho.st and pointed the wildcard at 127.0.0.1 so you don’t have to futz around in /etc/hosts every time you want another local hostname.

try visiting dontmakeme.smackaho.st:3000

Brilliant.

philc's vimium —

Life altering Chrome extension that adds vi keybindings. It’s not quite as intense as Firefox’s Vimperator but that’s a good thing IMO. You get some really interesting stuff in addition to the obvious h, j, k, and l movement keys and find commands:

gg           scroll to top
G            scroll to bottom
f            activate link hints mode
F            activate link hints mode to open in new tab
r            reload
gf           view source
zi           zoom in
zo           zoom out
i            enter insert mode -- commands ignored until you hit esc to exit
y            copy current url to the clipboard

ba, H        back in history
fw, fo, L    forward in history

J, gT        go one tab left
K, gt        go one tab right
t            new tab
d            close tab
u            restore closed tab

Feels great in practice. Sold.

Garbage Collection Slides from LA Ruby Conference —

Looks like Aman and Joe knocked one out of the park with this presentation on Ruby’s GC:

I wish RailsLab or PeepCode or somebody would team up with those guys and do a series of screencasts. You can learn a ton just by watching over their shoulder while they work.

What really happens when you navigate to a URL —

“The facebook server responds with a permanent redirect”

A Hidden Cost of Javascript —

Interesting set of results from a series of JavaScript parse and load benchmarks on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera presented with pretty graphs and tables. I’m convinced browser-side JavaScript profiling and optimization—including this kind of parse+load and GC profiling—is going to occupy more and more of my time in the future.

How do we kick our synchronous addiction? —

Eric Florenzano asks why modern web frameworks insist on a synchronous programming model and gives some answers with possible alternatives. The article is dead on, IMO, but I’m not sold on his conclusion:

We need to look at these alternative implementations like coroutines and lightweight processes, so that we can make asynchronous programming as easy as synchronous programming.

For Ruby, this is all about making Fiber robust and widely available. There was a time when I too thought this would solve all problems by hiding the underlying async model but retaining its benefits. That’s the dream. I don’t believe in it anymore. Having experimented with such an approach on a small team, I’m fairly confident that everybody working on an event-based/async program needs to understand the underlying model or blocking code will inevitably be introduced and destroy everything. And once everyone’s comfy with async, you’ll find that the sync façade is annoying and unhelpful. Embrace it.

A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular —

Paul Bigger, author of the phc PHP compiler, explains why Facebook’s HipHop is interesting and why the translator/compiler technique might be a better design than a JIT or something more… elaborate. Good article all around, even if you don’t care about PHP.

There’s some salt in there too:

I’m also slightly annoyed that people all of a sudden care about PHP compilers. I worked on one for 4 years and I could not convince anyone to give a shit. But now that its got the Facebook logo on it, all of a sudden PHP compilers are the greatest thing ever. Bah.

Lesson in marketing. Merit is not conducive to mass appeal.

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast —

Wow, okay, so it translates PHP into C++ and then compiles it with gcc. That’s… interesting. Here’s what’s more interesting, if you ask me:

We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of [Facebook’s] Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment.

That’s pretty damn fast, and super impressive if true. I can’t imagine the amount of infrastructure that would need touching for this kind of transition. You have to work with the backend devs and the sysadmins and pretty much everyone. That’s no small feat at a company the size of Facebook. Kudos.

Sinatra 1.0 FAQ —

We pushed out a Sinatra 1.0 pre-release. The FAQ includes some info on what the 1.0 release means and how to prepare for it.

Introducing: Readability 1.5 —

The Arc90 guys have a nice little Readability update. Two new styles with beautiful Typekit faces and more size and margin options.

This is cool too:

Beyond the “wow, this makes reading so much easier” comments is a whole slew of emails from the elderly, people with vision or cognitive difficulties and users that rely on screen readers. It’s incredibly gratifying to see Readability make a difference for so many people.

For the record, I’m rocking the Athelas style (type info) with Large type and Medium margins.

How would you serve 100,000 simultaneous comet requests with Node? —

Simon Willison throws down a C100K problem for node.js. That’s a tough order for a single machine. To get even close, you’re going to need lots of system tuning way down below node.js.

WTF - Haml —

I love this so much:

… one way or another it seems I need something called EMACS.. WTF..!!!!! I dare you to install it and see how many WTFsss you will say…. it’s like some text editor that is so smart that you dont use the mouse dont even use the cursor keys..if you want to go back one character you hit control then B!!! Brilliant!!! two random keys instead of one with an arrow!!!! WWWTTTFFFF!! ok I might not need this crap…. lost a day learning to use the Rubik cube of text editors.

It’s easy to pfft and blow off this kind of … criticism, but if you can look past the make believe grammar and punctuation you really do get a sense for how hard it is for newbies to wrap their heads around even very basic set of tools needed to build things on the web. Maybe what we do is just hard and complex and there’s nothing we can do to make it simpler. I’m just always surprised when I get to peek through someone else’s eyes and see just how fucked up everything must seem.

Node.js For My Tiny Ruby Brain: Keeping Promises —

Rick documents his progress a week into node.js. Nice look at some of the basic concepts underlying the system, like async everywhere and promises.

Highcharts - Interactive JavaScript charts for your webpage —

Nice looking pure JS charting library:

I’ve been seeing more and more of these charting libs lately and they all look great.

Rack 1.1 released —

Lots of needed fixes and some new features in this release, including new Config, ETag, Sendfile, and Logger middlewares, Carl and Yehuda’s rackup to Rack::Server conversion, multipart fixes, and a bunch of optimizations by Eric Wong.

Huge props to Josh Peek for putting his head down man'ing the patch queue on this one.

Optimizing Optimizing HTML —

Oh neat. You can drop the type='text/javascript' from your <script> tags, type='text/css' from your <style> (and/or <link rel='stylesheet'>) tags and the browsers won’t care. Also, in 2010, <b> and <i> are cooler than <strong> and <em>, and trailing slashes on self closing tags are lame.

Personally, I like these little tricks for making HTML more human readable but I can’t believe people are actually doing stuff like this in an attempt to compress HTML to gain network/browser efficiencies. I dare someone to actually benchmark those optimizations. Cutting your sucky EULA page in half and trimming away all that shit in your header/sidebar would be much more productive (but still barely worthwhile).

Server-Side Javascript: Back With a Vengeance —

Nice to see Narwhal, Jack, CommonJS, and node.js getting some love on ReadWriteWeb. Javascript on the server is breaking out.

Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta —

Google’s shipping official beta builds of Chrome for Mac and Linux. I’ve been using Chromium for a few months now and it’s definitely become my favorite browser. It needs a flash blocking extension and an ad blocker. I’m using userscripts for both but they’re a little janky.

Dean Allen on Human Identity —

In comments related to the recent shutdown of Favrd:

I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others. Much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference (god knows we’re taught to right from the outset by caregivers: good boy, pretty picture, heckuva job Brownie), deriving personal value from these transactions in the absence of a well-formed internal frame of reference through which you can decide on your own what does and doesn’t work, and subsequently accept the opinions of others as feedback, is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.

Disco.

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell —

This is pretty rad. You can do web searches and whatnot without leaving a command line style interface but you can also do stuff like read news feeds. Check it:

I’d love to settle into this kind of workflow but these shell interfaces always have one thing or another wrong with them. Maybe this is The One. We’ll see.

[ANN] Rack 1.0.1 —

Maintenance release that fixes a bunch of issues under Ruby 1.9, some multipart form problems, and various other minor bugs.

Gem Bundler is the Future —

Nick Quaranto shows why you need to start thinking about bundler.

PeepCode: Meet Sinatra —

Brand new PeepCode screencast on Sinatra by Dan Benjamin. The production on this thing is really exceptional and they get into some meaty topics. Highly recommended.

Unicorn! —

GitHub documents the how and why behind their Unicorn setup. Also, for the record, the fork(2) + shared accept socket technique described in my Unicorn is Unix piece was first explained to me by Chris and Tom.

CodeRack —

The CodeRack Rack middleware competition has begun. All entries get a $30 credit from Heroku and the top three pieces of middleware get special prizes (to be announced). You should submit something. I want to see it :)

Perl is Unix —

Aristotle Pagaltzis comes through with the simple preforking echo server in Perl.

Slides from Stefan Tilkov's HTTP Caching talk @ JAOO —

Warning: PDF. This is probably the best high-level, everything about HTTP caching all in one place resource on the web at this point. Good stuff. I’m kicking myself for not being a part of his track at JAOO now.

An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth —

It’s a rough world out there, and we need to to a better job of thinking about and testing under realistic network conditions. A better mental model of bandwidth should include:

• packets-per-second
• packet latency
• upstream vs downstream

Densely informational piece. Don’t miss the part where they generate packet loss using a microwave and a cup of tea :)

Full Stack ETag Support —

This is how I am using Rack::Cache, Sinatra, and CouchDB … Sweet ascii diagram there. I’ve seen this ETag chaining technique twice just this week. The other one is gemcutter. They store gems in S3 and pass the S3 provided ETag along in their responses, so it’s like the web app is more of an intermediary sometimes. Weird and cool and interesting.

Message: Re: [rest-discuss] REST-* —

Whoa. There’s some serious shit poppin' off on the rest-discuss mailing list lately. Here’s Roy Fielding (completely out of context):

Quite frankly, this is the single dumbest attempt at one-sided “standardization” of anti-REST architecture that I have ever seen. It even manages to one-up the previous all-time-idiocy of IBM when they renamed their CORBA toolkit “Web Services” in a deliberate attempt to confuse customers into thinking they had something to do with the Web.

It doesn’t get any better from there :) I saw the REST-* site a few weeks ago but I (literally) thought it was a joke site. The sad thing is that, if the past is a predictor of the future, Jboss/Redhat will probably be able to convince a large chunk of enterprise IT managers that they are REST.

hurl —

Chris Wanstrath and Leah Culver’s submission for Rails Rumble ‘09 finally has its own permanent hostname. Hurl makes HTTP requests and then shows you stuff about the response, like headers and a syntax highlighted body. Hurl’s have permalinks, too, so you can link to them from email threads, IRC, technical documentation, etc. See the about page for more info and a screencast.

Slow Web —

There’s a web that’s well-considered and worth savoring. We’ll show you where. — I fell in love with the term “Slow Web” immediately after reading that description, and the blog isn’t half bad either. If you’re a tl;dr type, or prefer to not wander outside the things on the web that are merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational, then keep moving.

Via: Chris’s Trivium 13sep2009

Tornado on Twisted —

Dustin Sallings proofs out an implementation of the recently released Tornado web framework but builds on top of Twisted. The result is -1,297 fewer lines and all the benefits of having the Twisted framework underneath. I’ve been waiting for someone from the Ruby community to announce a port — we’re good at stealing. Using Dustin’s fork as a reference and basing a Ruby implementation on EventMachine might be the way to go.

Common HTTP Implementation Problems, W3C Note —

Interesting W3C Note from January 2003 that I don’t remember ever seeing:

HTTP and URIs are the basis of the World Wide Web, yet they are often misunderstood, and their implementations and uses are sometimes incomplete or incorrect. This document tries to improve this situation by providing a set of good practices to improve implementations of HTTP and related standards (Web servers, server-side Web engines), as well as their use.

The information here is relevant to people who build web apps, not HTTP server implementors — the title is a bit misleading (not actually but practically). I especially like this bit about why short, less meaningful URLs are better than verbose, descriptive URLs. Shortness has become the most important characteristic of URL design in most apps I’ve built recently; SEO be damned.

Detecting HTML 5 Features —

Mark has published the second chapter in his upcoming book, Dive Into HTML 5. I still can’t get past the typography. It’s so pretty.

Snakes on the Web —

Jacob Kaplan-Moss somehow pulls a bunch of interesting contemporary web development issues into a coherent essay. This bit on what happens when web apps begin to mature is especially well stated:

This is an impossible situation for framework developers: by optimizing for a quick start, by focusing on common needs, we’re essentially guaranteeing future failure. Remember the “Rails doesn’t scale” pseudo-controversy last year? I guarantee it’s only a matter of time until there’s an angry “Django FAIL” moment.

Frameworks ought to gracefully fade away as you replace them, bit by bit, with domain-specific code. (This is what I meant, above, that inter-op is also a scaling issue.) Right now, they don’t.

I wish more people would write about their experiences growing out of the general purpose web framework. It’s a totally natural thing but most people seem hesitant to talk about it because it’s interpreted as an attack on the framework or community.

Unicorn's signal handling —

Unicorn is a newish Rack-based HTTP server that’s kinda sorta like Mongrel but comes packed with some insane process management features. The main link is to the SIGNALS file, which documents the master/worker process model, supported signals, process replacement, failover, etc. See the README for a high level description of features.

This link brought to you by @defunkt, who explained Unicorn’s unique approach (repeatedly) over the course of a week.

Readability (bookmarklet) —

Interesting bookmarklet from arc90. Removes all superfluous content and administrative debris from the current page and turns the main content into something very readable. Comes with a few options for font-size and margin width. I’m rockin the Newspaper style with large text and medium margins. The entire web looks like my blog :) Love it.

Oh, and a tip for Safari + Webkit users: drag the bookmarklet to the first position in your bookmarks toolbar and you can use “Command + 1” as a hotkey.

Let's make the web faster —

Big giant list of articles, essays, tutorials, and tech talks on making the web faster. This is part of a larger Google Code project that asks, “what would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine?”

Dive Into HTML 5 —

My God the typography is stunning. There’s currently only a single chapter — on Canvas — but I imagine the others will fill in rather quickly.

Dropping Django —

This seems to be a trend in Python and Ruby web circles. Frameworks present developers with a choice: accept these constraints, give up a little control, and I’ll make you more productive. Longer-lived apps start to evolve out of the framework at some point, though. You need more control over a piece here, or aren’t satisfied with the way something works there, and so you refactor and pull stuff out until the framework begins to slowly fade away. Maturity is a part of the web app development lifecycle we have precious little data on.

This comment nails it:

Maybe it worked out exactly like it should have. Django bootstrapped your app to a certain point. Got you further faster than you would have if you implemented everything from scratch. Then from there, you identified the things you considered inadequate and replaced them. If it all goes away who cares. You have learned something, shared it with us and moved on.

I think that’s just fine. Unexpected maybe, but fine.

Monk —

Nice looking Sinatra + Redis web framework with some novel concepts. Comes with a generator-like system as well: Skeletons are public git repos that are cloned into your local work tree. I’ve always wondered why this kind of project template system never took off before. Absolutely elegant.

The Google Search Redesign —

It was terrifying to think that they may have actually considered making the page more edgy in some retarded acknowledgement of bling.com. Best redesign ever.

Glims —

Safari extension that add’s a bunch of features I’ve missed since switching from Firefox: an awesome full screen mode, live search completion + results, open tabs to the right of current tab (instead of on the very very right), and a bunch of other stuff I won’t use.

Via Minimal Mac, my new favorite website.

sinatra-sequel —

Sequel has become my ORM of choice for Sinatra apps backed by a SQL database. This is a quick Sinatra extension I threw together to remove some of the boilerplate required to get a new app setup. It includes a simple single-file migrations framework and some other stuff. See the README for examples.

20 tips for writing for the web —

And every one is worth reading yet another “20 tips” post.

What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way —

The Google Wave demo blew me away but I think Anil gets a lot right here. If the past is a good predictor of the future, Wave is a little too orphaned, a little too complex, and doing a little too much to be adopted quickly on any kind of large scale.

Traffic Server Proposal —

Yahoo!’s proposal to open source their “fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server” as an Apache project:

Traffic Server fills a need for a fast, extensible and scalable HTTP proxy and caching. We have a production proven piece of software that can deliver HTTP traffic at high rates, and can scale well on modern SMP hardware. We have benchmarked Traffic Server to handle in excess of 35,000 RPS on a single box. Traffic Server has a rich feature set, implementing most of HTTP/1.1 to the RFC specifications.

Rad. I know Yahoo! runs a custom build of Squid as well so I’m curious to understand where this thing came from. The proposal states that it was originally acquired from Inktomi and has been in use for some time.

Backlogs and Request Time —

Adam takes a look at how long requests and backlog interact. The sleep example runs concurrently under Mongrel but Thin and WEBrick will backlog.

RabbitHub - RabbitMQ PubSub-over-Webhooks —

Tony’s simple HTTP interface to RabbitMQ. Somebody get this running as a service on EC2 so we can hook Heroku apps up to it on the private network.

Rails Envy: RailsLab: Load Testing - Part 2 —

“… learn how to use httperf load testing with sessions, how to automate our httperf testing using autobench, how to graph the results from autobench, and lastly we talk briefly about a few other load testing tools you might want to be aware of.”

This is the second time Gregg has beat me to a great screencast :)

What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache —

mnot on how to evaluate different proxy cache options for your needs.

Relationship between latency and throughput —

Interesting reading if you found Nick’s handling of latency vs. throughput (in the gogaruca talk) intriguing.

Stefan Tilkov's REST Book: References —

Whoa. How do I get my hands on an english copy?

3 Reasons Why Heroku is a Game Changer —

We’ve been getting a decent amount of PR-ish type coverage since the commercial launch but I still say blog posts like these are infinitely more interesting:

Remember when microwaves first hit the scene and people couldn’t believe how fast they could ‘deploy’ a meal? Yah me either, but the microwave changed the game big time.

And, unlike the microwave, Heroku doesn’t make your apps taste like cardboard :)

The Uzbl browser —

Minimalist, keyboard controlled (modal vim-like bindings, or with modifier keys) browser based on Webkit. A lightweight vimperator, maybe?

The Web vs. the Fallacies —

Tim Bray evaluates the web’s basic design from the perspective of the Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Reminds me of TimBL’s Axioms of Web architecture a bit. This stuff is essential to understanding why the web succeeded where other systems failed and why the web seems quirky in some ways compared to other distributed computing systems.

Top significant moments from the Internet history —

Pretty. Y axis is a category of significance, X axis is the year. There’s at least one error: no mention of suck.com ;)

Mechanical Analogies To Web Stuff, Part 2. —

Really interesting analogy between web architecture and a car crash. This is the piece that’s missing from almost every conversation about whether any given web framework or component “scales”. (via @jperkins)

Rack 1.0 released! —

We made it.

Mark Nottingham's HTTP Status Report presentation at QCon '08 —

Protocols are hard. Nobody understands this.

RackDAV - Web Authoring for Rack —

Matthias Georgi’s framework for building DAV servers in Ruby with Rack. Could make building apps that mount into a local filesystem quite simple.

8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs —

Measure, Leading, Quotes, Rhythm, Widows, Emphasis, Scale, and Rags. Great piece.

Dive into history, 2009 edition —

Mark Pilgrim: “Anyway, I now realize that there were some hidden assumptions behind my design decisions in 2000. Some of those assumptions turned out to be wrong, or at least not-completely-right. Sure, a lot of people downloaded dip, but it still pales in comparison to the number of visitors I got from search traffic. In 2000, I fretted about my ‘home page’ and my ‘navigation aids.’ Nobody cares about any of that anymore, and I have nine years of access logs to prove it.”

I don’t think most people realize how little site navigation matters anymore. Your site’s navigation is google, topic sites, blogs, and feeds. The “website” is dead. Long live the individual useful resource.

rack-cache 0.4 released —

Get it while it’s hot.

Gay People, Come To Rails —

Well said. It appears PHP’s culture of stupidity isn’t limited to technology. What a bunch of assholes.

Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app —

Nice. This is very similar to the Sinatra::Test module but with a few additional features (i.e., the session/cookiejar thingy). If this gets traction (and it will), we’ll deprecate Sinatra::Test and recommend people use Rack::Test instead.

Deploy Merb, Sinatra, or any Rack App to Heroku —

I worked on this a bit. Jazzed to see it announced. Actually, they pretty much had everything working when I got there. I wrote some docs and tightened things up a bit is all.

Now go deploy something – it’s free!

Heroku - How it Works —

Things are starting to get interesting around here. James pulled together some (fucking sexy) high level architectural diagrams and annotated them just so. We can start talking about what we’re up to a bit more now that this is out. I’m jazzed.

Why It's Worth Fixing HTTP Authentication (and How to Do It) —

Why browser UI for HTTP auth is so horrible has always baffled me. This could be improved significant without any changes to HTTP whatsoever.

Twitter's Varnish config —

John Adams posted a bunch of details of the Varnish configuration they use in front of search.twitter.com to the varnish ML. Great stuff and nice to see the Twitter devs continuing to share their experiences with the community.

Twitter / sinatra —

Harry Vangberg put together a Twitter relay bot in #sinatra (nick: nancie) so a bunch of the cool cats there are keeping the @sinatra twitter feed lit up with a stream links, tips, and announcements.

Enterprise static files —

This reddit comment makes me wish lesscode.org was still around :)

Sliding Stats: Rack Middleware to keep an eye on your traffic —

Another interesting use of Rack middleware.

Ryan Tomayko on the Ruby on Rails Podcast —

Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed me yesterday for the Ruby on Rails podcast. We had a nice chat about Python/WSGI, Rack, Sinatra, Rack::Cache, Heroku, and other random stuff.

The Future of Deployment —

I started full time with Heroku last Wednesday. This is why.

Easy client-caching with RestClient and Rack::Cache —

This is one the amazing benefits of having an insanely simple but well defined SPEC (Rack) around the edges of your library. It makes it trivial to hook things up in new and interesting ways.

Public Service Announcement: the "P" in "HTTP" stands for "protocol" —

I’ve written this same exact blog post a dozen times. For some reason, each hop along what should be a pure HTTP pipeline wants to invent their own psuedo-protocol for transferring HTTP messages. Why?! Your reimplementation of HTTP is not going to be any less complex — by definition, it must be at least as complex; and your reimplementation is definitely not going to be less buggy than the real HTTP implementations that have been around for a decade or more.

This is why can’t have nice things …

Sinatra —

We gave the Sinatra website a major face lift. Check it out. Don’t leave without subscribing to the feed.

Javascript, it's Python with braces! —

Guyon Morée shows how JavaScript 1.7/1.8 have been moving more and more toward Python with a few side-by-side examples. List comprehensions and generators would definitely be extremely cool to have in browser land.

Classy Web Development with Sinatra (Screencast) —

The Prag’s have published two screencasts in a new series on Sinatra.

When in Doubt, Turn to _why —

Magnus Holm disects a couple of implementations for parsing nested form parameters (e.g., “person[name]=Joe&person[zip]=55555”) in Ruby. _why’s is the most interesting (as always). We just added this to Sinatra and I’m fairly confident we’ll see something like it land in Rack before 1.0.

It's OK for GET Requests to Update the Database —

True! A lot of cargo-cult types get this wrong.

[ANN] Sinatra 0.9.0 released! —

I put a lot of work into this release. Really happy to see it out :)

Dan Webb - 8 minutes on Rack —

Quick presentation on Rack by Dan Webb. Covers a lot in eight minutes.

Video of Matt Todd's Rack Presentation @ ATLRUG —

Matt Todd did a nice presentation on Rack to the Atlanta Ruby Group (ATLRUG) and they were nice enough to put video of the slides + audio of Matt’s narration online.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Learning in a Hypertext environment —

Via Ted Han (@knowtheory): “Hypertext allows information to be organized and connected in a variety of ways that provide the user with a flexible working environment. The following advantages highlight the benefits of working and learning in a hypertext environment…”

No More Secrets —

Ian McKeller shows how easy it is to find web API “secret keys” when the user has access to the (network) client code. It’s actually a nice little crash coarse in how to write cracking software (here “crack” means warez scene type “crack”). That crazy shit like this is possible is why I got into software in the first place. Completely

rack-esi —

Christoffer Sawicki has started in on a partial implementation of ESI (Edge Side Includes) as a Rack middleware component. Put something like this in front of Rack::Cache and things get real interesting real fast :)

Sanitize: A whitelist-based Ruby HTML sanitizer —

Finally, a sane looking sanitization lib that doesn’t try to do too much.

Resourceful —

Interesting looking HTTP client library for Ruby with support for HTTP caching (with pluggable backends), basic and digest auth, intelligent redirect handling. It’s been around for a while and looks like it could eventually become similar in feature set to Python’s httplib2.

cachet —

Nick Kallen has started a project to implement a HTTP cache in Scala. Seems like an excellent idea given Java’s extensive collection of stable HTTP server libraries and Scala’s strengths in concurrency and performance.

Rails and Merb -- Why Merge At All? —

A much more sober but constructive take on the plan to merge Rails and Merb.

Google Groups: rack-cache —

Mailing list for Rack::Cache users and hackers. Come on in, the water’s warm.

CloudKit via cURL —

Jon Crosby’s RESTful JSON-based data store with OpenID and OAuth support. It does versioning and produces HTTP cache friendly responses all in a Rack middleware component. Jon’s been working on this for some time and it shows in the code and docs. Awesome.

Concluding Remarks —

Jean-Jacques Dubray: “How do the RESTafarians work? They take Roy’s REST, they try to use it for anything in their day to day activities, and then when they stumble upon a problem, they try to find a more or less ‘RESTful’ solution and post it on a blog.”

Precisely!

Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps —

Peter Cooper: “Lots of awesome articles about Sinatra, Sinatra apps, and various links and resources have cropped up over the past few months. The remainder of this post links to the best we’ve found – most of which you should find useful as you start to explore Sinatra in detail.”

Introducing Rails Metal —

David Heinemeier Hansson: “Rails Edge adopted Rack a while back and we’ve been exploring ways to expose that better. The first thing we did was to make it really easy to hook up any piece of Rack middleware in front of a Rails request. In your config/environment.rb file, you can do: config.middlewares.use(Rack::Cache, :verbose => true)”

Oh hell yes.

Rails Metal: a micro-framework with the power of Rails: \m/ —

Rails riding on Rack is going to be a big deal.

A Collection of Rack middlewares —

It’s really starting to come together, isn’t it?

What’s Ruby’s future —

Rafe Colburn: “On the other hand, I find programming in Ruby enjoyable and educational, so it’s not like I’m looking to give up. It’s just that even after a couple of years of doing it, I still feel like we’re dating rather than married.”

It seems like a lot of people are down on Ruby at the moment. Odd. I’m actually more excited about Ruby than I’ve ever been. Things seem to be moving along nicely, especially on the web tooling front.

ncache —

An Nginx module that acts as a gateway cache. I haven’t tried it yet but it’s a really good idea.

Building a iPhone web app in under 50 lines with Sinatra and iUI —

Nicely done. I have to take a serious look at iUI one of these days. It sounds like you can get really close to a native app experience.

Ruby on Rack #2 - The Builder —

Pratik continues his series on Rack with a deep dive into Rack::Builder.

Showcase Of Clean And Minimalist Designs —

Smashing Magazine shows off a massive catalog of minimalist designs and then attempts to deconstruct them.

Ruby on Rack #1 - Hello Rack! —

Pratik’s first in a series of pieces on Rack: how it came to be, why you need to understand it, along with some simple examples. Future installments will cover Rack::Builder and Middleware.

An Introduction to A/B Testing —

I’ve read about five extremely solid articles on this site (20bits.com) today; all thorough, easy to read, and cover interesting topics.

Rails vs Merb ¿drama? —

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Rack cache headers —

Interesting approach to setting cache related headers using a Rack middleware component.

Reverse HTTP —

Allows a server to turn the tables and make HTTP requests to the client. I’ve been trying to come up with some use for this for 45 minutes and I’m totally baffled but it’s kind of interesting anyways.

Rack::Cache is a good idea —

Ryan King nails it.

Advanced Squid Caching for Rails Applications —

So, I got an email yesterday disagreeing with my remark about HTTP caching being wildly under-appreciated in the Ruby web community. I felt bad, a little. Then I read this article (posted the day after my remark), which talks about Scribd moving to a Squid reverse proxy setup to front their Rails deployments:

“But there was a problem – no one uses caching proxies in 2008 :–) So, we’ve got an idea – why can’t we place such a server in front of our application and make it cache content for all users in the world?”

The fact that Scribd had to “have this idea” on their own and had not previously been exposed to a ton of literature/tools on reverse proxy / gateway caching is completely fucking unacceptable. I’m back to agreeing with myself.

Creating a Rack Middleware for Minifying Your Javascript files —

Pretty good introduction to building pieces of Rack middleware and using Rack::Builder.

What's New in Edge Rails: Even Better Conditional GET Support —

Much nicer, IMO. I’m interested to see if someone can get Rails + Rack::Cache working together so that you can maximize the benefits of generating these validators.

Introducing ActsAsMarkup: A Markdown, Textile, Wikitext, and RDoc Plugin for ActiveRecord —

Interesting Rails plugin from Viget Labs that adds ActiveRecord attribute helpers for various humane markup languages. The markdown variation supports both rdiscount and rpegmarkdown. Cool. Not sure how I missed it when it was released in August.

Ezra's "Merb, Rubinius and the Engine Yard Stack" Google Tech Talk —

So I’ve been skeptical about Merb but I really like the world-view Ezra puts forth here: core framework code should be simple (no/little meta-programming), fast is good, Rack is awesome, etc.

What I Believe Roy Said —

Paul Downey translates Dr. Fielding’s REST APIs Must be Hypertext Driven into lay-hacker speak.

AJAX should not mandate HTTP —

Huh? In a sane world, “Ajax” would have been called “HTTP” (or, more elaborately: “JavaScript gets a mostly-standard asynchronous HTTP client library”).

At first I thought this was going to be one of those articles that confuses animated JavaScript effects for Ajax but it goes on to talk about how Ajax is bad because it breaks “Save Page to File” … or something. Save Page to File?!

Qwitter: Catching Twitter quitters —

Sends an email notification when someone stops following you on Twitter. I don’t have the nervous system for it myself.

Conditional classnames —

Using conditional comments to stick an “ie” classname on <body> so that you can target IE from a single CSS file instead of bringing in a separate stylesheet. Nice hack.

Varnish's ESI Support —

“Varnish implementes a subset of the ESI Language 1.0 defined by W3C, this document lays out some of the thoughts and rationale for choices made and advice for usage of these features.”

This lets you perform includes at the cache layer so that each included resource can have its own caching policy. Akamai edge proxies have supported this for some time, apparently.

Varnish 2.0 released! —

Looks like a really solid improvement on 1.0. I haven’t had a chance to play with any of the betas but I’m anxious to see whether If-Modified-Since/If-None-Match validation made it in. There’s a note on “serving expired objects until we have a fresh one” but that sounds more like stale-while-revalidate.

An Introduction to REST —

Joe Gregorio’s 14 minute video introduction to REST and HTTP.

class='robots-nocontent' —

Apparently, Yahoo!’s indexer supports marking specific content on a page as “extraneous to the main unique content”. This lets you prevent headers, navigation, and other types of site-level crud from overwhelming the content and the search results will excerpt only content that’s relevant to the page.

From the Yahoo! Web Crawler FAQ: “… apply the robots-nocontent attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class='robots-nocontent' present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others.”

The Web is Agreement —

This is really close to what “the web” looks like in my brain:

I try to stay in the general vicinity of the “principles mound.” :)

"Air Budd Form Builder" meets "/admin Considered Harmful" —

Bill Burcham applies the technique of making form controls inherit style from their container in the Air Budd Form Builder Rails plugin. Cool.

Minima —

Alex Payne’s tumble-like blog on minimalism in coding and design. I didn’t realize @al3x was such a huge conscious follower of the minimalist aesthetic, although I’ve definitely noticed it in his work.

Google's undocumented favicon to png convertor —

I’m using this on all of my “linkings” index pages now (see here, for example). It works pretty well. I really like the idea of integrating a piece of the destination site’s visual identity instead of using a generic del.icio.us/bookmark icon. Some site’s with favicons don’t work properly, however, and I’d give anything to have another parameter that let me override the default globe icon (this one: ). It’d be nice if I could say, grab the favicon for this domain but if it doesn’t exist, give me the favicon for delicious.com ().

Managed Ajax - A New Approach to Ajax —

A horrible and misguided idea. I’ve personally never even liked the RJS/JavaScript generation stuff in Rails, and it’s actually well designed, thought out, and quite simple. “Managed Ajax” takes it to a whole new level, building from the assumption that “JavaScript is the new assembler,” and moves most types of interaction logic to the server. Reality seems to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Do yourself a favor and get real comfortable with JavaScript.

Latest iPhone Software supports full-screen Web apps —

“One unpublicized feature introduced by Apple’s latest iPhone software updates is the ability to save Web apps to the home screen and have them launch in full-screen mode without the Safari wrapper, essentially mimicking the experience of a native app.”

Cross Site XMLHttpRequest Design —

Oh, nice. Here’s a high-level design document that describes the new cross-site XmlHttpRequest (their calling it, “XXX”) functionality and ties the other documents floating around out there together. It seems that servers will be able to signal that certain resources are accessible from other domains using HTTP headers or (gasp!) XML processing instructions (PIs). Weird.

Bug 389508 – Implement Cross-site XMLHttpRequest —

Just landed on mozilla trunk a few days ago. See the draft spec for specifics.

Tap Tap Tap —

Looks like Paul Hammond is in the process of resurrecting his blog.

Varnish 2.0 beta 2 released —

Lots of good stuff coming in Varnish 2.0. GC, regexp based purge, custom hash funcs, backend load balancing based on health or other metrics, and the thing I’m personally most interested: what looks like support for validation based caching.

HTML5 Validator —

Highly experimental HTML 5 validation service. More info and bookmarklets available on the about page.

How to usurp PHP’s place: an outline —

Aristotle Pagaltzis on eating PHP’s lunch: “It will have to be more than just a programming language, because PHP itself is really more than a programming language. It includes a crude web framework (an invocation model reminiscent of CGI, with extensions) plus a crude deployment solution (just make all the libraries part of the language and let the sysadmin worry about it – who in turn often defers to his operating system vendor). This is PHP’s way of taking the worse-is-better philosophy to dazzling new depths …”

I was having this conversation at work the other day and came away with the conclusion that even if something were to reach feature / ease of use parity with PHP today, it would be many years before it actually surpassed the language in real deployments. PHP is everywhere.

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind —

“When the Texas Education Agency evaluated its Technology Immersion Pilot, a $14-million program to install wireless tools in middle schools, the conclusion was unequivocal: ‘There were no statistically significant effects of immersion in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement.’”

Dead Man's Switch —

Sends emails to people when you die. Awesome.

“This is how this works. You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to… happen… to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an ‘electronic will’, one could say.”

The C10K problem —

Dan Kegel: “You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1200 or so. Let’s see – at 20000 clients, that’s 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn’t take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients. (That works out to $0.08 per client, by the way. Those $100/client licensing fees some operating systems charge are starting to look a little heavy!) So hardware is no longer the bottleneck. ”

Looks like this is from 2003 but is still pretty accurate as far as I can tell.

Typography for Lawyers —

For lawyers?!?? This site is way too useful and right to limit it to lawyers.

Django’s cache framework —

All frameworks should approach caching the way Django does. The core app/origin framework does no real caching but provides utility/helper methods for setting standard RFC 2616 cache related headers on the response easily and correctly. A completely separate set of caching goo (“middleware”) sits between your app and performs the actual caching based purely on the headers set by the origin. The benefit to this approach is that caching is totally independent from the app framework and can be swapped out for a true gateway (“reverse proxy”) cache at any time.

Opentape —

PHP-based Muxtape clone that you host yourself. From the project page: “Opentape’s creation and design are proudly inspired by Muxtape’s success and sleek interface. We were sad with it’s untimely shutdown and wanted to let the web mixtape movement continue.”

muxtape.com was RIAA’d a couple of weeks ago. And while the EFF believes they could have decent legal footing if they wanted to challenge the take-down, it seems unlikely that the site will reopen anytime soon, if at all.

alan.dean's REST Bookmarks on Delicious —

Alan Dean has bookmarked over 100 REST related articles in the past two days (and 757 all time). For comparison, I’ve been bookmarking REST related articles since July 2004 and have a total of 107 bookmarks. It appears that Dean is shooting for a comprehensive list of every resource related to REST ever posted on the web.

Best Comment Policy Ever —

“This ain’t the goddamn Barney show, I’m not a goddamn purple dinosaur, and I don’t give a flying fuck about your feelings. I don’t love you, I don’t want to be your friend, and as far as I’m concerned, caring means not setting your house on fire.” — Phillip Birmingham

Explaining REST to Damien Katz —

Dare Obasanjo is a machine.

REST in the front, RPC in the back —

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.”

REST as an engineering discipline —

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.”

Don't Fear the URLs —

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).

Minimalism Revisited Theme —

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 …”

Web Development for the iPhone —

“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’]”

Why Ogg Matters —

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.

Timeplot —

Very nice and functional JavaScript based timeplot library. Looks good, shows data-points on mouse over, approachable API. Good stuff.

Patterns of Web Architecture —

An all around great post from Bill de hÓra. Wow.

beyond rest —

joshua schachter on Rabble/Kellan’s “Beyond REST?” presentation, with an interestingly simple HTTP-based callback system.

Building Load Resilient Web Servers —

Great look at varnish and concerns around putting a front-end reverse proxy cache in place.

The Five Best Firebug Extensions —

Awesome. I didn’t even know there were such things as Firebug Extensions.

(A Video) Introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol —

With your host, Joe Gregorio.

Minimalism —

if any – Another hella-great minimalist design.

blog.txt —

A minimalist’s WordPress theme. Focus on typography and simple markup. Various configuration options and a print stylesheet.

Typesites review's jon tangerine —

Nice review of the various typographic tact found at Jon Tangerine’s Pith & pulp http://jontangerine.com/

Minimalism —

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.

[The entire web is] Best viewed with [anything but any] Internet Explorer based browser —

Nice badge!

Firefox Add-on: AmIOnMySpace.com —

“This plugin will alert you if you accidentally stumble onto MySpace.com, and take you back to the site you came from.”

Plainview - A full-screen web browser for Mac —

Free (as in beer). Built on WebKit. Simple. Beautiful.

Babelmark — Markdown Testbed —

Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I’ve ever come across and then some…

Announcing AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure —

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…

peg-markdown —

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.

Apache 3.0 (a tall tale), Roy Fielding —

Nice ApacheCon EU ‘08 presentation (warning: video + slides, no transcript) covering various blue sky stuff on Roy’s brain for Apache and HTTP.

The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces —

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.

Mozilla Firefox 3 RC1 —

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.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus —

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”

Doctorow Declares His Virgin Media (ISP) Contract Null, Void —

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.”

Interactive Google App Engine Python Shell —

The Python REPL running on Google’s infrastructure.

Google App Engine —

Christmas in Python land! Run Python/WSGI code on Google’s infrastructure. This is an incredibly H U G E win for the Python web community and further validates WSGI’s architectural awesomeness.

The immediacy of PHP —

David Heinemeier Hansson: “PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.”

Agreed!

What Is the Open Web and Why Is It Important? —

Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): “Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can’t see how amazing it is. It’s a billion Library of Alexandria’s dropped into our laps.”

April First Reconsidered —

Interesting take on AFD as launch-crazy-but-legit-projects day. I didn’t use the Internet at all this AFD and sent everything in my reader to /dev/null. Now, I feel kind of bad. Sorry about that, internet.

On software architecture —

Roy Fielding on the difference between architecture, architecural styles, patterns, implementations, and applications.

Addressing Doubts about REST —

Stefan Tilkov addresses some of the most common doubts people have when first deprogram and come up to speed on REST. Short and well done, IMO. I think I’ll be handing this out quite a bit in the future.

The Common Lisp Directory finally crashed after 823 days —

“So the CLD lisp process uptime experiment is now over and I will move the CLD to a better place than a simple server in my basement.”

Why your Flash website sucks —

Spot on.

Presentational JavaScript to adjust text line-height in proportion to text column width. —

“If you can’t control the text width the next best thing you can do to compensate for an overly wide text measure is to increase the leading.” — I never considered that but it makes sense.

HyperText.m - source to TimBL's first implementation of hypertext (Sept. 25, 1990) —

From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”

Mozilla Bug 417302 – about:robots —

“In the spirit of the Firefox 3 firstrun pages, I would like to permanently commemorate the noble deeds of the robot community in their fight for an open web.”

Javascript online massive social password cracking ? —

Yes! Please. Make your friends on myspace work for you. Idle CPU is wasted CPU, dontchaknow.

NginxHttpEmptyGifModule —

“The ngx_http_empty_gif_module keeps a 1x1 transparent GIF in memory that can be served very quickly.” — That’s so amazingly awesome; spacer.gif for life.

Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On? —

This is so right. Why didn’t client certificates ever catch on in the browser? Or signed emails? Neither are hard to get set up but nobody uses it. It’s weird.

GitHub: mongrel_proctitle GemPlugin —

I repackaged mongrel_proctitle as a GemPlugin so that all mongrels on use it automatically. This is the first chance I’ve had to play with GitHub, too. Lovin' it.

Process title support for Mongrel —

Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: “mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4”. Let’s you monitor backends with ps and top.

IBM Web services guru predicts WSDL future —

From 2002: “On this latter specification, Sutor is emphatic: web services are defined by whether they are described in WSDL.”

Firefox 3 nightly builds shipping w/ FreeBSD's malloc(3) implementation —

“The reason we are integrating our own allocator is that we’ve found jemalloc to be better than all the default allocators of our three main platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)”

Single file Rails Application —

A “Hello World” Rails webapp in fewer LOC than a Java console app that System.out.println(“Hello World”). The routes and controller DSLs look pretty interesting as well.

9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension —

From the comments: “the only things i find [useful] in Web Developer Extension is the shortcut to clear cache… for other things i use Firebug…” — Me too!

The Magic of Web Apps is HTTP, Not the Browser —

An epiphany everyone needs to experience.

Tab Control —

Lightweight Firefox extension that causes new tabs to open to the right of the current tab. Works with Firefox 3.0 betas and nightlies with extension compatibility checking disabled.

W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic —

“Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.” – You must be new here.

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's Company-Wide Memo Regarding the Microsoft Takeover Bid —

“Welcome to Microsoft.”

Google Super Tuesday Twitter Map View Thingy —

Watch tweets pop up around the country on a google map as people comment on the goings-on of Super Tuesday.

Google forgets to renew JotSpot domain! —

You’ve got to be kidding me…

Håkon's Wium Lie —

Ahh, it turns out Håkon’s Wium Lie (Opera CTO and the guy who first proposed CSS) is on YesLogic’s board, makers of PrinceXML. I’m not sure how I missed that.

The Technology Rejection Curve —

Joe Gregorio: “This is what I call the ‘Scooby-Doo’ phase of the technology rejection curve, where the rubber mask has been ripped off and the crook yells as he’s dragged off by the cops […]”

Dear IE6, I hate you —

“There comes a time in every old browser’s life to pack up shop and, well, fuck off. This time has come and gone for IE6 …” Also: “42% of global users are still browsing the web with IE6.”

Modern Firefox Theme That Looks Like Netscape 3.0 Running On Windows 3.1 —

This is pretty funny. Even the options dialogs are themed.

Mother Earth Mother Board —

Neil Stephenson writing on “the longest wire on Earth” (undersea fiber) for Wired in 1996.

Hypermedia WTF! —

“… there’s a sub-constraint that goes by the unwieldly name of ‘Hypermedia as the engine of application state’, which is arguably the most important constraint of REST in the sense that it alone provides the bulk of the ‘shape’ of RESTful systems …”

Reddit: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational" —

Kragen throws some useful criticism at Digg/Reddit: “If you fill your head with ‘merely a collection of trivia, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational’, it won’t stay there; it’ll trickle right out again.”

What should Microsoft do instead? —

Holy crap, this is insane. Just let people run IE6 and IE7 as separate standalone browsers side-by-side with IE8. As James said in my previous post, they can even rebrand it as “Intranet Explorer” :)

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”

Django People —

Simon Willison’s latest project makes it easy for people developing in Django to hook up and get laid (since they have so much free-time due to developing in Django).

Websphere CTO Jerry Cuomo on REST & Project Zero —

Whoa. I apparently haven’t spent nearly enough time looking into IBM’s Project Zero. It seems to come down to REST + (Groovy|PHP) and sneaking practical technologies in the front door with a “SOA” label on it. Interesting strategy.

The problem with pixels —

“… anybody who’s ever built out a relatively complex design using ems will agree that at some point they wondered if the benefit was really worth the effort.”

Do we need WADL? —

Ka-pow!

Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A —

Steve does the Sun/MySQL aquisition Q&A and speculates on some interesting effects of the deal: “… YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.”

Myth: RESTful Web Services Don't Need an Interface Definition Language —

Dare weighs in on the usefulness of description languages in REST-based design and seems to conclude that Uniform Interface != Description Language and that simple discovery ( style) is the appropriate comparison.

Lying Through Their Teeth: Easy vs. Simple —

Steve Vinoski compares IDL as used w/ CORBA/DCOM with WSDL as used by WS-*. It’s interesting that IDL served as more than just a description for machines. Humans used IDL as spec text and built services accordingly, just like REST :)

ArchitectNotes - Varnish —

“I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975.”

Reverse proxy roundup —

Bob Ippolito wrote up some pros and cons to reverse proxy implementations in different servers a few months back. I don’t think much of it is out of date at this point but nginx isn’t represented.

NetNewsWire is now free! —

I wonder why newsgator would make this free. Seems like there was a pretty decent slate of paying users. Losing ground to Google Reader? Eventual ad placement? Just wanted to be nice? Weird.

A pool for the W3C validators —

This is a good idea. The w3c hosted validators tend to perform on the bad side of horrible. I’ve run the validator locally but never thought to look for mirrors.

moz-snapshooter.rb —

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

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.

A Brief Introduction to REST —

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

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.

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.

Bourne Shell Server Pages —

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

Changeset 8180 - Rails Trac - Trac —

“Ousted ActionWebService from Rails 2.0 ” :)

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.

Sinatra : Classy web-development dressed in a DSL —

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

RESTafarian SOA killers? —

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

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 …”

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.

How to tell if a web page sucks —

Beautifully executed.

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.”

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.”

Prism —

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

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.

adamssl on anonymity —

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

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.”

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.

BoingBoing TV! —

This’ll be a fun ride.

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.”

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.”

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

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

How a non-Neutral ISP could work —

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

HTTP Errors Poster —

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

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.)”

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…”

Ruby on Rails Security Guide —

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

The Rest of REST —

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

A little REST and Relaxation —

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

Joe Gregorio | Projects [bitworking.org] —

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

Jottit —

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

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.

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.”

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

RESOLVED FIXED

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.

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…”

SSH for iPhone —

You had me at “SSH”.

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.

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 :)

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…

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

A site for sore eyes :)

Fielding’s Dissertation [docunext.com] —

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

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?”

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).

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

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

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.

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.”

public-html@w3.org Mail Archives —

Looks like things are starting to heat up over here.

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.

mjt —

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

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.

REST Issues, Real and Imagined [mnot.net]

Sun proposes to apply Web service standardization principles to REST —

Elliotte isn’t pulling any punches :)

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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?

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.

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without —

Very nice list of CSS techniques.

subtlety : a remote subversion excursion —

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

All Wikipedia Links Are Now NOFOLLOW —

Boo – links are made to be followed.

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.

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.

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.

Web APIs Are Just Web Sites —

Well done.

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”.

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.”

OpenID for non-SuperUsers [intertwingly.net] —

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

Ajax Start Pages Suck [redmonk.com] —

Anne isn’t pulling any punches :)

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”

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…

The Role of Resources in REST —

“Each resource demarcates a subset of an application’s state, and becomes a handle by which other applications can interact with that state.”

Maruku: a Markdown interpreter written in Ruby —

This looks promising: handles all of Markdown proper plus various extensions.

Simon Willison’s Weblog —

Simon rebuilds his weblog with Django.

kuler —

Handsome Flash based color mixing tool and color theme sharing site.

Socio-political and Commercial Motivations for WS-* —

Nice bit of history showing the chain of events that led to WS-*.

Firebug 1.0 Beta Screencast —

Holy… This is big. Huge big.

A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft —

I guess this could be good thing. Good people have a tendency of being taken advantage of in ways they wouldn’t expect at MS though so I have to give the whole deal a respectful thumbs-down.

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.

Stefan Tilkov on SOA —

Extremely clear and right take on REST, WS, and other techniques for distributing systems.

Most websites are crammed with small text that is a pain to read. Why? —

I’m sure I don’t know.

Ruby for the Web! (irb running in an applet via JRuby) —

I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about Java Applets ;)

? will save us, or, Applicative trumps imperative in the large —

Aristotle just destroys that recent reg article that suggests we need to shit-can 20 years of engineering masterpiece for distributed objects. Nice piece!

tech decentral » a RedMonk blog about web technology by Anne Zelenka —

Go RedMonk. This is a major pick-up, IMO.

The S stands for Simple —

Wonderfully done.

ViewSourceClan —

Somebody should create a feed that posts a single random entry per day from the Atom Wiki.

A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change —

Outstanding piece. Adrian ought to write more often. Microformats.org could really use someone with Adrian’s background to squash some of the “why?” type questions.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web —

This site is really starting to come along now. The latest addition on how to manage vertical spacing in intervals is something I’ve been wondering about for a while now.

It's Not Software —

I have no idea how I missed this. Great Yegge piece from October 2004.

Getting started with extension development - MozillaZine Knowledge Base —

dangerous waters…

Rails RJS Templates —

I’m starting to “get it” now… Makes a ton of sense.

The Dining Philosophers in REST —

Great read…

FireBug —

Firefox extension with some promising script debugging/spying features.

Trac Hacks - Plugins, Macros, etc. —

Nice.

web economy bullshit generator —

haha!

AJAX Activity indicators —

Animated GIFs designed to indicate your site is doing something…

webkit2png —

Dumps graphic (PNG) representations of a webpage to disk using Apple Webkit. Similar to a screenshot but better because it can capture the entire height and width of a page even when they extend pass your screen size.

IBM UDDI Business Registry: Shutdown FAQ —

The first of many such FAQs and announcements…

timbl's blog | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs —

Tim Berners-Lee’s blog. Finally!

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo! —

Whoa.. Yahoo! buys del.icio.us.

The Beauty of Simplicity —

On Google and other things..

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes —

Doc just got upgraded to hero status…

What Is TurboGears (Hint: Python-Based Framework for Rapid Web Development) —

Really cool to see TG and Kid getting some press on O'Reilly

The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) —

Ouch. I’m making 50% of these right now :/

Presentation Zen

Bookmarklet Builder —

Useful…

Javascript Event compatibility tables —

Nice list of DOM events and the varying support of different browsers.

CSS: Specificity Wars Diagram —

CSS specifity chart based on Sith power levels — to good to be true.

Curing Float Drops and Wraps —

I run into these problems on a daily basis…

Whitedust: The Hunt Is On —

How to not be fucked with…

CSS Import™ —

this site rocks

Color Scheme Generator 2 —

This is probably the nicest color picker for choosing compliments off of a base color.

Rails Take 2 w/ Sound —

Perdy..

The BuildBot —

Let’s build an open / distributed build network.

LAMP and J2EE competition heating up —

it seems the tech press is only about a month behind the bloggers now… :)

Squawkbox: Corporate Use of MSN Spaces-- check out CNBC. Rant alert —

Damn, looks like Microsoft is back to their old ways again…

Journalism and weblogs, part 327 —

Word. Authority has been set on its head. There’s been no better time in history to be an ornery bastard. :)

Gallery of DRM-Related Antipixel Buttons and Badges —

If you must put badges on your site, make it one of these…

Google command line —

could be useful…

A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines —

Joe Gregorio throws together a RESTful web service for generating sparklines.

Links to essays in Joel's Best Software Writing I —

Nice!

Stealth Start-Ups Suck —

God this is so true and I’m doing exactly what he says not to. :(

Lever and fulcrum —

“Jim Gray reminded me that TerraServer does offer SOAP interfaces. And yet those interfaces demonstrably have not inspired a flurry of innovation. Why not?”

del.icio.us: casting the net wider —

Oh crap, he did it this time. Is the RIAA/MPAA going to be after del.icio.us now? Insane, I know but not impossible considering past history.

The Long Tail: Bring tha noize! —

“It sounds like a paradox, but it isn’t. Much of what you want is in the tail. Most of what you don’t want is also in the tail.”

The Power Of Us —

“Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business” — that’s not all it’s shaking up…

Integrate This —

Looks like an interesting new blog with proper taste for integration technologies. I can’t figure out who it is though…

YubNub —

This does look cool.

Small is the new big —

I missed the precursor to the last link. This one might even be better..

Bill de hÓra: No more nails: making good technology choices —

That’s what I’m saying bro..

Fear, Greed and Social Software —

Why corporations will have to pick up on blogging…

300 Images From 1800 Sites —

A bunch of nice little bullet images. I can never find them when I need them…

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby —

Holy crap this is the coolest language book I’ve ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters – there’s regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.

Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags —

“People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you’d think we’d have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf.”

My Long Bet with the NY Times —

It’s quite possible you’d win that bet today.

Cory Doctorow - All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites —

I bookmark a lot of doctorow and I bookmark a lot of IT Conversations; this is two birds with one stone. Doctorow sick genius as usual…

Typo - Weblog package atop Rails —

I’m going to see about moving my weblog to this..

how i implemented tags: a de-normalized approach —

I may be needing this in a bit…

Dracula Blogged —

Bram Stroker’s Dracula blogged based on dates in the book. This will run for the next six months. Subscribed.

Cell Phone Finder - A Whole New Way to Look at Cell Phones —

Right on.

World of Ends —

What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.

Google Search: programming language —

How cool is this?

JavaScript Reference —

Decent javascript reference. I really like the format but the cards are images so you can’t use your browser’s find to locate stuff…

Business Week predicts corporate takeover of blogs —

BusinessWeek has “Blogs” on cover but they don’t get it. Predicting a massive takeover of the blogosphere by major corporations – no one is going to some shitty feed-me-PR blog. We have those today, they’re called “Corporate Websites” and “Magazines”

PEAR 1.4.0, meet REST 1.0 —

Greg Beaver talks about some of the benefits of REST based design as he’s moving PEAR from XML-RPC to standrad HTTP/URIs/XML.

The spit fight that ended my career at MSNBC —

“So, fuck it. I quit.” – David Weinberger on leaving MSNBC because they’re clueless.

Rupert Murdoch should buy Jon Udell. —

I wish I could buy Jon Udell; I’d keep him in my cubical to impress my friends.

Mentat Wiki —

“… a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker.”

SFP: Come see us —

Aaron Swartz writes a novella about his startup interview w/ Paul Graham et al. I’m so jealous!

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review —

Oh wow – this is the definitive work thus far I guess.

Japanese Translation of How I Explained Rest to My Wife —

How cool is that?

Greasemonkey FUD —

Hi, we’re Forrester Research, a division of Microsoft. — I really didn’t expect Firefox to get this much FUD thrown at it.

What Does SOAP/WS Do that A REST System Can't? —

I didn’t know SOAP/WS systems were so capable. Astounding!

United States Patent: 6,880,125 —

“System and method for XML parsing” – BEA Systems, Inc.

Malcolm Gladwell's South by Southwest (SXSW) 2005 Keynote —

Talks about Blink and other cool stuff as usual.

Analyst Report: Scripting languages lag in Web services support —

That’s because they don’t have shithead analyst speculation driving feature development…

How to enable Emacs Keybindings w/ Firefox (Linux, Mac, Windows) —

One down, two to go…

[delicious-discuss] big news —

Joshua gets some funding for del.icio.us so that he can work it full time. Congrats!

Conkeror - Emacs mode for Firefox —

Make firefox act like Emacs. How cool is that?

Bowstreet Predicts 2002 Will Be The `Year of Web Services` —

Just for fun :)

Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater —

Udell wishes REST and WS-* could get along… The REST people did too – two or three years ago (e.g. Prescod, Baker).

Lesson's learned launching a web service —

Google reflects on some of the decisions made for the AdWords API.

Yahoo! Buzz Game —

Interesting prediction market that uses buzz around different technologies. I split my starting cash between REST, delicious, and Python.

The del.icio.us Screencast —

Jon Udell runs through some of the potential of del.icio.us in a screencast. rockin…

Cory Doctorow - Web 2.0 —

Doctorow’s Web 2.0 presentation on IT Conversations.

Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate —

Paul Prescod gives some background and opinion on the REST/SOAP debate.

It’s Not Dangerous —

Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career

The on-demand blogosphere —

An Udell screencast on the future of the blogosphere. del.icio.us as a shared brain.. all great stuff. watch it.

WS-Nothing —

More people coming over to the loyal opposition…

NS8, part 1: I need closure —

Blake Ross tearing into Netscape/AOL on Netscape 8. Can’t wait for part 2.

Dive Winer Just Killed Podcasting —

This is just horrible Dave. Please, stop.. Stop… huuuurrting us.

Show Me the Code —

Joe Gregorio’s second installment in his series on building RESTful applications shows us how to build a bookmark service kind of like del.icio.us. He nailed this one really nicely.

Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web —

Oh wow. This is cool.

What happens when you meet Tim Berners-Lee? —

heh.

Web Building: Style Templates —

Big list of sites that provide CC licensed CSS layouts and tools for generating layouts.

The Associated Press RSS Feeds —

The AP just put out some RSS feeds. ‘bout time, eh?

Emacs WebDev Environment —

Information on setting up emacs for (X)HTML web development including nxml-mode, rng-validate-mode, etc.

SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead! —

Carlos Perez with a nice wrap up of recent WS-* vs. REST discussion around the blogosphere.

Ball Revamped —

Kick-ass flash game. Level 23 is impossible.

Markdown in Python —

An implementation of John Gruber’s markdown text to XHTML processor in Python.

SHA-1 "Broken" —

Sam Ruby with one of the better write-ups on the impact of the SHA-1 break. Short and accurate.

SOAP is boring, wake up Big Vendors or get niched —

More reports of shrinking WS-* mindshare and cries for tools for building REST based architecture.

The false promise of template languages —

David Hansson (of Ruby on Rails fame) on why codeless template languages don’t work.

del.icio.us/popular/sparkline —

del.icio.us/popular with nifty sparkline graphs for tracking popularity over time (via Simon Willison)

The sad state of SOAP interoperability —

Complexity is kryptonite to interoperability. It’s that simple.

Gartner urges caution before downloading Firefox —

Redefining the concept of making sense: “some of the factors that make Firefox more appealing than Internet Explorer are likely to go away as the browser gets to be more popular”

The Unassociated Press —

New York Times covers the Wikinews project.

Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain —

Really interesting concept. Tags can be combined to form “tagwebs”

Why Craigslist Works, by Craig —

The whole PDF requirement at ChangeThis sucks but this looks like a good read anyway..

TheyWorkForYou.com —

Track whether your MP is working for you in the UK Parliament.. Really cool looking piece of civic software.

Bootstrapping a Corporate Wiki —

Best practices for creating and managing an internal Wiki in a large company.

New York Times Link Generator —

Generates non-expiring links to New York Times content. Bookmarklet included.

PBS FRONTLINE: Watch online —

Full video library of PBS' Frontline. I’ve never heard of Frontline but they’ve covered some interesting topics. All available through the web.

XForms Add-On for Mozilla Coming Soon —

bout time..

The Firefox Religion —

Blake Ross talks about what drove every Firefox design decision: simplicity.

WS-Who's-on-First —

Oh, this is brilliant. Look at the bright side, Mark, at least it’s horribly useless in a way that’s interoperable!

Picasa —

Photo management software, free from Google. Find, edit, share photos.

The Gillmor Gang - January 14, 2005 (Adam Bosworth) —

Adam Bosworth on the Gillmor Gang.

JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language —

So true.

Technorati Takes Tags Global —

del.icio.us style tags are taking over the world.

A del.icio.us study —

I need to read this a couple times when I get some times..

REST Intro and Overview —

Paul James wrote this nice technical summary on REST and competing technologies back in September 2004 and I missed it somehow.

Old People —

Gabe from Penny Arcade let’s the geezers in on this little secret the whipper-snappers have been hoarding to themselves called “The Internet.” Check it out at your local library!

CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode —

Information on quirks vs. strict mode for HTML/CSS rendering: how to trigger, what DOCTYPEs do what, etc.

What's Next for Google —

Is google the next netscape?

Web Application Component Toolkit - Template View —

Excellent look at various HTML and XML templating methodologies..

An anonymous Internet communication system —

One of these freenet clones really needs to get some traction. The EFF is providing funding for these guys.

10,000 Firefox enthusiasts make history —

My name will be in the NY Times tomorrow

Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One —

Finally hits 1.0. If you read one big nasty spec this year, this should be it. It’s actually full of stories and other weird stuff that make portions kind of fun.

The Internet's biggest foe —

powell sucks

Newspapers with RSS —

Big list of traditional newspaper’s that support RSS.

4096 Color Wheel Version 2.1 —

Is it just me or are color pickers the only apps that are innovating on the web? You can never have too many of these.

MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs —

BoingBoing tests the MSN blogs censors..

The Restful Web —

Joe Gregorio has a new XML.com column called “The RESTful Web” where he just posted his first article. This is great news. No one seems to want to stand up and bring REST to the masses.

Cascading Style Cheatsheet —

Styled for landscape printing…

Bloggercon 3 - Law —

Lawrence Lessig’s talk at Bloggercon 3 just hit IT Conversations.

Quotations and citations: quoting text —

Some information on using proper q and blockquote elements in HTML and then styling them with CSS to fix all the browser brokeness.

Full-back HTML tattoo —

hardcore!

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…

communication skills —

Punctuation substitution!

ColorMatch Remix —

Another great all-html color-picking app.

Gmail: How do I enable POP? —

looks like POP is finally coming. I’m seeing reports of it being switched on for selected accounts.

Build your own search engine with ht://Dig —

when you can’t afford a google appliance…

Why I Like Windows —

IE team on Firefox 1.0 release. The comments have me rolling on the floor. I can’t believe microsoft is letting these guys keep comments on.

Joshua adds popular support for tags —

I’ve been waiting for this one for awhile now..

G4 Optimized Firefox builds.. —

Haven’t tried yet but these optimized builds are rumoured to blow the doors off the standard distribution.

One Internet, Many Copyright Laws —

New York Times article on copyright law differences across countries and how the internet complicates enforcement.

Metacrap —

I love this paper…

XHTML 1.0 —

The recommendation..

httperf - A Tool for Measuring Web Server Performance —

I can finally shelve my bash/curl framework :)

Full CSS Property Compatibility Chart —

red/green/yellow for specific css attribute support in major browsers.

stopie.com —

“Help stop Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular and worst internet browser.”

Fear of Bloggers in Business and Journalism —

sigh.. corporate resistence to change never fails amuse me.

Kula: 1001 —

A flickr desktop client.

Bring on the tables —

a thorough look at how to use HTML tables correctly.

Google Help Central —

perfect..

Simon Waldman on Wikipedia's success —

The Guardian with some history and props for wikipedia..

Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs —

adobe reader is a tool of pirates. this will undoubtedly strangle the nascent graph paper market!

Showing Off —

:) “… it isn’t about REST or SOAP or WS-* or .NET or Java or whatever, it’s about easy.” — Tim Bray

Scobleizer: Are you afraid to blog —

Surprisingly interesting look at fears of corporate blogging both internally and externally. Scoble thinks most people are afraid to get fired.

Jon Stewart "Crossfire" feud ignites Net frenzy —

news.com covers the Jon Stewart on Crossfire phenomenon..

The Wiki way —

Jon Udell on corporate Wiki adoption..

Help get Firefox full-page ad in The New York Times! —

critical mass biatch!

Doctorow's Edinburgh talk video .torrent —

Video for the “Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rools to Make the Web Illegal, and You’re Not Invited” talk.

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.

Can a resurrected Netscape compete with IE? —

No. Netscape as a brand/browser is irrelevant. Anyone with a cluestick care to drop by cnet and whap those monkeys around a bit? Some decent history here though.

Buffalo News - New Firefox browser is smokin' as upstart challenges Internet Explorer —

More good Firefox press.

Float: The Theory —

A nice breakdown of how float works in CSS, which isn’t always intuitive.

Max Design - CSS Page Layouts —

Various CSS layouts.

The Browser Wars Are Back? —

yes. they are. IE is the new Netscape 4.7.

WordPress, Tagging, and a Critique of Hierarchy —

LaughingMeme: tags for wordpress.

Common REST Mistakes —

Some good tips on building RESTful web services.

Ed, settle down. And please don't call it "WS-mess"... —

… there has been a recent round of “glowing reviews from analysts”. What could possible go wrong?

Quixote Programming Overview

WDG HTML 4.0 Element Reference —

One of the nicer reference sheets for HTML 4.0.

Using inline frames (iframe elements) to embed documents into HTML documents —

Everything that you can possibly know about iframes.

Bloglines Web Services API Documentation —

A nice, simple HTTP/XML based API for bloglines. I hope this trend continues.

Technology Review: Sir Tim Berners-Lee —

Nice profile on TBL followed by a brief Q/A on semantic related stuff.

HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication (RFC 2617)

QuixoteCookbook —

Cookbook area of the Quixote Wiki. Lots o' topic specific howto’s.

Cool URIs don't change. —

Notes on good URI design.

Developing Web Applications with Quixote —

Condensed version of everything you need to know about using Quixote. (From PYCON 2004).

REST for Quixote —

Some code and theory on developing RESTish stuff under Quixote.

Quixote —

Python web framework that rocks.

The ‘Web’ in Web Services —

Mark Nottingham wondering why WS-Transfer (HTTP wrapped up in SOAP wrapped up in HTTP bwhhahaha) didn’t get more heat from the opposition.

Caching CGI generated content on Apache —

Various methods of caching dynamic content.

delicious extension for mozilla firefox —

Finally..

Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial —

Floating images and other objects using CSS.

SOAP Problems —

A big list of problems with the current WS stack. Contains pointers to mailing-list discussion on various issues.

Are Web Services receding? —

Simon St. Laurent noticing the recent WS-Opposition.

The Google Browser, Reloaded —

Some more speculation about a Google Browser.

IT Conversations - New Ideas Through Your Headphones —

Kind of pissed no one told me about this. A bunch of audio of really smart people talking about important geeky stuff.

A complete guide to WS in one, short paragraph —

Sean McGrath backing Tim Bray on the Loyal WS-Opposition.

WS-Pagecount —

The legs the Loyal WS-Opposition is standing on. (Tim Bray)

Joe Joins Loyal WS-Opposition —

Joe Gregorio on Tim Bray’s “The Loyal WS-Opposition” post. This might end up being a real committee or something.

Google Groups : jslaves —

Delicious Developers: “A point of rendezvous for developers "standing” on the platform provided by the del.icio.us API; i.e. those who are slaves to Joshua."

On Semantics and Markup —

More goodness from the archives of Tim Bray.

Help the Googlebot —

Tips and techniques for helping Googlebot. If you are a symantic markup perfectionist, you probably already have most of these right.

The Loyal WS-Opposition —

Tim Bray on WS-Sanity: “So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay out of the way and watch the WS-visionaries and WS-dreamers and WS-evangelists go ahead and WS-build their WS-future.”

2 Column Tableless Layout —

Methods for creating a 2-col layout using CSS.

Markdown Syntax Documentation —

Syntax Reference for the Markdown text markup grammer.

Web Colors: html color names, hexidecimal values, hex codes —

Color name chart with hex codes and overlays.

XML/XSLT/CSS/JavaScript/ Treeview component.. —

..that rocks. Quite possible the only javascript treeview I’d ever consider using.

Building a Large-Scale E-commerce site with Apache and mod_perl —

Disects the components of a large scale e-commerce site run on Apache/mod_perl with some Berkeley DB and Oracle thrown in for good measure.

ModPython Wiki —

A wiki…. About mod_python..

mod_python - Integrating Python with Apache —

Nice article on how mod_python integrates with apache. Goes into significant detail on non-CGI type stuff you might want to do.

CSS Directory —

Silly amount of links to CSS resources of all shapes and sizes.

Password generator bookmarklet —

Generates per-site passwords based on a master password and the site’s domain name.

Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project —

Nice summary of the recent wave of crap swirling around wikipedia. No one can quite believe an open and free culture can produce quality factual content.

Many-to-Many: Folksonomy —

Clay Shirky on Folksonomy

classification? —

Article on simple free-text classification systems such as those found on del.icio.us.

Coral: The New York University Distribution Network —

A distributed P2P web cache thingy that looks cool. Need a bookmarklet to generate the URLs.

Misunderstanding Wikipedia

TAL/TALES & METAL Reference Guide —

SimpleTAL reference.

CSS2 - Tableless forms —

More ridding of tables..

RSS 2.0 Specification

Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition —

A beautiful mish-mash of what works on the web. Hits Last Call WD.

Google.rss - Serves you Google's search results as RSS feed. —

This could be really really really big.

Simon Willison: Site specific stylesheets in Mozilla —

The saga continues.

Answers (about the web) for young people [Tim Berners-Lee] —

You gotta love TBL.

It's Just the 'internet' Now —

What about God?

max-width in Internet Explorer —

More hacks for trying to get IE to do the right thing.

QuickTopic - Instant Discussion Space —

Thinking about using this for my comment system. They have an XML-RPC API but it isn’t documented on the site.

In Search of a Browser That Banishes Clutter —

New York Times talking about people moving away from IE. It may finally be happening…

Stu Nicholls | Doing it with Style —

“This site documents my attempts at understanding and exploring the possibilities of CSS.”

Implementing REST Web Services: Best Practices and Guidelines

Novell and IBM to Implement XForms in Mozilla

DokuWiki —

No frills wiki that looks good has a short requirments list (grep, find, etc.)

what is 'the flow'? —

“So with this tutorial I hope to lay out the concept of the flow, and why understanding it will give you a greater grasp of CSS.”

The X-Philes [goer.org] —

List of XHTML Sites

Gallery of Stupid XSL/XSLT Tricks

Paul Prescod's REST Resources —

More in depth info on REST.

Web Service the REST Way —

Good intro to REST.

W3C members: Do as we say, not as we do —

“…only 21, or 4.6 percent, of 454 member sites Karppinen could access passed the W3C’s own HTML validator…”

Prepare for the transition from HTML forms to XForms —

Uh oh..

Sam Ruby: URI Equivalence

It's so del.icio.us —

Pythonic interface to the del.icio.us REST APIs.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP 1.1 —

HTTP specification

d.sankey.ca —

TODO: copy (gratuitously) this sites organization.

Just Fucking Google It —

I need to send this link to my mom..

HTML 4.01 Specification

HTML 4.0 Entities —

Entity Declrarations / Decimal and Hex values for important unicode code points.

XHTML Frequently Answered Questions

URL Rewriting Guide - Apache HTTP Server

mod_rewrite - Apache HTTP Server

ColorWhore —

Rockin color picker.

Blogging: A world stuck on itself [news.com.com.com.com]

XML on the Web Has Failed [xml.com] —

“Syndicated feeds are wildly popular, but they’re not a success for XML. XML on the Web has failed: miserably, utterly, and completely.”

I dream of Gmail [dive into mark] —

“If your web site doesn’t work in Lynx, your web site is thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.”

Color scheme

JavaScript Toolbox - Calendar Popup To Select Date

bitoogle :: the bit torrent file search engine (bittorrent)

Simon Willison: Site-specific extensions —

“Pop-up blockers have only scratched the surface. Let’s see some innovation.” — Users should control much more of their browsing experience.