I wonder if watching hours upon hours of children’s programming on television makes adults dumber too.

• 10 Tips on Writing Hero-worthy Error Messages
  Some good reminders here. Error messages need love and care.
• Scrollbar Contents (aka Visual Page Contents)
  An interesting little jQuery plugin that creates a visual area next to the browser scrollbar to denote page contents vs. comments and jump you between each.
• Behind the Typedia Logo Design
  Note that I’m a developer with very minimal design skills, but I came across this behind-the-scenes look at the way a serious craftsman created a very nice looking logo. The rigorous process and focus on the details will be relevant to anyone serious about their particular craft.
• How to Achieve Cross-Browser @font-face Support
  A really excellent tutorial on using custom fonts with @font-face. Seems much less daunting after reading…
• RFPs Will Kill Us All
  Similar to the NO!SPEC movement, some people feel that submitting bids in response to RFPs for technical services is bad mmmkay.
• rack-bug
  Debugging toolbar for Rack applications.

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Flashblock plugin for Firefox is a nice thing.

• bullet
  A Rails plugin that will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use counter cache. Cool.
• the update | gemcutter
  Gemcutter (soon to be rubygems.org) will become the default gem host for the ruby community, replacing rubyforge.
• White House opens Web site coding to all
  White House goes Drupal. I’m pretty sure this article was written by somebody with no clue what open source is. Some of the descriptions are nonsensical.
• Why seeding is important for random functions…
  or, How to Cheat at Bejeweled.
• and another thing… – Announcing Refraction
  Refraction is Rack middleware that can provide “mod_rewrite” type functionality using an easier to understand Ruby dsl. Some performance tradeoffs, but not as much as trying to use Rails routing.

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Approximately 1 month until Baby 2.0 ships in my household. Unlike software releases, baby releases tend to ship on time or early. Hopefully our MOM and POP servers are ready to scale.

• Do forms work in HTML emails?
  I’d always wondered about this.
• SORT in Redis
  Grumble grumble, I still haven’t bought into this NOSQL thing, but in case you have…
• The IE CSS Bug Which Cost Me A Month’s Salary
  A cautionary tale. Moral – be sure to test in all browsers.
• Double-Load Guards in Ruby
  If you see warnings about already initialized constants, this article is for you. Good tips to avoid this problem in the future as well.
• Treating User Myopia
  Jeff Atwood highlights a problem with a user not understanding how to use Markdown on one of their forum sites, misses the forest for the trees and blames the user instead of the site’s use of Markdown, and a mob forms in the comments. Ah, Friday.

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Agonizing over whether to go desktop (27″ iMac) or laptop (17″ MBP) with my next computer purchase. Not that I have the cash for either at the moment. But if I did…

• jQote – client-side templating
  A nice jQuery-based way to do client side html templates. Thinking about using this for some customizable widgets I wrote.
• 55 Unconventional And Original Free Fonts For An Unique Design
  Some really nice fonts here. Not sure if this is 100% the case, but all of the ones I checked were free for commercial use as well.
• Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5
  Deep Blue Sky does some investigation into browser support for various CSS3 and HTML5 features. Good info.
• Devise
  A full stack Rails authentication engine built on top of Rack-based Warden that uses a strategy provider pattern. Use of Rack allows authentication to be shared across different types of applications (Rails, Sinatra, etc) and strategy pattern allows new, customizable strategies (i.e. Invitable) to be created and shared. Very interesting…
• Part II: We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned.
  I’m enjoying this series. If you are developing a customer-facing software service (or want to someday), you should follow along. Good tips.
• How We Made GitHub Fast
  Lots of red meat here.
• Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC
  More info and GitHub’s data serialization and RPC protocol. BERT and ernie – too funny.

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Catching up…

• The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing
  This was my very first thought when I saw the instant typing feature in Google Wave – why would I want the people I’m communicating with to watch me clumsily struggle to type out my thoughts?
• 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS
  All of the styling on these is done with pure CSS – although several use CSS3 techniques that are not fully supported by some, er, lesser browsers. I really dug the rotated effect on #8.
• The Art of Library
  Some general tips & guidelines for writing library code.
• Number to LCD Kata
  Watch Corey Haines tackle the Number to LCD Kata.
• We must ship now and deal with consequences
  Another good take from Uncle Bob Martin on technical debt.
• Three sysadmin mistakes start-ups make
  I’ll admit switching web servers in a crisis, but it solved my problems. So there.

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It’s a no comment Monday.

• The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing
  People don’t mind scrolling down.
• Learn more about robots.txt
  Informational video from Google employee, Matt Cutts, regarding how Google uses robots.txt, why urls sometimes show up when you blocked them, etc.
• How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day
  Rails Inside has the Cliff’s Notes version. Click through to find out the dirty details. Good info for all of us running 1-Engineer Rails sites.
• Prime Factors Kata (Rough) – Uploaded by unclebobmartin
  I love watching pros work – a great way to pick up tricks of the trade. Watch Uncle Bob work through the Prime Factors Kata.
• My Tools of the Trade – 2009
  Mike Gunderloy’s hardware setup and software tool choices. As with watching other pros work, I always find value in seeing what other pros use to perform their craft.

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When I was in college my motto was “Sleep is for after college.” I didn’t know about kids.

• Copying files between S3 accounts
  A good writeup of what it takes if you ever need to do this.
• Ruby Daemons and Angels
  A good overview on how to write your own daemons using Kenneth Kalmer’s Daemon Kit.
• dynamicmatic
  Dynamic pages plugin for Static Matic (for mostly static sites that need just a touch of the dynamic).
• Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces
  Good tips here.

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New math 101: At a big corporation it is mathematically possible (and quite normal) for one to be assigned to allocate 50% of their time to each of 3 or more projects.

• Dr Nic ’s Install any HTML theme/template into your Rails app
  Really interesting stuff from Dr. Nic.
• How to Gemify your Rails Plugins
  A good walkthrough of the steps you would take to turn your Rails plugin into a gem.
• mustache
  A new framework-agnostic view replacement. I’m admittedly a bit obtuse – I’m just not sure what makes this better than erb or haml (which i prefer these days due to the conciseness). But, I’m sure some will find this to be right up their alley.
• formtastic-sass
  sass mixins for use with the formtastic Rails plugin – a DSL for building Rails forms.
• Graph Paper | Konigi
  Cool printable graphs for sketching out your designs. Paper is divided into 24 columns (+ gutters in between), which is perfect for designing with grid frameworks like Blueprint.

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I suppose I’ll be “catching the Wave” soon. So what will we say, now? “Wave at me?” I don’t know. That just doesn’t sound right.

• Shoes-and-a-Shotgun
  A quick way to develop and serve up a desktop / Sinatra application.
• railscasts_wordpress
  A syntax highlighting stylesheet for ruby based on the railscast/textmate theme – for use with WordPress & the SyntaxHighlighterPlus plugin, but the developer is encouraging forks to add support for other syntax highlighters.
• Oh My Zsh gets an auto-updater
  I’ve been thinking about giving ZSH a go. This looks like a nice way to get a (regularly scheduled) boost.

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Glad to see improvements to Github performance after the Big Move. Hope it continues.

• jQuery quickSearch plug-in
  Niftly little search plugin for filtering data.
• Google Chrome Frame — technical notes
  Some good notes about using Google Chrome Frame.
• UI Fundamentals for Programmers
  Video of a talk given by 37 Signaler, Ryan Singer.
• StackOverflow cool Ruby questions
  The first in an “endless series” of posts from Khaled alHabache covering selected ruby questions on the popular question and answer site. Good stuff!
• Fork Support – gemcutter
  gemcutter is trying to make some headway regarding the forked gem problem and is asking for your opinions.

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