So.

2008-Jan-1

2008-01-01T14:03:22-05:00

A Common Lisp web startup test-case, two years after the Reddit switch

The entire codebase of stix.to is written in Common Lisp. That is to say, html output is written in s-expressions and all our Javascript is written in Parenscript (if we choose to ignore a few quick hacks).

Fallen Frukt
rlwrap

rlwrap runs the specified command, intercepting user input in order to provide readline’s line editing, persistent history and completion. rlwrap tries to be as transparent as possible, keeping track of command’s terminal settings, so that it can do the right thing when command asks for single keypresses or for a password.

Hmm. Good idea. There’s a Mac port version.
PureText lets you cut and paste just the text from documents

PureText is a freeware app for Windows which simplifies the cut and paste process by automatically stripping out formatting and images, in order to paste the results in a pure text format.

Lifehacker Australia &mdash; This is FREE – no excuses now.
Ruby: expectations gem

In February I wrote about removing test noise. 10 months later, I finally took the time to write the unit testing framework I’ve been wanting for the past year: expectations

Jay Fields Thoughts &mdash; This is an interesting idea, and at first consideration does appear to occupy a ‘hole’ in the testing framework hierarchy. I think I’m going to see what happens if I combine this with rspec to test some very annoying and complex code I’m working on.
Samples Updated for AIR Beta 3

What started as a couple dozen examples has also now grown to be over forty (40) AIR samples, to include a number of full applications.

Kevin Hoyt &mdash; That’s a lot of work and should be very useful for anyone trying to get a handle on AIR.
Dust-Me Selectors

Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors.

It extracts all the selectors from all the stylesheets on the page you’re viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those selectors are not used. The data is then stored so that when testing subsequent pages, selectors can be crossed off the list as they’re encountered.

This is really nice.
Prebuilt Darcs for OS X

The Darcs package installers have been updated to use the latest release of darcs, 1.0.9. We’ve also added the bash completion file to the install. Read the README during the install process if you want to see how to use it.

Fivesquare Software &mdash; Solved a problem for me on Leopard – namely that you can’t build ghc so you can’t build darcs.
Service Scrubber

Wouldn’t the services menu be much more useful if it weren’t overcrowded by services you never even thought of using?

Many Tricks &mdash; Yes.
Coworking wiki

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.
XRAY :: for web developers

XRAY is a bookmarklet for Internet Explorer 6 , and Webkit and Mozilla based browsers (including Safari, Firefox, Camino or Mozilla). Use it to see the box model for any element on any web page.

This is very cool!
The Closures ControversyJoshua Bloch at Parleys.com - a Belgian Java User Group initiative &mdash; Oh Dear! this does not look good.
Vim support for ScalaIf you want to use scala with vim, these are the files you will need (it was way too hard to find these).

2007-Dec-15

2007-12-15T12:13:18-05:00

flot

Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.

Looks very nice.
Agile contracts - AC

I’ve been collecting ideas people have for contracts on agile projects.

Alistair Cockburn
The Optimistic View

There is a movement advocating throwing our hands in the air and banning all forms of “advanced” programming idioms in the hope that our code bases will be somehow more accessible. Everyone has horror stories about incompetent and downright dangerous programmers who somehow keep their jobs, and there’s an argument that code bases must cater to them.

Raganwald &mdash; I agree.
A Quick Jaunt Through Merb's Framework Code

This is a tutorial for people that want to familiarize themselves with the merb framework code and how a request travels through the framework. This is not a complete walkthrough but it will definitely get you into the code base and peeking around at key areas.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz &mdash; I’m using Merb on a couple of projects. It is quite nice.
Rak

Rak is a grep replacement in pure Ruby. It accepts Ruby syntax regular expressions and automatically recurses directories, skipping .svn/, .cvs/, pkg/ and more things you don’t care about. It is based on the Perl tool ack by Andy Lester.

Looks interesting. Ack is certainly useful.
RubyCocoa: RubyInject

RubyInject is a Mac OS X framework that allows you to inject at runtime the Ruby interpreter into any running application, using the machstar∞ mechanism.

This is really interesting, and it seems to work nicely.
Can Java be saved from death by feature bloat?

I think many of the recent discussions for changes to Java are in danger of pulling the language downhill fast, and the term “Simplicity” has different meaning to different people that cause directly contradictory results for language design.

Michael Kölling &mdash; We’ve seen this before in C++
The Evolution of Javai c e d ( j a v a ) &mdash; as a series of car designs
A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript

Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world’s most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. The last year has seen the launch of a number of high profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer.

Simon Willison &mdash; Looks useful
Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey

There has been a new wave of interest in Common Lisp over the last few years. This paper is a November, 2007 survey of Common Lisp implementations that are currently being actively maintained. It also provides references to writings about why Lisp is interesting and important, Lisp textbooks, and useful Lisp resources including repositories of available libraries. I hope it will help you find the right implementation for your project or product.

Daniel Weinreb &mdash; Daniel pulled this together nicely. This is the first time I’ve seen this all in one place.
CDNs Are Big Business, EdgeCast Get $6 Million

When we watch movies or play music online, there’s a flurry of unseen activity making sure that data arrives when and where it’s supposed to be. This is the job of the high speed fiber and computer systems of the internet’s content distribution networks (CDNs).

Some information on an obscure, to me anyway, corner of the internet.
Computer Storage (1956)Urban Legends Reference Pages &mdash; A 1956 disk drive? (photo and article)
SPF: Introduction

Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people’s confidence in its reliability. That is why your bank never sends you information about your account by e-mail and keeps making a point of that fact.

But it does not have to be this way!

Hmm, as a victim of this kind of abuse on a regular basis, I’m thinking this might be a really good idea.
A festive Holiday (Chrifsmas) PosterChurch of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Opera sues Microsoft over Web standards in the EU Court

Yesterday, Opera filed an anti-trust complaint in the EU court against Microsoft … Read the Opera press release and treat yourself to a smile. They rely in part on the recent decision taken by the court against Microsoft over bundling MediaPlayer with Windows. Opera accuses Microsoft of stifling innovation by embedding a browser than does not support Web standards as it should.

JON TANgerine
Brand New Scene Graph API: Trying It Out

Yesterday Josh Marinacci announced that a library called Scene Graph has been spun out of the JavaFX project and open sourced on java.net. According to the site, the library “provides ‘scene graph’ functionality at the Java level, as well as providing one of the important runtime elements that the JavaFX Script language depends upon from the underlying platform. This project is released in very early access form, so that people can see what we’re doing and play with it as we continue developing.”

I hope this works out well. I was looking for one a few years ago and failed to find one that I thought was both useful and usable. Spoiled from my Alias days I guess.
NetBeans Visual Library

The Visual Library is the next generation of the original Graph Library. Now it is designed for a general visualization with support for graph-oriented modeling. Its focus is to become a part of the NetBeans platform and unify the visualization (UI and API) used in NetBeans-platform-based applications.

NetBeans &mdash; This might be interesting, especially from something like JRuby, JPython, Scala, even Groovy.
Coderspiel / The awesomeness of Scala is implicit

Learning a new programming language, especially one that is a significant advancement over those that you’re comfortable in, is like hiking a trail that only optionally climbs mountains. There are few obligatory streams to cross at the beginning: assembling tools to write and compile the code, learning how to write familiar old constructs in the new language. And then?

Speaking of Scala
Install Multiple Versions of Ruby on Leopard

I’m glad that Apple bundled Ruby (1.8.6) with Leopard, but I need 1.8.5 installed to ensure compatibility with some projects that are deployed on servers running 1.8.5. Not only do I need 1.8.5, but I need it installed at different patch levels. Here is how I set up OSX to have multiple versions of Ruby installed.

Dan Manges &mdash; Might help someone
The Django Book

Welcome to the online version of The Django Book, a free book about Django.

The book is due to be published in December 2007 by Apress, but in the meantime you can read the “beta” book online. The final book will be posted when the print version ships.

The book has gone to press.
NodeBox | Core Image

The Core Image library for NodeBox adds image manipulation to NodeBox. It’s like having control over Photoshop through simple Python programming commands. Core Image is a Mac OS X specific framework available from Mac OS X 1.4 (Tiger). Core Image uses hardware acceleration whenever possible. You can apply filters and transformations to images with a real-time and interactive response. And, since all of the image manipulations are stored in a script, the process is non-destructive. The source images remain unchanged. The script is a recipe you can reuse on different source images.

Looks like fun.
Utility Belt: Usage

Utility Belt is a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB, including convenience methods, language patches, and useful extensions. It also includes a couple command-line widgets. Its primary inspirations were an awesome gem called Wirble and a blog post by Amy Hoy called “Secrets Of The Rails Console Ninjas”.

This is very nice.
gosu

Gosu is a 2D game development library for the Ruby and C programming languages, available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

Google Code &mdash; Wow!
Luca Guidi : Click To Globalize

Click To Globalize is an extension for Globalize plugin, it allows to edit in place globalized labels. With this plugin you don’t have to create a globalization back-end, but just edit your interface in place!!

I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I will. About 15 years ago I used a tool that allowed this kind of thing… it very neatly solved the context problem.
Beanstalkd - Software - xph.us

beanstalkd is a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service. Its interface is generic, but is intended for use in reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running most time-consuming tasks asynchronously.

There’s a few of these kinds of things come out recently.
Async Observer

Async Observer is a Rails plugin that provides deep integration with Beanstalk.

And this takes Beanstalk a step further.
memcachedb

Memcachedb is a distributed storage system designed for persistent. We simplely hacked from memcached and tugela. But neither of them. Memcachedb is not a cache solution, it is a persistent solution for high-frequency writing and reading. It conforms to memcache protocol(not completed, see below), so any memcached client can have connectivity with it. Memcachedb uses Berkeley DB as a storing backend, so lots of features including transaction and replication are supported.

Google Code &mdash; Very interesting, to me at least.
on pimping your browser

Dork Talk will devote itself over the next two weeks to those of you who regularly browse the web but don’t consider yourselves in any way expert at techy, dweeby, geeky things. I want to show you how to enhance your browsing experience with a few simple alterations to your set-up. They don’t involve any kind of specialist knowledge and they are all reversible.

Technical types can look away and snort gently: this is aimed at - well, I have many friends who can, so to speak, drive around the web, but who have never thought much about the software vehicle taking them through the traffic.

Stephen Fry, Dork Talk &mdash; This weblog should be on your read-regularly list
GChart

GChart exposes the Google Chart API (http://code.google.com/apis/chart) via a friendly Ruby interface. It can generate the URL for a given chart (for webpage use), or download the generated PNG (for offline use).

RubyForge &mdash; That didn’t take long.
CSS Text Wrapper

The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want. All you have to do is draw the left and right edges below and then copy the generated code to your website.

Oohhhh! I need this!
Accessible, SEO friendly text chopping method

Chopping text at fixed number of characters, or preferably the nearest corresponding word boundary, is a common problem and is usually handled entirely server side. An ellipses (… rather than 3 full stops) is often added to show that the displayed text only represents a proportion of the original. The following function achieves this effect for an arbitrary text string

Ed Eliot &mdash; continued next item…
Django Chop Text Filter

yesterday I implemented Ed’s chop text function as a Django filter

jesselegg.com
Killing Some Bad Layout Conventions

As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment.

Design View / Andy Rutledge
Agile conference 2008

Agile 2008 will be an exciting conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development.

This will be in Toronto, so I’ve got no excuse
Adobe Debuts Flash Media Server 3 - Slashes Price

Adobe … today announced the release of Flash Media Server 3, the delivery platform for its near ubiquitous Flash technology. Perhaps the most striking change to Flash Media Server is the drastically reduced price.

Hmmm
jTagEditor

jTagEditor is a lightweight jQuery plugin which allows you to turn any textarea tag into a quick tag editor in an inobtrusive manner. This plugin is easy to use and fully customizable (Styles, Tagset and behaviours).

Ha! I knew if I waited long enough someone would do this :-)
Testing Various Configurations of Rails, Merb, Swiftiply, and Nginx

If you’re developing Web applications in Ruby and are concerned about system scalability, you may find this post useful. I’ve been exploring different ways to optimize front end application performance before setting my sights on the back end. Along the way, I’ve compared the performance of Rails and Merb using various architectures for handling HTTP proxying, session management, and logging. The results are provided in the second half of this article.

Webficient &mdash; Interesting to see, timing is good for me too.
The ObjectStore Database System

Recently Dan Weinreb mentioned a paper about ObjectStore he co-authored with Charles Lamb, Gordon Landis and Jack Orenstein in 1991. It’s a bit hard to find unless you have an ACM account. I’ve made it available here. Enjoy!

Lispmeister
Erowid

Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants and chemicals and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.

If you have teenage kids you are going to want to have this information available. Sticking to the propaganda isn’t going to work… give your kids some credit – did you fall for it?
NY police train citizens to be bad samaritans

Despite anyone finding a lost wallet having 10 days by law to return it, NYPD is using entrapment techniques to immediately arrest anyone who picks up planted wallets and bags which are now seeded with credit cards to make it a felony (instead of just cash which was a misdomeaner). Over half the people arrested had no previous criminal record whatsoever.

Mind boggling stupid. There are 300!?! people charged already!
Book for Sale

his book is the authoritative tutorial on the Scala programming language, co-written by the language’s designer, Martin Odersky. While mostly complete, the book is still a work in progress. This early access program will allow you to learn about Scala from the source and provide helpful feedback to the authors that will make the book even better.

Still more on Scala.
on creative commons licensing

Long ago, I made a decision to publish everything that I do under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license (CC:By). With all of the licenses available, and all of the clauses listed as part of Creative Commons, why did I choose not to invoke them?

D'Arcy Norman dot net
ForestExtension - Mercurial

The Forest extension allows operations on trees with nested Mercurial repositories, called forests. Those to some degree correspond to multi-project CVS/Svn/… repositories.
'Merry Mithras 2007'

Here’s a fun one from the archives. Norm at http://onegoodmove.org posted this again, and I just couldn’t resist.

QI, Stephen Fry, via RichardDawkins.net &mdash; (video) quite funy
Europe Guide : Maps of Europe by language, religion, population density, hair & eye color, etc.quite interesting.
An indie director asks: Is the whole thing a Kafkaesque nightmare?

You have not seen this movie. You couldn’t have, unless you were one of the few customers who contributed to its depressing $200,000 total national gross. It got enthusiastic reviews from both trade papers, the New York Times, Salon, the New Yorker and so on, but then it disappeared.

It was written and directed by a legend in the indie film world, Tom DiCillo, who has made other movies I’ve liked (“Living in Oblivion,” “Box of Moonlight,” “The Real Blonde”). Yet it opened in two theaters in New York and Los Angeles, was supported by pitiful near-zero advertising, went to one theater in each city after a week, had brief one-theater runs here and there (in Chicago, at the Music Box), and disappeared.

Roger Ebert
Clojure: A Lisp Worth Talking About

A couple nights ago I walked down to LispNYC in the East Village to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, his new Lisp-like language. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Another Lisp? Ho hum. I’m sure it’s very clever and cool and all, but not something I can actually use.

Instead, I was blown away by Rich’s presentation. Clojure might just be the Lisp I’ve been waiting for. Here’s why:

Stuart Sierra &mdash; This does look interesting.
Team Hoyt

The goal of Team Hoyt is to integrate the physically challenged into everyday life. One way to accomplish this is to educate the able-bodied, making them more aware of the issues that the disabled face every day. Another is by actively helping the disabled to participate in activities that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. Team Hoyt targets both of these areas.

Amazing! You will not believe what these two have achieved.
PHP Login script

If you’re looking for a serious script to manage your users then you’re at the right place. Built with security in mind and packed with dozens of features, our PHP login script is the right solution for every webmaster looking to take his website to the next level. Trust us, we’ve stayed (and we still do for early versions) open-source long enough to learn what people really need.

2007-Nov-22

2007-11-22T23:01:10-05:00

Ikarus Scheme

Ikarus is a free optimizing incremental native-code compiler for R6RS Scheme. … Ikarus is an optimizing compiler, so your Scheme code will run fast without the need to port hot spots to C “for performance”. With an incremental compiler, you don’t need a separate compilation step to make your program run fast. The best part is that the compiler itself is fast, capable of compiling thousands of lines of code per second.

Fun.
Annoyed to distraction by Front Row?
Well then, fix it once and for all.
sudo mkdir /System/Library/CoreServices/JUNK sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Front\ Row.app /System/Library/CoreServices/JUNK
… Then kill the already running Font Row.app process. Gone! For good!
(my weblog) &mdash; Turns out you need to do this after upgrading to Leopard.
Haute Steampunk! Attack of the Horological Machine No.2

Personally, I think he just pulled it out of an antique alien submarine control panel and put a strap on it.

THE WATCHISMO TIMES &mdash; Completely insane! I love it! It’s a watch by the way.
Safari 3 in Leopard (and Debugging)

The debug mode of Safari is not new. Evaluating the following command in the terminal … and restarting Safari adds a Debug menu with many useful commands. What I accidently discovered in my new Leopard installation just blew me away. The context menu Inspect Element of a DOM node opens into a totally new world…

Lukas Renggli &mdash; Very cool
Leopard, Macports, SSH, and Trouble

ssh user@host -i ~/.ssh/iddsa

Troy Telford, macport-users mailing list &mdash; A little secret that you really want to be in on if you are trying to use Leopard, Macports, and anything using ssh. There’s a more useful configuration you can change in the article.
Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared

Fast food is bad food. That’s pretty much common knowledge these days. The majority of the foods served at fast food restaurants contain an insane amount of calories, tons of fat (including the very evil trans fat), and are high in pretty much everything else that you’d want your food to be low in. Long story short, it’s the kind of food you want to avoid eating.

But, you probably know this already.

Oh dear.
Corporate Ipsum

Dramatically iterate intermandated metrics after value-added strategic theme areas. Energistically plagiarize process-centric e-business with web-enabled data. Objectively integrate 24/365 paradigms rather than interactive solutions.
Dramatically pontificate goal-oriented users after intermandated materials. Interactively drive 24/365 collaboration and idea-sharing after leading-edge communities. Continually seize B2C core competencies with web-enabled e-services.
Distinctively pursue customer directed technologies with client-centric paradigms.

Now you can get this stuff automatically generated!
A Little Unnecessary Smalltalk Envy

In A Little Head Trauma…: Returning None is Evil, Mark Derricutt provoked a brief moment of Smalltalk envy.

(my weblog) &mdash; Cured.

2007-Oct-31

2007-10-31T13:49:26-04:00

Blue Screen of Death, OS X Style

After completing an upgrade installation of Leopard and restarting the computer, a “blue screen” may appear for an extended period of time.

Apple &mdash; I needed this when upgrading. It is caused by Unsanity’s APE it seems. I have no idea what I was using APE for or how long ago. Anyway, log in in single user mode and do what it says on this page, it worked for me.
Play of the Day

(video)

This is crazy.
Blue in the Face

This is pretty much the worst case scenario of what can go wrong with an unsupported system modification like APE.

Daring Fireball &mdash; I agree. I suspect installation of Logitech’s control centre is how it got on my machine. So how do you get rid of APE before upgrading?
Get rid of your code with Leopard

As Cocoa developers, whenever we get a major new release of Mac OS X, we have to spend time familiarising ourselves with the new APIs and facilities on offer. One of the main goals of this investigative process is to identify controls and funtionality which we previously had to implement ourselves, but which are now provided natively for us.

I’ve been using Leopard for the last few months, and I thought I’d post a partial list of new and improved APIs which may be of interest to Cocoa application developers.

Matt Legend Gemmell &mdash; This is going to be the real reason to upgrade to Leopard. There’s going to be Leopard only applications coming out real soon now.
There's no Hope For IT

When you read stuff like this, you can’t help but feel that IT is, without a doubt, doomed.

Steve Vinoski &mdash; There’s an article that sparked this. I will not be linking to that article – have to keep a bit of distance. The guy who wrote that article and his attitude are the problem – and he’s probably a nice guy and smart enough. Sigh.
What High Coupling hath Wrought

A long time ago, I wrote a blog entry about the high price of coupling as it pertains to Internet Explorer and Windows. In it, I lambast Microsoft for the business decision to tie Internet Explorer so tightly into the underlying operating system. Developers all know that highly coupled systems are bad. And here’s a stellar example.

Meme Agora &mdash; Sigh. This is depressing me even as I resist spasms of laughter.
Is it Christmas?Right :-)

2007-Oct-30

2007-10-30T15:16:30-04:00

Cannabis use down since legal change

British Crime Survey statistics showed that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds using cannabis slumped from 28% a decade ago to 21% now, with its declining popularity accelerating after the decision to downgrade the drug to class C was announced in January 2004.

The Guardian &mdash; Why do people have such a hard time accepting reality? You bully someone and what happens? You get resistance. And what is ‘the war on drugs’ if not bullying?
World's hottest chile pepper discovered

Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world’s hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India

EurekAlert &mdash; Ouch.
Nobel Prize Sees What Market-Fundamentalists Don’t

The reality-based community got a little boost recently with the announcement of the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics.

Three Americans, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson and Leonid Hurwicz, shared the honor for their work in mechanism design theory, which studies under what conditions markets work well or don’t. Sneak preview: They do better with private than with public goods.

The very idea that markets are imperfect at some things may come as a shock - or even sacrilege -to true believers in the cult of the market god.

Rick Wilson, Sunday Gazette-Mail (Charleston, West Virginia) via CommonDreams
freeimage/image_science on leopard

Full installation instructions (full credit goes to: Michael Steinfeld for figuring this out)

Thomas Mango &mdash; Should you install Leopard, you will need this information if you are using Ruby’s imagescience gem or FreeImage.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: The Ars Technica Review

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they’ve only grown as the months and years have passed. Apple’s tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good.

Ars Technica &mdash; Nice review, 16 pages. I upgraded yesterday, despite planning on waiting for a month or so for things to settle down… don’t ask, I don’t want to talk about it. Leopard is nice. Took a while to get working, but I managed it.

2007-Oct-28

2007-10-28T09:19:47-04:00

Tripoli Beta in Development

Tripoli is different from other frameworks, because it doesn’t tell you how to code your web sites. Just plug it in, add a simple content class where you want your HTML content and you’re all set. The specificity is kept low so you can easily extend it with your own classes and layouts.

David's Kitchen &mdash; Must check into this. I first reported this in August, but I’ve neglected it to the point of having forgotten about it. Oops.
Terrier Information Retrieval Platform

Terrier is a highly flexible, efficient, effective, and robust search engine, readily deployable on large-scale collections of documents. Terrier implements state-of-the-art indexing and retrieval functionalities. Terrier provides an ideal platform for the rapid development of large-scale retrieval applications.
BlueprintCSS 101 | Blue Flavor

Since its release, Olav and other contributors have advanced and extended Blueprint, and we’ve been using it some recently here at Blue Flavor. I thought I’d take a bit of time to talk about how we use it, how it’s impacted our workflow, and what we like about it.
tmail-0.11.0, and 0.12.0, and 1.0.0
2. 0 merges all the good patches from the unofficial branch that the Ruby on Rails team have been maintaining in their ActionMailer module. All patches applied up to ActionMailer 2.0 Preview release have been back merged into TMail 0.11.0.
RubyForge &mdash; Nice. By the time you read this TMail 1.0.0 will be available. The files are on RubyForge now, but the gem has not percolated through yet and there’s no announcement.
Time window matcher (in Common Lisp)

Well, I did it: I succumbed to the allure and challenge of someone who posted a Ruby quiz on Usenet … I was intrigued. So I did it. It’s a bit messy, as these things usually go, but it passes all the unit tests. I did it first in a Lispy way, by making it sexpression instead of strings, then I tacked a string parser on top of it.

LispCast
Accepting Online Payments - The Ultimate How to Guide

How do I start accepting credit cards online?

That’s a very common question everyone here at FreshBooks hears from people calling and e-mailing in. I’ll try answering the best way I know how: through a little question-and-answer session.

FreshBooks
XML CDATA and escaping

There’s only one thing you can’t say in a CDATA section: “]]>”. But there’s a trick to save us, even here.

LShift Ltd. &mdash; This is a neat trick. You can’t escape the ]]> because CDATA sections turn off escaping – that’s why you use them. The normal ‘solution’ is to just escape everything. The thing is CDATA sections are way faster to parse and especially generate than escaped text. (In Raconteur the time to escape the content ranges from 10-25% of the entire processing time.)

2007-Oct-26

2007-10-26T23:16:16-04:00

Samsung Solid State DrivesUp to 64GB, 2.5” and 1.8”… this is what should be in the iPod classic, not to mention the MacBook.
Less Is More: Tumblr Raises $750K

Tumblr, a blogging software startup that ascribes to the philosophy that less is more, has raised $750,000 in Series A funding, according to Private Equity Hub. The money came from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, with Spark general partner Bijan Sabet joining Tumblr’s board.

GigaOM &mdash; Not bad. Don’t use Tumblr myself.
The hidden costs of the multi-tasking software developer

Yesterday, a colleague complained that the timesheet system we use at my day job does not have an entry for context switching1. The geeks in the room knew immediately what she meant but everyone else was baffled.

Sean McGrath, ITworld.com &mdash; A few years ago I worked at a company where we called this ‘thrashing’ (Sean mentions this terminology in the article). We made an estimate of 4 hours cost to an unplanned task-switch, and counted that 4 hours as a separate work item. Once we got a handle on how often this happend it was funny how much better our estimates became.
Pages and Views

Dabble DB is taking a significant step towards being not just a database tool, but an application development tool.

Dabble DB Blog &mdash; Good to hear.
Atom Publishing Protocol Spec

The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources. The protocol is based on HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations. The Atom format is documented in the Atom Syndication Format.

Very good! The link is to a nice readable/printable HTML version of the spec.
Classy web-development dressed in a DSL

For those of you who don’t know, Sinatra the newest kid on the open-source web frameworks has been released late last week.

This super-sexy DSL runs at lighting speed. It sits on top of Mongrel and was written to be thread-safe, sleek and tiny. And an entire web-application can be written and contained in one file (or a small collection of files)! Think Facebook apps…

Guess what else? It’s super easy to use! Let’s create an app from scratch to demonstrate!

This is a tutorial.
IBM Trying To Get Patent On Patent Extortion?

Have fun with this one. As seen on Slashdot and sent in by a few different readers, it appears that IBM is trying to patent the process of using a large patent portfolio for patent extortion. Technically, the patent is for “A system and method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets.”

Techdirt &mdash; Sigh.
Meteor no longer prime suspect in great extinction

The greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history also may have been one of the slowest, according to a study that casts further doubt on the extinction-by-meteor theory. … Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying 250 million years ago, said USC doctoral student Catherine Powers. … The decline began millions of years before the disappearance of 90 percent of Earth’s species at the end of the Permian era, Powers shows in her study. … More damaging to the meteor theory, the study finds that organisms in the deep ocean started dying first, followed by those on ocean shelves and reefs, and finally those living near shore.
ZFS Puts Net App Viability at Risk?

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business. … So later this week, we’re going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. … In addition to seeking the removal of their products from the marketplace, we will be going after sizable monetary damages. … And remember, we indemnify our customers.

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog
Fast image enlargement through seam insertion in OCaml

I have implemented the last major feature missing in my content-aware image resizer based on seam carving/insertion, image enlargement via seam insertion. It took a whole 50 lines of OCaml code which you can find below.

eigenclass &mdash; This is really very interesting.
Python Quick Reference

This is a (relatively) Quick Reference for Python in a single long HTML page. Also exists in PDF.

Richard Gruet @ free.fr &mdash; Nice, 47 pages so not one of those two page things that are normal for ‘quick references’
OmniWeb 5.6The Omni Group &mdash; Glad to see this.
Mac OS X Web browser rundown 2007

Several years ago, when Mac OS X was still a very young operating system, it was hard to find a really good and stable web browser for the Mac. Pretty much the only viable option for the first release of Mac OS X in 2001 was Internet Explorer 5. … Today, in late 2007, things are different. Very different. Mac OS X users have a large number of excellent, standards compliant browsers to choose from.

456 Berea Street
Video: Zombies in Plain EnglishCommon Craft - Explanations In Plain English &mdash; Nicely done!

2007-Oct-17

2007-10-17T22:07:57-04:00

Findings From the Web Design Survey

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.

33,000 responses is a lot of data. To make sense of it, An Event Apart commissioned statisticians Alan Brickman and Larry Yu to translate raw data into meaningful findings. Here we present what they found.

A List Apart &mdash; 82 page finding. Raw data available in various formats.
Instances - Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides the flexibility to choose from a number of different instance types to meet your computing needs. Each instance provides a predictable amount of dedicated compute capacity and is charged per instance-hour consumed.

Amazon.com &mdash; This is interesting. Out of beta and three service levels.
Apple to open iPhone, iPod touch to third-party developers in early 2008

Steve Jobs today announced that Apple is working on a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone and iPod touch so that third-party developers can build native applications for the devices. The SDK is on track for a February 2008 release, after the annual Macworld Apple-fest takes place in January 2008.

Does this surprise anyone? Really?
15 Ridiculously Useful Websites

A diverse list of useful websites to make life a little easier.

Garrett B Santos, Web Upon
Developer's Notebook: Forward-thinking CSS float-clearing

The art of float-clearing - getting containers to honor the height of floated elements inside of them - has slowly evolved over the past several years as Safari has taken over many Mac desktops, IE5/Mac has atrophied, IE7 has slowly caught on, and our use of CSS filters has improved. I’d like to share a slight variation on the state of the art that I believe makes for much cleaner markup.

Agile Ajax
List Expander

The basic concept remains the same as with Sitemap Styler, but the usage is a bit wider. We can use this script for any type of content that needs to be organized in some sort of hierarchy.

Css Globe
Web Directions North

Following great success in 2007, Web Directions North returns in January 2008 for another year of enlightenment, inspiration, networking, and of course snowboarding
Cruciforum: crucially simple

Cruciforum is really, really simple. There’s no database required to run it — you don’t need MySQL or anything — it doesn’t have user accounts, it doesn’t need an administrator. It’s really low-impact on your server because all the pages are plain HTML – if someone’s browsing the forum then they don’t even use PHP! Just fire it up and go; all you need on the server is PHP support, which most things have.
HTML TOOLBOX: 30 HTML Tools and TutorialsMashable
Group task management,share tasks, online to do list

Introducing TaskBin, the only way to manage tasks while working in groups. Think of it as the ultimate shared to-do list.

Taskbin.com &mdash; I don’t know if it’s the only way, but…
30 Free Three-Column Website TemplatesMashable
25 Tutorials For The Web MindedMashable
DATABASE TOOLBOX: 20 Database Tools & ResourcesMashable
250 Tools and Resources For Coding the WebMashable &mdash; Maybe you should just to the the Mashable website, and I’ll stop mentioning these for a while?
Thinkspotting / Recent Top Ideas

Competitive mini-blogging for ideas.
Google is destroying the web and you don't even know it

Google is good. Too good. Every day, 10 hundred million billion searches are conducted on the website google.com. So many searches are conducted, it’s the main gate to the internet for almost everyone on the planet.

Alex Bosworth
Minimalist Website Design Patterns at Max Kiesler

Do you want your website to be beautiful, SEO friendly and fast loading? Try a true minimalist approach. Total, complete and utter minimalism is a high mark to meet in any medium.

Max Kiesler
How to Take Notes like Thomas Edison

Famous inventor Thomas Edison is probably the most experienced note-taker in the world. His diary which is still maintained as an important part of the United States historical record contains five million (5,000,000) pages. Important developments such as his work on perfecting the light bulb and electric lighting systems are captured in great detail.

lifehack.org
iPodia

Podia is a Wikipedia viewer for your iPod touch. With this application, you can view articles in an optimized layout, find certain text in the article, and save the article as a data URL for offline reading.
Blackwater 'Actually Drew Their Weapons On U.S. Soldiers.'

The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV.

Crooks and Liars
Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore

You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule post to your blog daily, right? RIGHT?

Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

Eric Kintz, Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog &mdash; Lucky for me.
Supercapitalism == super

I bought this book because I heard it described on the radio (NPR, no less) in a way that made it sound like the dumbest book of the decade. It turns out that it was the summary, and not the book, that was dumb. Indeed, this is a fantastic book by an extremely smart and experienced liberal. It is the first book on the Corruption Required Reading list.

Lessig Blog
About JSPON

JavaScript Persistent Object Notation (JSPON) is a convention for using JSON to facilitate JavaScript referencing and complex object types to provide the necessary semantics needed for efficient and meaningful persistent objects.

New to me.
Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - 300 New Featuresonly 300

2007-Oct-15

2007-10-15T20:36:14-04:00

Favourite Unicode CodepointsChris Ball
MCL/OpenMCL

MCL 5.2 will soon be released as on open source project. It is Unicode based. It is PPC only. Perhaps this release will enable some combination of financial and engingeering resources to provide an Intel implementation.

Alice Hartley, lisp.mcl.general &mdash; No Intel… that’s a problem… but one that Digitool can get some help with now.
Talarico HardwoodsTons of photos of, usually big, slabs of wood
html5lib 0.10 Released

html5lib is an implementation of the HTML 5 parsing algorithm, available in both Python and Ruby flavours. The HTML 5 algorithm is based on reverse engineering the behaviour of popular web browsers and so is compatible with the myriad of broken HTML encountered on the web.

The WHATWG Blog
Sticking it to l'homme: Canadian co-op forms own ISP

Some ISPs simply discourage end users from offering WiFi connections to neighbors; most explicitly rule it out in their terms of service. But a small Canadian ISP called Wireless Nomad actually requires it.

Ars Technica &mdash; This looks very cool. I’m on the waiting list.
Speeding up email delivery on Rails

There’s one thing that has always bugged me: when using Sendmail to deliver email from Action Mailer in Ruby on Rails, it always takes a few seconds for the email to be sent, thus slowing down whatever task the user is trying to accomplish. … In the past, we fixed this behaviour by adding the email to a queue in the DB which was then processed by a cron script every few minutes. … What if Rails could simply pass the email to Sendmail and then get back to work?

The Wonsys Blog &mdash; I think I’ll give this a shot and see what happens.
Flash-Based Galleries For Your Images

if you’d like to present some multimedia-content, particularly images, Flash can often be a feasible solution, with flexible image management for web designers and impressive visual presentation for users. Used moderately, Flash-based galleries can give the presentation a fresh spark and create a rich visual experience you might want to offer your visitors.

In this post we present some of the free, attractive and flexible Flash-based galleries you can use to present your images more effectively.

Smashing Magazine
Best of September 2007

Below you’ll find useful references, tutorials, services, tools, techniques and articles we’ve found over the last 30 days - an overview of web-sites you shouldn’t have missed in September 2007.

Smashing Magazine
Who Are You?

Almost every freelancer needs some kind of written biography, a small piece that’s shorter than a resume but is more engaging to read. … I’ve written dozens of profiles of people, places and businesses, but as soon as I sit down to write about myself, I’m faced with the dreaded “white screen syndrome.” … I’m not sure what it is; am I worried that I’ll seem egotistical if I play myself up too much? Will I seem boring if I try to remain too objective? And of course, the possibility of inserting a little too much of my personality.

Freelance Switch &mdash; Hmm, I happen to be procrastinating on this right now, for a lot of the same reasons/fears :-)
FCKeditor 2.5 Beta released

After an incredible development period, full of challenges and enriched by brilliant ideas, here we are with the Beta for the most important release of FCKeditor since version 2.0. It brings not only Safari and Opera support, but also introduces incredibly powerful features.

FCKeditor &mdash; Well, after a couple of minutes checking out the demo, I think the problems that forced me to TinyMCE are resolved. I’ll have to take a closer look.
Top 10 Blogs for Web Designers

Today I’m doing a round up of the magazine-style blogs that are usefull for web designers. I prefer these over printed magazines as they’re quicker with the latest information and the quality is as good if not better than traditional mags.

Tutorial Blog
Learn F-Script in 20 Minutes...and Have Fun Playing with Core Image

F-Script is an open-source scripting layer dedicated to Cocoa. If you aren’t using it yet, this is your chance to learn how it can improve your productivity as well as those of the users of your own Cocoa applications. In this article, our goal will be to produce a nice little animation using fancy Core Image effects. In doing so, we will learn the basics of F-Script.

Philippe Mougin
Non-notorious CSS templates for websitesAjax Digest &mdash; Some nice collections of website templates.

2007-Oct-14

2007-10-14T11:29:49-04:00

Data Visualization

The charts on the right track the power of Intel Corp.’s microprocessor chips from 1971 to 1997. The chart along the bottom and up the right side shows a 27-year perspective.

Karl Hartig
A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins

I thought Ligaya Turmelle’s post on SQL joins was a great primer for novice developers. Since SQL joins are fundamentally set-based, the use of Venn diagrams to explain them seems, at first blush, to be a natural fit. However, like the commenters to her post, I found that the Venn diagrams didn’t quite match the SQL join syntax reality in my testing.

Coding Horror &mdash; Another shot at using Venn diagrams to explain joins in SQL
jQuery: Write less, do more

In the following article, I’ll show you some of the things you can do with the toolkit jQuery.

Hans S. Tømmerholt, Opera Developer Community
Helping your client maintain markup quality

One thing that is particularly frustrating with caring about Web standards and accessibility is what often happens after your work is done and a site is handed over to the client.

I’m sure most of you have been there. Despite your hard work to educate the client’s editor(s), regardless of the style guide you wrote, and no matter how much time you spent patching the CMS they use, there will be problems.

456 Berea Street &mdash; I’ve just added it to Raconteur.
20 of the best Ecommerce Websites

well designed, standards-compliant E-commerce stores

TutorialBlog
Mini Moke Front Photo

When your whole brand centers on a single retro icon, success hinges upon stirring the pot with niche variations on the central theme.

Motor Trend Magazine &mdash; I don’t know about this ‘variation’
NuPants: SmartyPants in Nu

I’ve been working with Nu since its unveiling yesterday. I find that the best way to learn a language is to implement something in it. Whenever I see a language with regular expression support, I want to port SmartyPants and Markdown. I worked a bit last night and today on porting SmartyPants. It’s not the most accurate translation (I took a few shortcuts), but it generally works.

From Concentrate Software
Markdown in Nu

I finally got around to finishing my implementation of Markdown in
Nu. It takes a few shortcuts and doesn’t produce identical output (I
shorted on a few newlines), but the markup should be the same as
Markdown v1.0.1. When viewed in a browser, it should be the same.

Grayson Hansard, Programming Nu, Google Groups &mdash; The same guy who did SmartyPants in Nu.
What the F***?

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

Steven Pinker, TNR Online &mdash; The title, the title the article was published under, is a bit curious… the article certainly has no difficulty in spelling it out :-)
Religion driven industry? Buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection

“For some reason, we have invented and are following religions ….” This is how James O. Coplien describes today’s industry which, he believes, is based on buzzwords and checklists rather than on thinking, inspection and efforts to find solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project:

Sadek Drobi, InfoQ &mdash; I just ‘discovered’ this debate. It ties in with some of my more depressed trains of thought over the last half year. I’m certainly not sure that I entirely agree – but I am sure that I don’t entirely disagree.
Diagnostic Styling

On stage at An Event Apart Chicago, I made reference to recent efforts I’ve been making to develop a set of “diagnostic” styles. I’d hoped to have them ready for presentation in Chicago, but didn’t get it done in time.

Eric's Archived Thoughts &mdash; Along the lines of the “Helping Your Client Maintain Markup Quality” link above.
HTML Entities for Ruby

HTMLEntities is a simple library to facilitate encoding and decoding of named… or numerical… entities in HTML and XHTML documents.

RubyForge &mdash; I’ve not been paying attention. Sigh.