sneer

Links for 2009-06-01 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

What is Web 3.0? Semantic Web & other Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English

Links for 2009-05-16 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Tuffcode
Logs HTTP requests and more.

Jake's Walking

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:58:55 -0600

He’s been taking a couple of tentative steps but today decided that he was ready to go and has been walking all around the house.

Bandwidth Comparisons

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:48:21 -0600

Theoretical maximum bandwidths of various networking technologies.

Links for 2009-04-24 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Open Source World Map

Authenticity

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:37:46 -0600

On Sunday evening I unfollowed well over half the people that I was following on Twitter. My criteria for whom to unfollow was simple: anyone that I had opportunities to meet and talk with in my day-to-day activities (coworkers) or could meet with a small amount of effort (Gabe).

I didn’t quit Twitter —- it still fills a niche where distance and schedules don’t afford the type of opportunities at “catching up” that I’d like and in these cases, I can live with Twitter as a poor substitute for the real thing. But I don’t want that poor substitution to continue as the standard.

Links for 2009-04-09 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Links for 2009-04-07 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Links for 2009-04-01 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Exporting from a SaaS application
Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps
Great content. Lousy title.
Graph 1.0.0 Released
"Graph is a type of hash that outputs in graphviz's dot format. It comes with a command-line interface that is easily pluggable."
Peter Marklund's Home : Really Simple Rails Log Rotatation
"...log rotation could be set up by adding this one line to config/environments/production.rb" Another tip I consistently forget.
Content Storage With Apache Jackrabbit

Links for 2009-03-27 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Safari's Search Field
(I always forget about this)
3000 miles from home | aram kudurshian's web site | photodrop
"photo Drop is a Mac OS X utility that allows you to create small, customized droplets that turn the tedious task of modifying a folder of images into a simple drag-and-drop operation."
Typeset
"The fastest way to find the perfect font."
Crufty
"Find unused methods in your projects."

Heart of Chicago

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:30:14 -0600

Coworking Space in Chicago

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:03:44 -0600

Nice looking coworking space in Fulton Market, though a coffee shop fits my current needs.

Why Cal Hates Django

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:04:29 -0600

Cal Henderson is one of the best technical speakers around. Check out his talk at DjangoCon on why he hates Django:

The bits about Rails developers and PHP are hilariously funny.

Sensible Defaults

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:00:33 -0600

If you’re using Capistrano for your deployments and don’t want to accidentally have master (as opposed to your well-tested branch) deployed to production, it’s probably a good idea to write your deployment task so that it’s impossible to deploy anything that’s not a branch to your production environment. Ahem.

Code Annotations

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 06:47:43 -0600

You know the TODO’s and FIXME’s that accumulate in code and then nothing ever happens with them? We’ve added the explicit step in out retrospective where we search our code for instances of these, throw them up on the wall with the projector and one of three things happens:

A ticket is created that captures the gist of the annotation and is thrown into the product backlog. The annotation is deleted;
The annotation is acted upon and the annotation is deleted;
After discussion, the annotation is deleted.

This way we’ve got one place for all of the things that we want to do (our backlog), the author of the annotation had a better chance of being able to recall the details that led to the creation of the annotation (since they’re at most two weeks old) and our code isn’t being littered with annotations that no one ever acts on.

We have a large refactoring coming up that the code that we’re presently working on will touch and we are annotating where our new code will interact with the refactored code. We’ve established a unique annotation for this and are leaving these in for the planning of the refactor at which point they’ll be removed. For every rules there’s an exception and common sense should prevail.

Turkish Delight

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:45:09 -0600

Josh’s band, Parks and Gardens, performed last night and Kathy was good enough to video one of the songs for those of us that couldn’t make it.

Dead Man's Switch

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:41:03 -0600

Shit happens. Sometimes, it happens to you. If it does happen, you might wish there was something you had told the people around you. How you feel, what you regret, where the money is stashed.

For this, you need a dead man’s switch.

Such a great idea!

Link

Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) on Steak Knives

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:39:03 -0600

Imagine if you’re designing a restaurant. And in this restaurant we’re going to be serving steak. And because we’re going to be serving steak we’re going to be using steak knives. And since we have steak knives, people might be stabbing each other. And therefore we need to put fences around all the tables. We need to have cages so that people are protected from each other, because who knows what godawful thing they might do, sitting there with knives.

That isn’t a good idea. It isn’t a good way to design a restaurant, it isn’t a good way for us to live our lives in society. A society that is based on a lack of trust ends up being a distrustful and violent society. We normally don’t think twice about sitting next to someone with a steak knife because we trust them. And yes, occasionally people go berserk in restaurants and stab each other with steak knives. We put up with this, though, because we like the human community and it’s kind of nice that I can go and sit in a room and not worry about people stabbing me, not because there are cages but because they’re basically good people.

So at Wikipedia we consistently had a design philosophy to use the softest possible security. We try not to lock anything down unless it absolutely needs to be locked down.

This type of common sense is like a breathe of fresh air.

Link

Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:37:40 -0600

If anyone had any doubt, “Web 2.0” has jumped the shark.

Link

One In Five Employers Uses Social Networks In Hiring Process

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:28:27 -0600

CareerBuilder recommends that job seekers:

Remove pictures, content and links that can send the wrong message to potential employers.

Update social networking profiles regularly to highlight latest accomplishments.

Consider blocking comments to avoid questionable posts; avoid joining groups whose names could turn off potential employers.

Consider setting profile to private so only designated friends can view it.

Why should totalitarian governments have all the fun? Also, no mention if the 20% of employers that do this are the kind of places that you want to work in the first place.

Link

2008 AWS Start-Up Challenge

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:01:57 -0600

Amazon Web Services is hosting their 2008 Start-Up Challenge. They’re looking for the next hot start-up that will use AWS for its infrastructure with a grand prize of $100,000.

Link

daemon_controller

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:44:10 -0600

Phusion released daemon_controller, a Ruby library for managing daemons and it looks very good!

Link