rc3.org Rafe Colburn on software development (and other topics)

Posts Tagged ‘fonts’

Links from June 17th

In Commentary on 18 June 2009 tagged browsers, cities, community, fonts, health care, language, links, politics, Ruby on Rails, The Media with 1 comment

• Telegraph (UK): US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive. I appreciate the realistic approach to dealing with the massive shrinkage some cities have undergone.
• IE6 denial message for Momentile.com on Flickr. Brilliant.
• Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address. This is the argument that naturally flows from his important article on health care costs. Look for a separate blog post on positive deviants.
• Economix Blog: What Is ‘Socialized Medicine’?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems. Single payer, nationalized health care, and a public health insurance provider are all very, very different things.
• Financial Times: First Person: Frank Ahearn. Former skip tracer advises people on how to disappear.
• Smashing Magazine: Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs. Who doesn’t love fonts?
• James Fallows: Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general. A short explanation of how Obama differs from other politicians.
• Anil Dash: The End of Fail. Anil Dash really is the conscience of the blogosphere. The comments on this piece are really telling.
• Roger Ebert: The O’Reilly Procedure. A damning critique of Bill O’Reilly.
• Matthew Bass: Auto timeout sessions in Rails. I hate this feature but some applications demand it.

Links from May 28th

In Commentary on 28 May 2009 tagged email, fonts, Google, government, healthcare, HTML, links, Web development with no comments

• O’Reilly Radar: Google Bets Big on HTML 5. The big takeaway from this is that current browsers already support a big chunk of HTML 5.
• Webmonkey: Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5. More coverage.
• O’Reilly Radar: Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? Really interesting new project from Google.
• Introducing Typekit. Third party hosting for embeddable fonts. This could be huge.
• The New Yorker: Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum. Convincing argument that capitalism is driving rising medical costs, delivering inferior care to patients and lining the pockets of doctors and the health care industry. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about health insurance.

Links from May 20

In Commentary on 20 May 2009 tagged economics, fonts, JavaScript, links, music, performance, public speaking, Ruby on Rails, sports, testing with no comments

Long delayed roundup of links:

• Dan Benjamin: Top 10 Programming Fonts. I’m currently giving Inconsolata a whirl.
• Jasmin Blanchette: The Little Manual of API Design. A very interesting looking PDF that I intend to read.
• John Quiggin: Austrian Business Cycle Theory. A very well written critique.
• Advanced NFL Stats: Draft Success by Team. Not enough attention is paid to the long term results of the draft.
• James Carr: TDD Anti-Patterns. I’m a sucker for lists like this.
• Firediff. A diff plugin for Firebug.
• Continuing Intermittent Incoherency: Ending The ga.js Wait.Using Dojo to address some of the problems with ga.js, the JavaScript file used by Google Analytics.
• Eliot Spitzer: If Judge Posner believes this, the world really has changed – One of the most prominent free market intellectuals thinks the market is incapable of setting CEO pay. Judge Posner has gone on to say many even more provocative things lately. This week he’s guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan.
• AisleOne: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Design. Very good article on improving your use of type.
• James Duncan Davidson: Dear Speakers. Tips for conference speakers.
• Ajaxian: FirePHP: Tying together Firebug and PHP. A means of packaging debug information for Firebug to consume with AJAX responses.
• LearnHub: How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!). DNS performance is an underrated piece of the overall site performance picture.
• Seed Magazine: Getting Past the Pie Chart. On the state of data visualization.
• USA Today: Announcing baseball’s all-stars in the broadcast booth. Ranking the baseball broadcasters.
• A.V. Club: Turn off the shuffle: 25 great albums that work best when listened to from start to finish.
• Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008. The results are interesting, but what I really like is the CSS used to create the charts.
• Web Style Guide 3. Filing this away for later.
• Chad Fowler: 20 Rails Development No-No’s. Compiled from responses to a request for feedback on Twitter.
• Last.fm Blog: Mapreduce Bash Script. Very elegant hack.
• Migrating from svn to a distributed VCS. This is specific to the Python code base, but it is a great general resource.
• Digg the Blog: Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure. Something I need to digest.
• Patrick Peak and Paul Barry: Presentation on BrowserCMS. It’s an up and coming CMS built using Ruby on Rails.
• Rogers Cadenhead: Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain. On the risks of relying on the technical governance of an authoritarian dictatorship.
• dotfiles.org: .zshrc. A collection of zsh init scripts.
• UXmatters: Refining Data Tables. Tips on creating usable reports.
• Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions. From my recent zsh obsession.
• Fried CPU: zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need!. zsh advocacy.
• 2009 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment. This is where I got the idea to try zsh in the first place.
• Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline . An amazing set of photos.
• James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. This happens to me all the time.
• Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. Very much applicable to software development.
• Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. Who doesn’t want to confit their own duck?