links – Page 4

Tag: links (page 4 of 7)

Links from March 23rd

There are a whole ton of links in the backlog today.

xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project. A tool to render HTML in PDF format (supports CSS).
Antonio Cangiano: Ruby’s Biggest Challenge for 2009. A plea for Ruby developers to move to Ruby 1.9.1. Getting all of the libraries and Rails plugins updated is going to be a big job.
Ajazxian: Richard Stallman: Free the Javascript. People make full of rms, but he is an extremist for a good cause. His radical stance in many ways frames a debate that is worth having.
TV Guide: Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore Answers Our Burning Questionsm. I totally get the unhappiness with all of the deus ex machina aspects of the series finale, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Thoughtbot: Testing Rake’s Integration. How to write integration tests for Rake tasks.
Doug Bowman: Goodbye Google. Remarks on leaving Google. Nice reading for all of us who were never offered a job by Google.
The Big Picture: Scenes from 30,000 meters above. High altitude photographs taken by a weather balloon launched by Spanish students.
The Best Pictures from the BOREALIS Archives. Another student weather balloon project.
Karl Martino: Here’s to dreaming big and doing it. More links relating to the weather balloon project.
What they make: The highest paid chief executives in digital media. I’m surprised the CEO of Tivo makes more than the CEO of Netflix.
WoW Insider: Authenticator app coming to iPhones, iPods, and other mobile devices. Blizzard is expanding the authentication options that prevent World of Warcraft account theft.
FiveThirtyEight: Why AIG Paid the “Bonuses”. Most interesting remarks I’ve read on this topic.
istartedsomething: Expression Web SuperPreview makes cross-browser testing like moist delicious cake. Seems like a major advance in cross-browser testing.
Laughing Meme: Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. Insightful remarks on the Facebook redesign.
New York Times: Hadoop, Analytical Software, Finds Uses Beyond Search. I still don’t understand MapReduce as well as I should.
Antonio Cangiano: Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database. Still looking for the right project to use this technology for.
The Annotated Watchmen. For after I finish the graphic novel.

Links from March 16th

March 16, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Mark Danner: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. There can no longer be any debate on whether the US tortured detainees. We did. The evidence is undeniable. It’s time to investigate the crimes and start charging people.
Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline. Just about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. Simple solution to an incredibly annoying problem with OS X..
Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. I really want to write a whole blog post on this, but I’m linking to it in case I don’t.
Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. The key piece of information here is that you can make confit just as well with olive oil as you can with duck fat.
David Pogue: Unify the Phone Numbers and All Else Follows. Google Voice sounds great, but I hesitate to use Google products for everything.

Links from March 12th

March 12, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Kurt Cagle: Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal? The real question being asked is whether the features associated with dynamic database-driven Web sites are more compelling than the pinpoint control and top notch user experience of Dreamweaver.
Pathfinder Development: Keeping Up With The Joneses: Keeping Rails and its extensions up to date. Managing dependencies is generally one of the most unpleasant aspects of any software development project.
Eric Burke: Ban Software Patents. Yet another example of ludicrous patents.
Michael Ruhlman: Michael Symon’s Pickled Chillis. Really cool recipe.
Serial Consign: Desktop Deja Vu. The history of the default desktop picture that shipped with Windows XP.
useum: Measuring Social Participation in a Science Museum. Useful for more than just museums.
Wired: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist. Looks fascinating but I’m not reading it ’til my Wired comes in the mail.
High Performance Web Sites: Performance Impact of CSS Selectors. Hard numbers on the varying performance of different CSS selectors. Also a reminder that there’s a lot more we could be measuring that we don’t.
oobject: formula 1 user interfaces. Incredibly fascinating comparison of the current state of steering wheels in Formula 1 cars.
PC Pro Blog: I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying. Another argument that high end page-based authoring tools are giving way to Drupal.

Links from March 1st

March 3, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Dries Buytaert: Drupal sites. A big list of Drupal sites.
Hivelogic: Review: The NewerTech Voyager Q. Docking station that lets you use internal hard drives as external hard drives. Seems like a great solution for certain backup strategies.
Music Machinery: In search of the click track. Programmatically determining which drummers use click tracks and which don’t. Really, really interesting.
David Plotz: What I learned from reading the entire Biblee. I was obsessed with his Blogging the Bible series, and I’m glad to see it’s now a book.
TheMoneyIllusion: An open letter to Mr. Krugman. A really interesting alternative to the stimulus plan, suggesting novel monetary policy rather than fiscal policy. I have no idea whether this would work, but it’s an interesting idea.

Links from February 25th

February 25, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Jamis Buck: Net::SSH, Capistrano, and Saying Goodbye. It’ll be interesting to see how Capistrano fares without its author and long time maintainer. This will also be a test of the Github model. Anyone can create their own Capistrano fork and go forward, will consensus arise around one particular fork?
Paul Krugman: What should government do? A Jindal meditation. Really excellent academic definition of public goods.
Harold McGee: Do You Need All That Water to Boil Pasta? McGee takes on one of the great sacred cows of the kitchen.
Ars Technica: Hands on: Safari 4 beta fast, mixes polish, rough UI edges. Nice review of the new Safari beta.
Datawocky: Reboot: How to Reinvent a Technology Startup.
The Washington Monthly: What about the filibusters? Turns out Senate procedure doesn’t require Senators to make interminable speeches to maintain a filibuster.

Links from February 3rd

February 5, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

A few links from the past few days.

Martin Fowler: Flaccid Scrum. An argument that the Scrum process, which is focused on project management, is doomed to failure without good technical process operating in the background.
Fraser Speirs: On the Flickr support in iPhoto ’09. Musings from a third party developer whose product is being subsumed into the platform.
Bruce Schneier: The Exclusionary Rule and Security. A perspective on the recent Supreme Court ruling that loosened the restraints on police handling of evidence. Schneier argues that loosening the rules creates poor incentives for the police.
Last.fm: Closing in on clean metadata: artist and track spelling auto-correction is here. Very cool.
Dom Sagolla: How Twitter Was Born.
Dealbreaker: No More Than The President Of The United States. A look at the President’s real compensation.
Food & Think: Wing Shortage Looms On Eve of Big Game. 5% of the chicken wings consumed each year are eaten on Super Bowl Sunday.
Vitalsecurity.org: Direct Revenue: A Twisting History. An informative followup on this widely linked interview with a reformed adware author.
Marginal Revolution: What is the best food produced en masse? An interesting answer to an interesting question about food.
Felix Salmon: Where’s Markopolos’s Blog? An argument that had Harry Markopolos, the guy who tried repeatedly to inform the SEC of the Madoff ponzi scheme, just published his findings on a blog, he would have seen results. Wikileaks would have worked too.
Sam Ruby: Rails 2.3.0 RC1. I don’t know how developers keep up with all the changes in Rails, I feel particularly bad for authors publishing Rails books.
git ready: converting from svn
Michael Widenius: Time to move on. MySQL creator leaves Sun.
Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code. An argument for skipping design and requirements and just iterating in code.

Links from January 29th

January 30, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

These links are for the past three days.

fudgestudios’s bort at master – Skeleton Ruby on Rails project with a common set of plugins already baked in. I need to create a version of this for myself.
Michael Ruhlman: Anti-Bacterial America. An inspired rant about Americans becoming germophobes and the implications of that transition.
Aten Design Group: On Becoming a Drupal Development Shop. I’m fascinated by a company tying itself so closely to one tool.
Jason Kottke: More on Candy Land. Pointers to an interesting discussion on the value of Candy Land as a game.
The Guardian: Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God.
rentzsch’s clicktoflash at master. New home of the Safari plugin that blocks Flash movies.
Jack: Rack for JavaScript. Because it’s there.
Al Arabiya: Obama tells Al Arabiya peace talks should resume. The first big interview of the Obama presidency goes to the Arab media.
Marc Lynch: Obama to Arabs: “what you’ll see is someone who is listening”. Analysis of Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya.
The CMS Myth.
mezzoblue: Sprite Optimization. A very cool technique that I just learned about.
FiveThirtyEight.com: Just Five Red States Left? This is a map we can believe in.
Media Matters: O’Reilly don’t know much about (WWII) history. Jessica Alba knows more geography than Bill O’Reilly. Not surprising.
Dr. Saturday: Hug your friendly neighborhood recruiting rankings. In light of the recent articles on talking about how hard it is to project the performance of professional football players based on college performance, it’s interesting that the performance of college teams can be predicted fairly accurately by the quality of their recruiting classes.
How to Choose Chart Types. Very useful resource for determining which kind of chart to use to visualize data.

Links from January 26th

January 27, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Boston Globe: An American take on al-Jazeera. Really interesting recounting of how al-Jazeera has covered the war in Gaza. I feel strongly that if American war coverage was less sanitized, support for military action would go down.
Rick DeNatale: Database Representation for Recurring Events. I’d love to see more micro-case studies of data modeling problems.
Marginal Revolution: Worry less about releasing terrorists. An economist’s view of releasing terrorists.
Errol Morris: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Long interview with wire service photo editors on iconic photos of President Bush.
clicktoflash. WebKit plug-in to prevent automatic loading of Adobe Flash content.
Riding Rails: Nested Model Forms. Improvements in this area have been desperately needed.

Links from January 25th

January 26, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Matthew Yglesias: The Thunder and the Laughter, the Last Thing They Remember. A list of the idiotic assertions about shutting down Guantanamo that people who want to keep it are putting out there.
The Washington Monthly: There Are No Files. There are no formal case files for any of the detainees at Gitmo. The United States has held hundreds of prisoners for years without charging them with crimes, and never even bothered to put together evidence for eventual prosecutions. More here.
LA Times: News organizations concerned about access issues at the Obama White House. Media outlets are trying to put a stop to anonymous background briefings from White House staffers and pushing for on the record comments.
12 Standard Screen Patterns. Handy resource.
Integrity. A slick looking continuous integration server for Ruby on Rails applications.
Hoptoad and Exceptional are both subscription-based services that log exceptions from Rails applications.
Rands In Repose: The Larry Test. On being done.

Links from January 24th

January 25, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Magnus Holm: When in Doubt, Turn to _why. A comparison of different algorithms for parsing nested parameters from a query string in Ruby. Very educational.
Waxy.org: Pirating the 2009 Oscars. Andy Baio’s annual report on which Oscar-nominated films are available via file sharing. This year’s list is larger than ever.
WoW Insider: Ezra Wheathoof is Thunder Bluff’s newest Elder. Ezra Chatterton was a young World of Warcraft player who died of cancer. Blizzard continues to memorialize him in the game.
New York Times: Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers. This is fascinating but I don’t really know what to make of it.
John Resig: OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. Walkthrough of a GreaseMonkey script that solves one relatively weak CAPTCHA implementation. Put this in the “I didn’t know you could do that in JavaScript” file.

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