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Posts Tagged ‘Ruby on Rails’

Links for September 3

In Commentary on 3 September 2009 tagged math, Ruby on Rails, torture, usability with no comments

First of all, happy birthday to my friend Paul, who doesn’t read my blog.

• Guardian: CIA doctors face human experimentation claims. Just read the headline.
• Tim Bray: Ravelry. Tim interviews Casey Forbes, the tech guy behind Ravelry, a site for knitting enthusiasts and covers everything from bootstrapping a business to scaling Ruby on Rails.
• The Numbers Guy: Some Theorists Withhold Best-Voting-System Award. Voting experts weigh in on the new voting system for the Oscars this year.
• Hanan Cohen: Spoken Directions to Web Content (aka “Go to page number”). A good, simple idea for improving Web site usability. This approach could also be extended to create a spoken instructions/shortened URL hybrid service for a site.

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 26th

In Commentary on 28 May 2009 tagged css, design, JavaScript, law, links, politics, Ruby on Rails with no comments

I have a number of Sonya Sotomayor links today.

• SCOTUSblog: Judge Sotomayor’s Appellate Opinions in Civil Cases. A review of her actual work. This is the important stuff when evaluating judges.
• Daytime Running Lights: Simple Wins. Case study of a realtime chat server built using CouchDB.
• The Quine Page (self-reproducing code). A quine is a program that produces its own source as its output.
• Tim Bray: The Web vs. the Fallacies. How the Web makes many of the fallacies of distributed computing less fallacious.
• SCOTUSblog: The Dynamic of the Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. She’s as qualified as any other recent nominee, she doesn’t seem like she’ll expand the ideological boundaries of the Supreme Court, and she’s going to be confirmed.
• Maintainable Software: Minifying Your Rails Javascript. Rake task to minify JavaScript as part of the build process.
• Glenn Greenwald: Justice Sam Alito on empathy and judging. The fixation on Obama’s empathy criteria for Supreme Court justices is a canard.
• Shhhaw! On Redesigning the Front Page of Talking Points Memo.

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?

What I hate about RSpec

In Commentary on 23 March 2009 tagged Ruby on Rails with 2 comments

This is not developer-friendly:

response.should be_success

Unless you have fully internalized RSpec, it is nigh impossible to know where the space, underscore, and period go. The goal is to come up with code that looks like sentences but the end result is to come up with something a non-developer can read but that developers shouldn’t have to write.

Links from February 25th

In Commentary on 25 February 2009 tagged browsers, economics, food, links, politics, Ruby on Rails, startups with no 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

In Commentary on 5 February 2009 tagged Apple, food, law, links, management, music, Ruby on Rails, security, software development, Twitter with no 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

In Commentary on 30 January 2009 tagged drupal, evolution, food, games, links, religion, Ruby on Rails, science with no 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

In Commentary on 27 January 2009 tagged browsers, databases, economics, flash, links, photography, politics, Ruby on Rails, terrorism, The Media, war with 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

In Commentary on 26 January 2009 tagged links, management, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, software development, The Media, user experience with no 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.