Links from May 20

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?