February 2010
101 of the Best Movie One Liners Ever - Movie... →
We all know some of the famous on-liners from the movies, but some of them are so commonplace that you may not even know that it’s a quote from a movie or from which movie it originated. But there are some quotes from movies that everyone should know. Some of them have really stood the test of time and are very old. Ironically, these are sometimes the ones that we know the best.
64 Things Every Geek Should Know « Caintech.co.uk →
A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. If you’re that type of person and are looking for a few extra skills to pick up, or if you’re a newbie aiming to get a handhold on the honor that is geekhood, read on to find out what skills you need to know.
Freebie: Massive Web UI & Button Set » MediaLoot... →
We’re excited to announce that the first of many MediaLoot freebies is finally here! This freebie is a very large web UI and button set that was designed by our very own Jon Phillips. From text boxes, to buttons, to drop-down menus, this set should have something useful for everyone.
Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money |... →
Many of the developers I know have been programming since they were in junior high. Whether it was building text-based games on an Apple IIe or creating a high school football roster app in Visual Basic, it’s something they did for the challenge, for the love of learning new things and, oh yes, for the ladies. Ladies love a man who can speak BASIC to his Apple.
January 2010
$ cheat sunspot →
Usage: sunspot-solr —
$ cheat git →
clone the repository specified by ; this is similar to “checkout” in some other version control systems such as Subversion and CVS
Use jQuery - Blog - The jQuery Cross-Domain Ajax... →
Ajax requests to third party websites are normally not possible because of security restrictions. But there are several client-side techniques to work around this restrictions. Learn about them in this handy guide.
Isaac Kearse | Stopwatch - A HotCocoa Status Bar... →
At work we use a job management web app called WorkflowMax. This product has a huge array of features but I mostly just use it for tracking the time I spend on client work. It ships with a javascript timer in the web app that is probably sufficient for most people, but I wanted to be able to work offline. They have an API so this seemed like a great excuse to build a MacRuby & HotCocoa...
Firefox for Mobile Now Available on Nokia’s Maemo... →
We’re pleased to announce that Firefox is now available for Nokia’s Maemo platform. Starting today, Nokia N900 owners can enjoy many of the same Firefox features they know and love on the desktop on their mobile device.
Jason Zimdars | Portfolio | Thinkcage →
Here are some things I designed that I’m pretty proud of. For most of them I created the website from start to finish including client consultation, design, XHTML/CSS, interactive elements (Flash and Javascript), CMS integration, and page build.
H&FJ News | Hoefler & Frere-Jones →
The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567.
Sunspot: A Solr-Powered Search Engine for Ruby |... →
If you code in Ruby, Sunspot is an ideal solution for any of those inventories. Created by Mat Brown, Sunspot is an intuitive and expressive domain specific-language for indexing and searching Ruby objects. Sunspot is powered by Solr, the open source enterprise search server based on Lucene. Solr can highlight matches, replicate its index across many servers, shard indices, and, for the purposes...
sunspot default scope →
While I was DRYing up some code, I noticed that a lot of my Sunspot searches were using the same options over and over. Default scope is a nice option in ActiveRecord queries, why not in our searches?
A Few SunSpot Tips « spiral_code |... →
I started playing with SunSpot yesterday with the intent of using it as my full-text search provider in a Rails application. The few how-tos I found show the beautiful DSL it provides, but unfortunately not much more. Below are a few gotchas I ran into while getting it to work on my setup.
mynyml's watchr at master - GitHub →
Agile development tool that monitors a directory tree, and triggers a user defined action whenever an observed file is modified. Its most typical use is continuous testing, and as such it is a more flexible alternative to autotest.
Sinatra: Writing Extensions →
Some knowledge of Sinatra’s internal design is required to write good extensions. This section provides a high level overview of the classes and idioms at the core of Sinatra’s design.
For $3K, You Can Build Your Own Kindle Killer |... →
It may not be as pretty as the neatly packaged Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader. And at a whopping $3,000, the E Ink kit isn’t going to threaten Amazon’s market share (the Kindle 2 costs $350). But for the Lego-minded, the kits can offer an experience that pre-packaged e-readers will find difficult to beat.
UN agency calls for global cyberwarfare treaty,... →
The world needs a treaty to prevent cyber attacks becoming an all-out war, the head of the main UN communications and technology agency warned Saturday.
6 Image Manipulation Plugins for jQuery You Should... →
Hi, In the past few months, I bookmarked some interesting jQuery plugins or usages to deal with image manipulation, editing or effects. Today I’m sharing this list with you.
A Better Javascript Memoizer | Unscriptable.com →
Last month, I had the pleasure of meeting tons of excellent and intelligent front-end engineers at JSConf 2009 — the conference for Javascript in Washington DC. If you are a front-end engineer — or even if you write programs in Javascript for back ends, mobile devices, or desktops — you absolutely have to go to JSConf 2010. It’s apparent that Javascript is quickly becoming one of the hottest...
Six Things Your Mom Never Told You About Debugging... →
One of the most exciting days we’ve had all year came a few weeks ago after a routine deploy, when someone opened up the site in IE to find that nothing worked. Such is Javascript. A simple syntax error in the code can, under the right circumstances, cascade down and break all other Javascript in its path. In our case this included the popup scripts that launch our apps.
The Web Way to Learn a Language - NYTimes.com →
The young woman seated next to us at the sushi bar exuded a vaguely exotic air; her looks and style, we thought, made it likely that she was not American born.
James River Branch: N Scale Layout In Z →
For the last eleven years, I’ve claimed that I’d built the world’s smallest working train layout (as seen in this video). Actually, that was the second one I’d built; the first was a slightly larger proof-of-concept version, which I donated to Rick Spano for his Sceniced and Undecided. Subsequently, I’ve thought about making more models of layouts, including an N...
Sunspot: Solr-powered search for Ruby objects →
All the power of the Solr search engine; all the beauty of Ruby. Sunspot exposes all of Solr’s most powerful search features using an API of elegant DSLs. That means robust, flexible fulltext search with no boolean queries and no string programming.
The pyramid of code quality, the 5 characteristics... →
The quality of the code can be seen as pyramid where each of the 5 vertex are one characteristic of the code.
Android Laptop Review: Hivision PWS700CA –... →
This is the world’s first video-review of the Hivision PWS700CA ARM9 Powered Android Laptop, find more info at Hivision’s website. (Hivision, which I previously video-Interviewed about cheap Laptops from the trade shows at CES 2010 and IFA 2008)
Exploring Rails 3 The Free Rails Online Conference... →
Rails 3 is taking its final shape, so there’s no better time to take a close look at the work that’s been done in the past year. Join us for a series of talks on everything you’ll need to get started with it – from creating a new application, to upgrading from Rails 2, to the foundation that makes it all possible.
15 Tips for Designing Terrific Tables | Design... →
In a sense, they’re meant to be that way. A good table communicates a lot of information in a concise, easy to understand way. Because the emphasis really should be on the information, over-designing a table can kill the effectiveness. However, in the right hands, clever design can not only make a table more attractive, but can actually increase readability.
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the... →
The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.
Inside the iPad: Apple's new 'A4' chip | Nanotech... →
Called the A4, (“A” presumably for Apple), the most obvious difference with the chip in the iPhone 3GS is speed. The iPad’s chip runs at 1GHz, compared to the estimated 600MHz (0.6GHz) of the iPhone 3GS. On Wednesday, at the event in San Francisco, the A4 was billed as “the most advanced chip” Apple has done yet. While fast, it’s also frugal with power....
Where Are the Network Virtual Appliances? – GigaOM →
The networking industry is stuck in the 1990s, the last time there was a fundamental shift in commonly deployed network architectures. While servers and applications have gone virtual, migrating into cloud computing environments, networking technologies remain bound to physical hardware and data center racks, creating potential gaps in support or security in virtualized environments. As server...
Swfdec Wiki - FrontPage →
Swfdec (pronounced “swiff deck”) is a decoder/renderer for Macromedia Flash animations.
git ready » about →
The goal with this site is to make it usable as a way for beginners to get off the ground using Git and to show those who are already familiar with Git some new tricks.
‘Cyber Genome Project’ kicked off by DARPA |... →
Applecart-bothering Pentagon boffinry bureau DARPA is at it again. This time, the military scientists want to establish a “Cyber Genome” project which will allow any digital artifact – a document, a piece of malware – to be probed to its very origins.
Hbase/Stargate - Hadoop Wiki →
This package provides “Stargate” — a RESTful Web service front end for HBase.
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.stargate (HBase 0.20.2... →
Stargate is alpha quality software. It has received testing under controlled conditions and functions correctly given well formed input. It is bundled with a suite of unit tests which form the basis for correctness and regression testing but the coverage of this suite is basic. Stargate has not yet been tested under high load conditions. No comprehensive performance measurements have been made.
InfoQ: The Java EE 6 Web Tier: JSF 2 Gains... →
In a previous article we looked at the Servlet 3.0 API including its support for Ajax. Whilst it took a great deal of work to make the Servlet API suitable for this family of technologies, Java EE’s web framework, JavaServer Faces (JSF) has always been a more natural fit for the Ajax approach since the JSF framework maintains a stateful UI component tree. JSF 1.x, however, did not have built...
Can You Crowdsource Journalism? Seed Is Trying –... →
In what he hopes will be the first big demonstration of the “crowdsourcing” potential of AOL’s new Seed.com service, former New York Times writer Saul Hansell says he is looking for writers who will write up interviews with all of 2,000 or so bands and artists at the SXSW music festival in Austin. The assignment will involve “real reporting,” Hansell said in an interview, in which writers will...
Panopticlick →
Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies. Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. Click below and you will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.
luke - Project Hosting on Google Code →
Luke is a handy development and diagnostic tool, which accesses already existing Lucene indexes and allows you to display and modify their content in several ways
jQuery OpenID Plug-in →
The jQuery OpenID Plugin is a free plugin to add easy login support for the most popular OpenID RP’s such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and more. The inspiration for this plugin is based on openid-selector, openid-realselector, and ID Selector. This selector is different because it does not hide the markup details in javascript. Therefore, you can easily add new providers or rearrange the existing...
Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a... →
For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.
Understanding HBase and BigTable →
The hardest part about learning HBase (the open source implementation of Google’s BigTable), is just wrapping your mind around the concept of what it actually is. I find it rather unfortunate that these two great systems contain the words table and base in their names, which tend to cause confusion among RDBMS indoctrinated individuals (like myself). This article aims to describe these...
How Google Works - Infrastructure →
For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google, the company must still work through common business problems such as reporting revenue and tracking projects. But it sometimes addresses those needs in unconventional—yet highly efficient—ways. Other
Nicholas Felton | Feltron.com →
Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist… any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and...
The Principle of Proximity in Web Design |... →
The principle of proximity calls for related items to be grouped visually, creating less clutter and making for a more organized layout. Items unrelated to each other should be placed further apart, to emphasize their lack of relationship.
Beautiful Typographic Business Cards | Inspired... →
There is something truly fascinating about beautiful business card designs, I can look at them for ages in awe of their respective simple and sometimes complex designs. Having a beautifully designed business card get have lasting effects on your business. I for one have a huge collection of business cards that I keep to build contacts and provide visual inspiration. In this post I am going to...
Christopher Blizzard · HTML5 video and H.264 –... →
Recently Youtube announced that you could test out an HTML5-enabled version of their site. They said that they were doing this partially based on people’s “number one request” that Youtube do more with HTML5. (They left out the other half of that #1 request – that the implementation be based on open codecs, but more on that later.) Not to be outdone, Vimeo rushed to announce a beta version of...
Featured content | opensource.com →
The term open source began as a way to describe software source code and the collaborative model for how it’s developed. Red Hat used this model for developing technology and built a business model around open source and its principles: Openness. Transparency. Collaboration. Diversity. Rapid prototyping.
HumanApi →
HumanApi is a platform to discuss, develop and prototype new kinds of browser based applications. Through the incredibly fast rise of web-based applications on mobile devices and the fact that their SDKs give us possibilities to inject custom features into the browser runtime, we now can access “real” hardware via bluetooth, WIFI or other mediums supported by the devices.