March 2008
63 posts
FlightWait - Boston →
Google Maps mashup with flight delay data.
The Jacoby Factor →
Jacoby Ellsbury expose.
rest-client →
More from Adam Wiggins of Heroku.
4 million Ruby developers in 5 years →
According to Gartner.
David Says... To Raise, or Not to Raise?
David Says… To Raise, or Not to Raise? When you use a finder driven by primary keys, you’re looking for a particular record. You expect it to exist. A call to Person.find(5) is based on our knowledge of the persons table. We want the row with an id of 5. If this call is unsuccessful—if the record with the id of 5 has been destroyed—we’re in an exceptional situation. This mandates...
The Little JavaScripter →
based on The Little Schemer.
WatchJohn Resig on JavaScript and jQuery at Northeastern University, March 2008
The War Journals of Hillary Clinton, Vol. 1 →
As bullets clawed the air around us and screams echoed down the rubble-strewn tarmac, I felt almost peaceful. It was a simple mission, they had told me – get in, shake a few hands and mouth a few platitudes, get out. Simple. Yeah. Things had started going wrong while we were still in the air and only gotten worse from there. So here we were, pinned down, choking on the acrid tang of cordite and...
Bush's War →
PBS.
"White space" data transmission →
Google lobbies Washington. When TVs switch from analog to digital next year, the airwaves can be used for mobile devices accessing that old spectrum for data transmission at billions of bits per second (as opposed to millions of bits per second that we are accustomed to on broadband lines).
“sellers must learn how to have a positive impact on one or more of five crucial...”
– [ via adverselling]
dirty - replacement for acts_as_modified →
Book it.
Hilary Clinton under sniper fire
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” ~ Hilary Clinton, speech at GW, March 17, 2008 … and the video of the harrowing events:
“How Is Our XHTML Fragment Processed? The same way hedgehogs mate: with great...”
– “Prototype & Scriptaculous” (the Bungee book).
“i’m going to petition to change UI => U! it’s the U that’s...”
– Angelo Simeoni
Shoulda authorization helpers
context "A user who is not logged in" do setup { @request.session[:user_id] = nil } should_login_before :index, :get should_login_before :show, :get should_login_before :new, :get should_login_before :create, :post should_login_before :edit, :get should_login_before :update, :put should_login_before :destroy, :delete end context "A regular_user" do setup { login_as :regular_user...
Full-text search benchmarks →
Sphinx and Ultrasphinx win, matching my own anecdotal experience. Telling first comment from Ezra, too: Nice write up. Sphinx has shown itself to be the most stable and consistent under load of these three search options at Engine Yard. Ferret is not stable enough to run production apps on. Solr is a nice search engine and has some advanced search features Sphinx doesn’t have, but Sphinx...
“The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”
– William Faulkner
37signals 4-day work weeks →
Implemented.
GemStone architecture explained using Rails... →
Unlike in Rails, where you have to be mapping and marshalling at every step, in Gemstone copying objects from storage to cache to worker process is pretty much just that - a simple byte copy. This makes it fast. The effect is as if all of your worker processes were running their objects inside a single, consistent and impossibly large chunk of persistent memory. This makes it easy.
Wikipedia on the iPhone →
Why: It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of having the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. It’s the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy realised. EDGE is slow; search is slow; you’re abroad, in a plane, a tunnel, or on top of a mountain.
“Amazon Simple Queue Service is the glue that holds it all together. This is by...”
– Amazon Web Services blog
Ruby Google Contacts Data API →
Fetch users’ contact lists from your web application without asking them to provide their passwords. Tweet by Mislav Marohnić this morning: 100% spec coverage and documentation for Ruby Google Contacts Data API … now to try actually using it :)
Clicky →
Looks promising. Register screen has a scary message, though: Please note, we cannot currently accept any web sites that receive more than 50,000 daily page views.
CCMenu →
CCMenu displays the project status of CruiseControl continuous integration servers as an item in the Mac OS X menu bar. CCMenu allows you to: Monitor selected projects on multiple continuous integration servers Identify the overall build status with a glance to menu bar Access the build web sites of the projects using the status menu Receive notification of completed builds via Growl
Yahoo Open Search API →
Coming soon to a developer near you.
Google Ad Manager →
AdSense on steroids?
OpenSearch →
Yahoo now supports the Amazon A9 OpenSearch specification with extensions for structured queries to deep web data. [via TechCrunch]
Ultrasphinx tutorial →
Agree 100% that sphinx is the preferred full text solution over ferret and solr and that Ultrasphinx is the best sphinx Rails plugin.
GitHub pricing plans announced →
Seems fair.
Ridiculous - Ruby wrapper for del.icio.us API →
svn co svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ridiculous/0.6
“Yes, honey…Just squeeze your rage up into a bitter little ball and release...”
– Homer Simpson
The battle for Wikipedia's soul →
I’m on the “inclusionists” side.
Acid 3 web standards-compliance test →
“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards for Internet applications. For example, XHTML, HTML, CSS, etc. Acid 3 basically takes a lot of W3C’s newer standards and tests to be sure that the browser supports the features it should and that it behaves as it should when using them. Acid 3 is a suite of 100 different tests to be sure that these standards are being met. So when I say...
Shadowbox.js →
Shadowbox is a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application written entirely in JavaScript. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating away from the linking page.
jCarousel →
jCarousel is a jQuery plugin for controlling a list of items in horizontal or vertical order. The items, which can be static HTML content or loaded with (or without) AJAX, can be scrolled back and forth (with or without animation).
