Links for 07-08-11
Links!Why WSJ Mobile App Gets ** Customer Reviews (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Why do so many people think they have to pay when they don't? Because of a highly confusing user interface design.
Dynamic nested forms using jQuery made easy; works with formtastic, simple_form or default forms
Please, please, please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder. - humbledMBA
You don't find a technical cofounder, you earn one.
Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.
Chatbox - Project collaboration inside Dropbox
Chatbox makes it easy to discuss or comment on files shared over Dropbox. Install it, right click on any files / folders inside Dropbox, and start conversations with people you shared the Dropbox folder with.
How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack
Redis is different than other database solutions in many ways: it uses memory as main storage support and disk only for persistence, the data model is pretty unique, it is single threaded and so forth. I think that another big difference is that in order to take advantage of Redis in your production environment you don't need to switch to Redis. You can just use it in order to do new things that were not possible before, or in order to fix old problems.
Bundler for non-ruby dependencies from homebrew
Swiffy converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads).
We use this library at GitHub to detect blob languages, highlight code, ignore binary files, suppress generated files in diffs and generate language breakdown graphs.
Native style momentum scrolling to arrive in iOS 5 · Johan Brook
The Technium: The Shirky Principle
The Billy Baldwin of Conditional Assignment // Collective Idea
Speed up your unit tests with Devise
Start-Up Lytro Aims to Sharpen Focus of Entire Camera Industry - Ina Fried - News - AllThingsD
BundleWatcher: Watching Your Gems
Heroku | The New Heroku (Part 1 of 4): The Process Model & Procfile
Egregious Dropbox Authentication Bug Yesterday
Mocking fog When Using It With Carrierwave
has_many :through - Slightly more readable Ruby
Automate Github Pull Requests [splitbrain.org]
Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories
I went to graduate school at Georgia Tech, and read some Chris Crawford. I learned that he had the same problem. But he didn’t think of it as failure. For him, this was an organic part of the development process. The failures filling his hard drive were actually “prototypes” that helped him decide which ideas were worth pursuing. For each good idea, there were a large number of stupid ones that didn’t work out. Failing, for this successful designer, was a way to find the good ideas.
? Most common numeric passcodes
What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails? « Katz Got Your Tongue?
Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories
How we got the unusual symbol used for the menu command key
Automated Heroku Database Backups to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, or Google Storage - Jack Chu
The heroku_cloud_backup gem also adds a rake task to your project, but supports all the providers that fog supports. It’s also a lot more configurable through the heroku config. The heroku:cloud_backup task, when called, will upload the latest PG Backup capture to the cloud using fog. Currently, it supports Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, and Google Storage.
iOS device and OS version stats from Instapaper 3.0 – Marco.org
Use concerns to keep your models manageable — Gist
The Most Important Code Isn't Code
Documentation is the single most important change I’ve made to my coding style in the last year.
Jeff Bezos on innovation: Amazon ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time’ - GeekWire
If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would expect that maybe some of them wouldn’t work out, but I am just not seeing that. So, my question is where are the losers?
futuresimple/broadcast - GitHub
A broadcasting microframework making publishing of messages to different services easy.
Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar - Official Gmail Blog
Reaching localhost from VMware / virtual machines on a Mac - Rowlando’s Blog
Jeff Dean's Ruby Blog - Testing your gem against multiple rubies and rails versions with RVM
josh/ruby-coffee-script - GitHub
Ruby CoffeeScript Compiler
Ruby Eco Compiler
Chax is a collection of minor modifications and additions that make using Apple's iChat more enjoyable.
halostatue/rubypython - GitHub
RubyPython is a bridge between the Ruby and Python interpreters. It embeds a running Python interpreter in the Ruby application’s process using FFI and provides a means for wrapping, converting, and calling Python objects and methods.
Learn how RubyGems works, and how to make your own.
Ryan's Scraps: Extend Your ActiveRecord Association Methods
You can customize to your heart’s content – these are just some simplistic examples of how to plug into this nifty feature. I just recently stumbled upon it and thought it might be worth spreading the word since I found myself smitten by it.
mynu - A simple DSL to create a systembar menu with macruby in OSX
Divide and Concur « Code as Craft
You’d have a dyno that should (in terms of memory) be able to spin up 3 or 4 instances, but you were only able to spin up a single Thin instance per dyno. With Thin, even after the introduction of Cedar, this is still the case. But now since the application server constraint no longer exists, you can use Unicorn to do it. With this, you should be able to improve your application’s throughput by a factor of 3 to 4 on the same dyno.
A QuickLook plugin that lets you view plain text files without a file extension
This Blog Post Costs $3.99 : Planet Money : NPR
When something costs $3.99, you just round up and tell yourself it costs $4.00. Right?
Agile eLearning » Industrial Logic's Greatest Hits » 2011 BLogic: Return of the Horizontal Slice
We can deliver value and learn faster by horizontally slicing our vertical slices and deploying those horizontal slices to production.
Buddhists make rational economic decisions | Diamond Way Buddhism UK Blog
Google Chrome - Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It
JavaScript Rails internationalization
danwebb.net - Its About The Hashbangs
Commit f4897f890d8dd33215fef238902988e8823a6539 to jnicklas/capybara - GitHub
Capybara ate Steak, didn't it?
Highlight.js highlights syntax in code examples on blogs, forums and in fact on any web pages. It's very easy to use because it works automatically: finds blocks of code, detects a language, highlights it.
moocode - cloud infrastructure and services
“Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek” And What We Did About It - Fog Creek Blog
We build stunningly distinct machines designed for city riding.
How I've started to contribute to open source - Binary Balance
The rest of this post is devoted to a couple of small case studies in my open source contributions and the lessons that I have drawn from them, hopefully for the benefit of those of us who may be interested in beginning to contribute to OSS.
Creating strongly-typed, app-wide, user-editable settings
rake deploy and rake cache_assets for Heroku (storing JS minimized and gzipped on Amazon S3) — Gist
rake deploy and rake cache_assets for Heroku (storing JS minimized and gzipped on Amazon S3)
Sinatra-based CMS
Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.
Fetch.io | Cloud Storage & Media, supports RapidShare, MegaUpload, MediaFire, BitTorrent, and more
FETCH.IO LETS YOU DOWNLOAD MEDIA FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES AND STREAM THEM INSTANTLY, FAST.
contrast/uploadify-s3 - GitHub
A rails plugin for using uploadify direct to S3
Amazon Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books
elabs/front_end_testing_talk - GitHub
Our presentation "The Front End Testing Frontier" given by cjkihlbom and jnicklas at Scottish Ruby Conference 2011.
Perl, the first postmodern computer language - Perl.com
Netflix passes BitTorrent in U.S. bandwidth traffic
New Relic Releases Real User Monitoring and Ditches RPM Name
yostudios/Spritemapper - GitHub
CSS Spritemap Generator
DHH’s RailsConf 2011 Keynote Live-Blogged Here
Sinatra: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I automatically escape html?