Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.
Looks very nice.
I’ve been collecting ideas people have for contracts on agile projects.
Alistair Cockburn
There is a movement advocating throwing our hands in the air and banning all forms of “advanced” programming idioms in the hope that our code bases will be somehow more accessible. Everyone has horror stories about incompetent and downright dangerous programmers who somehow keep their jobs, and there’s an argument that code bases must cater to them.
Raganwald — I agree.
A Quick Jaunt Through Merb's Framework Code
This is a tutorial for people that want to familiarize themselves with the merb framework code and how a request travels through the framework. This is not a complete walkthrough but it will definitely get you into the code base and peeking around at key areas.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz — I’m using Merb on a couple of projects. It is quite nice.
Rak is a grep replacement in pure Ruby. It accepts Ruby syntax regular expressions and automatically recurses directories, skipping .svn/, .cvs/, pkg/ and more things you don’t care about. It is based on the Perl tool ack by Andy Lester.
Looks interesting. Ack is certainly useful.
RubyInject is a Mac OS X framework that allows you to inject at runtime the Ruby interpreter into any running application, using the machstar∞ mechanism.
This is really interesting, and it seems to work nicely.
Can Java be saved from death by feature bloat?
I think many of the recent discussions for changes to Java are in danger of pulling the language downhill fast, and the term “Simplicity” has different meaning to different people that cause directly contradictory results for language design.
Michael Kölling — We’ve seen this before in C++
The Evolution of Javai c e d ( j a v a ) — as a series of car designs
A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript
Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world’s most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. The last year has seen the launch of a number of high profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer.
Simon Willison — Looks useful
Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
There has been a new wave of interest in Common Lisp over the last few years. This paper is a November, 2007 survey of Common Lisp implementations that are currently being actively maintained. It also provides references to writings about why Lisp is interesting and important, Lisp textbooks, and useful Lisp resources including repositories of available libraries. I hope it will help you find the right implementation for your project or product.
Daniel Weinreb — Daniel pulled this together nicely. This is the first time I’ve seen this all in one place.
CDNs Are Big Business, EdgeCast Get $6 Million
When we watch movies or play music online, there’s a flurry of unseen activity making sure that data arrives when and where it’s supposed to be. This is the job of the high speed fiber and computer systems of the internet’s content distribution networks (CDNs).
Some information on an obscure, to me anyway, corner of the internet.
Computer Storage (1956)Urban Legends Reference Pages — A 1956 disk drive? (photo and article)
Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people’s confidence in its reliability. That is why your bank never sends you information about your account by e-mail and keeps making a point of that fact.
But it does not have to be this way!
Hmm, as a victim of this kind of abuse on a regular basis, I’m thinking this might be a really good idea.
A festive Holiday (Chrifsmas) PosterChurch of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Opera sues Microsoft over Web standards in the EU Court
Yesterday, Opera filed an anti-trust complaint in the EU court against Microsoft … Read the Opera press release and treat yourself to a smile. They rely in part on the recent decision taken by the court against Microsoft over bundling MediaPlayer with Windows. Opera accuses Microsoft of stifling innovation by embedding a browser than does not support Web standards as it should.
JON TANgerine
Brand New Scene Graph API: Trying It Out
Yesterday Josh Marinacci announced that a library called Scene Graph has been spun out of the JavaFX project and open sourced on java.net. According to the site, the library “provides ‘scene graph’ functionality at the Java level, as well as providing one of the important runtime elements that the JavaFX Script language depends upon from the underlying platform. This project is released in very early access form, so that people can see what we’re doing and play with it as we continue developing.”
I hope this works out well. I was looking for one a few years ago and failed to find one that I thought was both useful and usable. Spoiled from my Alias days I guess.
The Visual Library is the next generation of the original Graph Library. Now it is designed for a general visualization with support for graph-oriented modeling. Its focus is to become a part of the NetBeans platform and unify the visualization (UI and API) used in NetBeans-platform-based applications.
NetBeans — This might be interesting, especially from something like JRuby, JPython, Scala, even Groovy.
Coderspiel / The awesomeness of Scala is implicit
Learning a new programming language, especially one that is a significant advancement over those that you’re comfortable in, is like hiking a trail that only optionally climbs mountains. There are few obligatory streams to cross at the beginning: assembling tools to write and compile the code, learning how to write familiar old constructs in the new language. And then?
Speaking of Scala
Install Multiple Versions of Ruby on Leopard
I’m glad that Apple bundled Ruby (1.8.6) with Leopard, but I need 1.8.5 installed to ensure compatibility with some projects that are deployed on servers running 1.8.5. Not only do I need 1.8.5, but I need it installed at different patch levels. Here is how I set up OSX to have multiple versions of Ruby installed.
Dan Manges — Might help someone
Welcome to the online version of The Django Book, a free book about Django.
The book is due to be published in December 2007 by Apress, but in the meantime you can read the “beta” book online. The final book will be posted when the print version ships.
The book has gone to press.
The Core Image library for NodeBox adds image manipulation to NodeBox. It’s like having control over Photoshop through simple Python programming commands. Core Image is a Mac OS X specific framework available from Mac OS X 1.4 (Tiger). Core Image uses hardware acceleration whenever possible. You can apply filters and transformations to images with a real-time and interactive response. And, since all of the image manipulations are stored in a script, the process is non-destructive. The source images remain unchanged. The script is a recipe you can reuse on different source images.
Looks like fun.
Utility Belt is a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB, including convenience methods, language patches, and useful extensions. It also includes a couple command-line widgets. Its primary inspirations were an awesome gem called Wirble and a blog post by Amy Hoy called “Secrets Of The Rails Console Ninjas”.
This is very nice.
Gosu is a 2D game development library for the Ruby and C programming languages, available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Google Code — Wow!
Luca Guidi : Click To Globalize
Click To Globalize is an extension for Globalize plugin, it allows to edit in place globalized labels. With this plugin you don’t have to create a globalization back-end, but just edit your interface in place!!
I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I will. About 15 years ago I used a tool that allowed this kind of thing… it very neatly solved the context problem.
Beanstalkd - Software - xph.us
beanstalkd is a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service. Its interface is generic, but is intended for use in reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running most time-consuming tasks asynchronously.
There’s a few of these kinds of things come out recently.
Async Observer is a Rails plugin that provides deep integration with Beanstalk.
And this takes Beanstalk a step further.
Memcachedb is a distributed storage system designed for persistent. We simplely hacked from memcached and tugela. But neither of them. Memcachedb is not a cache solution, it is a persistent solution for high-frequency writing and reading. It conforms to memcache protocol(not completed, see below), so any memcached client can have connectivity with it. Memcachedb uses Berkeley DB as a storing backend, so lots of features including transaction and replication are supported.
Google Code — Very interesting, to me at least.
Dork Talk will devote itself over the next two weeks to those of you who regularly browse the web but don’t consider yourselves in any way expert at techy, dweeby, geeky things. I want to show you how to enhance your browsing experience with a few simple alterations to your set-up. They don’t involve any kind of specialist knowledge and they are all reversible.
Technical types can look away and snort gently: this is aimed at - well, I have many friends who can, so to speak, drive around the web, but who have never thought much about the software vehicle taking them through the traffic.
Stephen Fry, Dork Talk — This weblog should be on your read-regularly list
GChart exposes the Google Chart API (http://code.google.com/apis/chart) via a friendly Ruby interface. It can generate the URL for a given chart (for webpage use), or download the generated PNG (for offline use).
RubyForge — That didn’t take long.
The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want. All you have to do is draw the left and right edges below and then copy the generated code to your website.
Oohhhh! I need this!
Accessible, SEO friendly text chopping method
Chopping text at fixed number of characters, or preferably the nearest corresponding word boundary, is a common problem and is usually handled entirely server side. An ellipses (… rather than 3 full stops) is often added to show that the displayed text only represents a proportion of the original. The following function achieves this effect for an arbitrary text string
Ed Eliot — continued next item…
yesterday I implemented Ed’s chop text function as a Django filter
jesselegg.com
Killing Some Bad Layout Conventions
As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment.
Design View / Andy Rutledge
Agile 2008 will be an exciting conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development.
This will be in Toronto, so I’ve got no excuse
Adobe Debuts Flash Media Server 3 - Slashes Price
Adobe … today announced the release of Flash Media Server 3, the delivery platform for its near ubiquitous Flash technology. Perhaps the most striking change to Flash Media Server is the drastically reduced price.
Hmmm
jTagEditor is a lightweight jQuery plugin which allows you to turn any textarea tag into a quick tag editor in an inobtrusive manner. This plugin is easy to use and fully customizable (Styles, Tagset and behaviours).
Ha! I knew if I waited long enough someone would do this :-)
Testing Various Configurations of Rails, Merb, Swiftiply, and Nginx
If you’re developing Web applications in Ruby and are concerned about system scalability, you may find this post useful. I’ve been exploring different ways to optimize front end application performance before setting my sights on the back end. Along the way, I’ve compared the performance of Rails and Merb using various architectures for handling HTTP proxying, session management, and logging. The results are provided in the second half of this article.
Webficient — Interesting to see, timing is good for me too.
The ObjectStore Database System
Recently Dan Weinreb mentioned a paper about ObjectStore he co-authored with Charles Lamb, Gordon Landis and Jack Orenstein in 1991. It’s a bit hard to find unless you have an ACM account. I’ve made it available here. Enjoy!
Lispmeister
Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants and chemicals and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.
If you have teenage kids you are going to want to have this information available. Sticking to the propaganda isn’t going to work… give your kids some credit – did you fall for it?
NY police train citizens to be bad samaritans
Despite anyone finding a lost wallet having 10 days by law to return it, NYPD is using entrapment techniques to immediately arrest anyone who picks up planted wallets and bags which are now seeded with credit cards to make it a felony (instead of just cash which was a misdomeaner). Over half the people arrested had no previous criminal record whatsoever.
Mind boggling stupid. There are 300!?! people charged already!
his book is the authoritative tutorial on the Scala programming language, co-written by the language’s designer, Martin Odersky. While mostly complete, the book is still a work in progress. This early access program will allow you to learn about Scala from the source and provide helpful feedback to the authors that will make the book even better.
Still more on Scala.
Long ago, I made a decision to publish everything that I do under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license (CC:By). With all of the licenses available, and all of the clauses listed as part of Creative Commons, why did I choose not to invoke them?
D'Arcy Norman dot net
The Forest extension allows operations on trees with nested Mercurial repositories, called forests. Those to some degree correspond to multi-project CVS/Svn/… repositories.
Here’s a fun one from the archives. Norm at http://onegoodmove.org posted this again, and I just couldn’t resist.
QI, Stephen Fry, via RichardDawkins.net — (video) quite funy
Europe Guide : Maps of Europe by language, religion, population density, hair & eye color, etc.quite interesting.
An indie director asks: Is the whole thing a Kafkaesque nightmare?
You have not seen this movie. You couldn’t have, unless you were one of the few customers who contributed to its depressing $200,000 total national gross. It got enthusiastic reviews from both trade papers, the New York Times, Salon, the New Yorker and so on, but then it disappeared.
It was written and directed by a legend in the indie film world, Tom DiCillo, who has made other movies I’ve liked (“Living in Oblivion,” “Box of Moonlight,” “The Real Blonde”). Yet it opened in two theaters in New York and Los Angeles, was supported by pitiful near-zero advertising, went to one theater in each city after a week, had brief one-theater runs here and there (in Chicago, at the Music Box), and disappeared.
Roger Ebert
Clojure: A Lisp Worth Talking About
A couple nights ago I walked down to LispNYC in the East Village to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, his new Lisp-like language. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Another Lisp? Ho hum. I’m sure it’s very clever and cool and all, but not something I can actually use.
Instead, I was blown away by Rich’s presentation. Clojure might just be the Lisp I’ve been waiting for. Here’s why:
Stuart Sierra — This does look interesting.
The goal of Team Hoyt is to integrate the physically challenged into everyday life. One way to accomplish this is to educate the able-bodied, making them more aware of the issues that the disabled face every day. Another is by actively helping the disabled to participate in activities that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. Team Hoyt targets both of these areas.
Amazing! You will not believe what these two have achieved.
If you’re looking for a serious script to manage your users then you’re at the right place. Built with security in mind and packed with dozens of features, our PHP login script is the right solution for every webmaster looking to take his website to the next level. Trust us, we’ve stayed (and we still do for early versions) open-source long enough to learn what people really need.
