Is the Atom Publishing Protocol the Answer?
There seems to be a complaint that outside of the tiny corner of the Web comprised of web pages, news stories, articles, blog posts, comments, lists of links, podcasts, online photo albums, video albums, directory listings, search results, … Atom doesn’t match some data models.
Abstractioneer
US beaches ban bucket-and-spade brigade
Dr Bradley Maron, of Harvard Medical School, revealed that people falling into holes dug in the sand had accounted for more fatalities in the US since 1990 than shark attacks - 16 as opposed to 12, according to statistics collected by the University of Florida.
Guardian Unlimited — Get your fears in order.
Some of the most difficult questions about a startup have to do with making predictions about the future … we’d like to help you minimize those mistakes by dissecting 4 very different web application companies that are at varying stages of their life cycle. In addition to age and size, these companies vary in their business models, programming languages and views on approaching the web as a platform. Specifically, we’ll be sharing code line counts, business processes, conversion rates, support requests revenues per customer.
Particletree — Worth reading if you are considering or in the middle of starting something up.
Exploring Lisp: Investigating slot access
I’ve been thinking about implementations of maps and associative arrays. Besides hash tables and association lists, structures and classes can act as maps. This got me wondering about the speed of slot access
I’ve been thinking about implementations of maps and associative arrays. Besides hash tables and association lists, structures and classes can act as maps. This got me wondering about the speed of slot access
Exploring Lisp
What if I actually like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?
That assumption then leads to the fallacy that if only someone could come along and give us a competitive distribution story using more “advanced” and “rich” interface technology, they’d surely be golden. That all web developers are waiting on is someone to save them from the browser mess and deliver them the clean desktop-development experience of yester-century.
In the immortal words of Eric Cartman: Bullcrap.
37signals — Of course it’s become a bit of a controversy. Funny, that… seems to come with being opinionated.
One of my favorite terms in the world of Web Content Management is “baking vs. frying,” which refers to when presentation templates are applied to render pages out of structured content. Baking style rendering systems generate pages when content is published. Frying systems generate pages on the fly when they are requested by the end user. Whether a system bakes or fries content tells a lot about its architecture and what it is good at. Baking systems are great for high volume sites that do not need to personalize content. Frying systems excel when requirements include personalization, access control, and other presentation logic that uses information about the user in order to decide what to show and how.
Enter Content Here — This is an interesting read, but I don’t quite get the analogy.
Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial (aka. How rake turned me into an alcoholic)
As a Rails developer you’re probably familiar with running “rake” to run your tests or maybe you’ve used “rake db:migrate” to run your migrations. But do you really understand what’s going on under the hood of these Rake tasks? Did you realize that you can write your own tasks or create your own library of useful Rake files?
Rails Envy — Very basic introduction.
Scalable CSS Buttons Using PNG and Background Colors
There has been a lot of talk about CSS buttons lately. Very understandable, since there are a lot of web applications being developed today that could benefit from slick looking buttons without loss in accessibility. Before jumping on the train myself, I just want to emphasize that you should not use this technique to replace real form buttons unless you know what you are doing. That said, the script I am providing to this article can create the same stylish buttons out of boring input buttons as well as plain anchors.
David's Kitchen — Very nice!
Twenty Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime
Did you know that corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined? This and 19 more amazing facts about the state of corporations in America.
AlterNet — Hmmmm…
The Monty Hall Problem is one of my favourite examples of a counterintuitive solution in mathematics.
James Tauber — Fun way to exercise your thinking.
Tutorial: Publishing RubyGems with Hoe
A long time ago, on an internet far away, publishing code to RubyForge was a scary thing to do.
Fortunately, Ryan Davis has remedied that situation by writing hoe, a set of rake tasks for testing, packaging, and releasing RubyGems.
Unfortunately, not many tutorials exist that show you how to harness the raw power of hoe. Until now.
Ruby on Rails for Newbies
Computational thinking isn’t thinking like a computer, rather it involves an understanding about how computer scientists think and solve problems. The reason that computers are used in almost every discipline is that the techniques that computer scientists use to solve problems are universally relevant. At its heart, computer science deals with how difficult problems are to solve, how to think about and manage problems, and how to create procedures for solving them.
Phil Windley's Technometria — Worth a read and a think.
Wiki: The business case for web standards
Welcome to the “The Business case for Web Standards” Wiki.
I thought it a good idea to set up a wiki to collect information on this topic as there are a lot of presentations written about it but all differ in approach and content and collating all these great ideas can help us form a solid approach to selling web standards to the business.
This is a Wiki.
In my Modular CSS article I documented the possibility of breaking down stylesheets into components that could be reused across projects. All well and good. The next logical step is to extend this to become a CSS framework, allowing rapid development of sites with pre-written and tested components. All that’s really required to produce this is a set of naming conventions and a flexible base template…
Content with Style
This is just the upper neck of a guitar, and the strings are the infrared ray that makes the sound as your fingers hit the fretboard. The controller has seven buttons on the front to click for “G” to “A” and four buttons on the side to identify the chords as major, minor, augmented or diminished. It also includes ten songs for air guitar beginners.
HimeyaShop.com — What a hoot :-)
I’ve been using Nginx (engine-x) for some time now and really digg it. So much simpler and nicer than Apache. Ezra apparently discovered the thing, a hidden Russian gem in the endless desert of HTTP servers, sometime last year.
err the blog
Parallels between software development and content development
During a session this afternoon at TOC on “Beta Books” Tonya Engst talked about how they treat the versions of their books much like versions of software – version 1.1, version 1.2, etc. Their beta/early-access program is just an extension of that, down to the 0.5 stage.
O'Reilly Radar
rocaml: Ruby extensions in Objective Caml
rocaml allows you to write Ruby extensions in Objective Caml.
ruby talk — Looks pretty nice.
Term Sheet Hacks: The Cheat Sheet
For optimal results, apply each of these Term Sheet Hacks liberally before you sign a term sheet. Apply regularly at each term sheet thereafter. This is not a complete or prioritized list! More hacks are forthcoming—we will keep this page up-to-date.
Venture Hacks — What you need to know before financing your company.
One of the most commonly overlooked and under-refined elements of a website is its pagination controls. In many cases, these are treated as an afterthought. I rarely come across a website that has decent pagination, and it always makes me wonder why so few manage to get it right. After all, I’d say that pagination is pretty easy to get right. Alas, that doesn’t seem the case, so after encouragement from Chris Messina on Flickr I decided to write my Pagination 101, hopefully it’ll give you some clues as to what makes good pagination.
KuraFire Network
Collecting minimal user information
Web applications are in constant competition for a user’s attention. Unlike shrink-wrap software, there’s often no captive audience, and web apps must gently guide and woo users to help them to the best experience of the software.
This is particularly true when considering the problem of collecting personal details from a user. Collect too little information, and your app might not be able to function effectively. Collect too much information, and you raise the barrier for participation with your application. Users may either not be bothered, be alarmed at the apparent intrusion into their privacy, or fill out bogus information.
Behind the Times, Edd Dumbill
Here at starfish towers we’ve been using inkscape almost exclusively for the past year to achieve professional results portfolio
Dont believe us? Follow the easy 10 steps below to Inkscape goodness!
Starfish Web Design and Ecommerce solutions, Belfast, N.Ireland. — Nice tutorial.
Web app without makeup: iterations of TeamSnap
Andrew Berkowitz takes us through five iterations of a single screen of web app Teamsnap, as it blossoms from “ugly and unusable” to “just feels right”.
Vitamin Features — This is how it works, not too often you get to see it from a distance.
An Argument on Navigation and Statefulness
So I want to pose a question to you. Does navigation really need to show state? It’s such an old habit that many of us still hold, but I think we hold it without ever asking why.
Innovative Thought
AirstreamYou see these all over, but especially when I was a kid. I only knew they were expensive (no, more expensive than that) and they had fanatical ownere who travelled in packs. Take a look at the product shots. These are outfitted like (expensive) yachts.
Just in case you were wondering, yes, every home needs a bizarre tunnel running straight through it.
Geekologie — Brilliant! (photos)
Keen, a writer, and failed Internet entrepreneur, spends 200 pages attacking the rise of the “amateur” and the harm – economic, social, cultural and political – these amateurs will cause. Without “standards,” without “taste,” without “institutions” to “filter” good from bad, true from false, the Internet, Keen argues, is destined to destroy us. … And then it hit me: Keen is our generation’s greatest self-parodist. His book is not a criticism of the Internet. Like the article in Nature comparing Wikipedia and Britannica, the real argument of Keen’s book is that traditional media and publishing is just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Here’s a book – Keen’s – that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top – but also riddled with errors.
Lessig Blog
I’ve been intrigued lately by the bigger issues facing the IT market, and especially of the people who work in it. The news of late seems to be ominously similar in tone no matter where you go, that even in the face of softening employment elsewhere companies can’t fill programmers fast enough. I don’t think this is peculiar to this particular moment, but may in fact shadow a significant shift in the relationship of the IT workforce to the companies who employs it. My apologies for the length, but there’s a lot to cover …
O'Reilly XML Blog — Read this. Stuff to think about.
O'Reilly schooled by a 16 year old
Jesse Lange totally schools Bill O’Reilly. I have to say it’s sort of fun watching O’Reilly dismiss Jesse as a “pinhead” as his only response to Jesse’s reading of the transcript O’Reilly was misquoting. But it’s more fun watching this articulate, put-together kid stand up to a bully.
Joho the Blog — This is great!
This is my very basic set of shapes for making wireframes (low-fidelity web page schematics) in OmniGraffle (Mac OS X).
urlgreyhot — I’m going to have to play around with this.
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
A physician, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The physician remarked, “Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The civil engineer interrupted, and said, “But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong: mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, “Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?”
webreference.com — An old joke… but that’s just the beginning.
It’s not new to say that we now live in an age in which survival in business depends on your ability to communicate effectively through the internet.
What is new is the realization that just having any old website isn’t enough. The quality of your site and the nature of its content are paramount and your ability to communicate with your audience is the key.
Sharon Lee, A List Apart: Articles
Rejecting Software Engineering
So here’s where the whole software engineering thing falls down for me. Building software is not like building a bridge. It’s just not. In physical, “real world” engineering you have the laws of physics, near perfect information on durability, composition, balance, etc. A programmer, as Fred Brooks puts it (The Mythical Man Month) is like a “poet who works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff”. There is a plethora of languages and methods for achieving the same results in software development and none of them are exactly the same. For something to be labeled as an engineering science in my opinion, it needs to have known values and be infinitely repeatable. Software development meets neither of these.
Eric Wise — I have a tendency to agree, but I don’t think it is so simple.
Mutations in Moms' Genes Reveal Human Migration Through the Ages
DNA passed down through generations of mothers could help answer big questions about the human journey across continents, thanks to a massive new database created by the The Genographic Project.
The project has already yielded some provocative evidence about modern humans’ interactions with Neanderthals. The DNA data shows no evidence of mutations known to be common in Neanderthals, which suggests that modern humans – at least those of European descent – may not have mated with the long-extinct humans.
Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally
Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA. … A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others. These genes so far make up a small fraction of all human genes.
New York Times — Why is the ‘striking’ feature surprising? Isn’t this exactly what you’d expect?
You are looking at pictures of our family home in Wales. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).
Very appealing look too, I think.
Publishing a Blog From a mod_atom Store
Fortunately, there are bits and pieces that cover the rest. I’ve contributed heavily to Planet, the Universal Feed Parser, and html5lib, and maintain what effectively is the only active development branch of Planet at this point, which I call Venus. As Venus has been refactored, it is easier to discuss this in terms of Venus’s architecture than of Planet’’s.
Venus has been split into two phases, Spider which fetches the data, and Splice which selects and formats entries. They communicate by means of an Atom store. Let’s look at each in turn.
Sam Ruby
Merb on AIR - Drag and Drop Multiple File Upload
I’ve built ‘multiple’ file uploaders for Rails sites but they always involved some slight of hand, the files appeared to be uploading all at once but they where actually queued up by Flex then handled one by one by the app (which also had the unhappy side effect of blocking any other requests to that process). I’ve been wanting to try out Adobe AIR’s file system drag and drop for a while so this is a two-fer example. You’ll need the beta version of Flex Builder 3 or the Flex 3 SDK beta if you don’t mind getting down with the command line.
Vixiom Axioms
Which theory fits the evidence?
There are two schools of thought about the practice of managing software development (the theory of managing software development is of little use to us because “the gap between theory and practice is narrower in theory than it is in practice”). … Understanding whether software development follows the Theory D (fully deterministic) model or the Theory P (probabilistic) model helps us set our expectation for the relationship between what we plan and what transpires.
raganwald — Woefully inadequate quote. As far as I’m concerned the ‘D’ in Theory D isn’t ‘deterministic’ it’s ‘delusional’.
Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.
Marketcircle — Love the name :-)
As we rant and rave about CSS the true artists are up to amazing things with HTML tables :)
Ajaxian — Japanese insanity :-)
Marco's Highly Opinionated Guide to Editing Lisp Code with Emacs
GNU Emacs (and XEmacs) is a very large program, I’ve been using it as a mail client, shell, note pad and IDE for the past six years and I’m still learning new things. For those of you who’ve never really sat down and looked at Emacs’ LISP editing functions, here’s a guide to what I do.
CLiki — Hmm. Maybe one of these days.
Monochrome websites can be very effective, especially when combined with a solid grid layout, continuing our color series today we take a look at 10 of the best
TutorialBlog — My monochrome site didn’t make the cut … Ha! No surprise there :-)
Nevertheless, it took me almost ten years to take ten minutes to lookup the settings which merge the histories of several terminals in a common file, as opposed to each terminal overwriting the other’s history when exiting.
Bertrand's weblog — Seems that it’s taken me more than 10 years, and even now I can’t claim to have dealt with this on my own :-)
Video explains the world’s most important 6-sec drum loop
headlessness
New York Times editor David Pogue managed to get an Apple iPhone, and provides us with some hands-on footage.
TechEBlog — video review.
Firebug is an extension for Firefox, but what happens when you need to test your pages in Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari? If you are using console.log() to write to Firebug’s console, you’ll wind up with JavaScript errors in these other browsers, and that’s no fun.
The solution is Firebug Lite, a JavaScript file you can insert into your pages to simulate the Firebug console in browsers that are not named “Firefox”
I haven’t tried this yet, but I will be soon I think.
Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters.
This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks, e.g. like an < or the letter c.
Left Logic — This might be handy. There’s a OS X widget too.
iCab - Internet Taxi for the Mac
iCab is an alternative web browser for the Apple Macintosh with numerous useful features not found in other browsers.
This is a new browser for me. I’ve downloaded it and the free version seems quite nice. As they say, it has lots of functionality other browsers don’t.
