Looking for an excuse to check out Merb? I was too and finally had a chance to check it out on the plane to RailsConf. The code base is definitely a work in progress but the code is very impressive and approachable. I’d encourage everyone to take a look at it - especially the ultra clean routing code
Depixelate — I’m starting to use Merb more all the time.
Atom Publishing ProtocolJoe Gregorio, BitWorking — Latest version
Scalable CSS Buttons Using PNG and Background Colors
I know, it’s been a lot of articles lately about CSS buttons. But I simply felt the need to write about something that has not yet been covered in the latest button-trend: Dynamic CSS Buttons using PNG, transparency and background colors that degrades nicely and supports full scalability. With full scalability I mean it should resize in all directions according to the font size and content.
David's kitchen — I like this a lot. I’ll see if I can get it to work with Raconteur.
Data Grids with AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript
17 free solutions for data grids, developed with AJAX, DHTML and/or JavaScript. In a brief and descriptive overview.
Smashing Magazine — This ought to keep you busy.
How we measure shows what we value
Stephen Downes calls it, “a completely useless and misleading piece of non-information” while the Globe & Mail earnestly reports that, “Once formal schooling ends, learning rates drop“. They are both talking about the Canadian Council on Learning’s Composite Learning Index.
Given the CCL’s support of homework without any data to back it up, or pushing formal post-secondary education in spite of what Canadians value, I don’t expect many innovative ideas here. What I see are reports that reinforce the existing industrial education system, with all its trappings. Instead, let me recommend some other sources of information and points of view:
Harold Jarche — “a completely useless and misleading piece of non-information” — pretty much says it all.
XP and Patterns Ralph Johnson's View
Very often, questions like; — “Are there any links between XP(Extreme Programming) and Patterns?” — are asked. The following two articles are Ralph Johnson(one of the GoF … authors of Design Patterns)’s view in response to those questions.
“So, as far as I am concerned, Kent [Beck] started two movements that are based on Alexaderian philosophy, and the fact that we [the patterns crowd] talk about Alexander more than the XP crowd doesn’t mean that we are closer to Alexander than they are.” — Ralph Johnson
Humans Evolved To Be Peaceful, Cooperative And Social Animals, Not Predators
In his latest book, “Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution,” Sussman goes against the prevailing view and argues that primates, including early humans, evolved not as hunters but as prey of many predators, including wild dogs and cats, hyenas, eagles and crocodiles.
Despite popular theories posed in research papers and popular literature, early man was not an aggressive killer, Sussman argues. He poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that greatly influenced the evolution of early man.
Pining for Toronto's 'gone world'
A friend of mine in New York has been pointing out surviving bits of what he calls his city’s “gone world” to me for the past 20 years or so. When I first started getting to know New York, in the early 1980s, it consisted mostly of that gone world, or so it seemed to me. People who lived there didn’t seem to believe it possible that this would change. My friend was the first New Yorker I knew who noticed that things there were changing, becoming gone.
But I had, in this, a secret, if only half-recognized. There was an element of dj vu for me about this “regooding” (my friend’s term) of the gone world. I felt as though I knew where it was going. I felt as though I’d seen it before, and knew where it led, though I wasn’t quite aware why.
Now, in retrospect, I know that I knew it from Toronto, which had been my first city (if one didn’t count Roanoke, Va., or Tucson, Ariz., or Los Angeles, none of which, for their various reasons, were quite the ticket).
William Gibson, globeandmail.com — If anything, Toronto’s ‘gone world’ is bigger than Gibson imagines. I’ve lived in Toronto since 1970. It is almost unrecognisable.
Dynamic Development with the Debugger
On today’s Smalltalk Daily, we go back to yesterday’s polymorphism example - but we create the shared API dynamically as we test the code in the debugger.
Smalltalk Daily 6/01/07 — There is a link to a video. If you ever wondered about where test driven development came from, this should clear that up.
Is the Common Lisp 'loop' macro evil?
I must admit to being “old school” when it comes to Lisp coding. I like s-expressions. The loop macro introduces a non s-expression syntax to the language that I find a little uncomfortable.
Mark Watson — I don’t know about ‘evil’, but when there’s iterate why compromise?
RubyCocoa ResourcesLots of stuff about using Ruby and Cocoa (the OS X UI ‘environment’).
