July 2010
3 posts
Browse your Git Repository locally! Way Cool!
webvampire:
cd [your git repo]
git instaweb --httpd webrick
Watching a lighting talk of the Mountain West Ruby Conf, and this guy walked up and demoed this one command!
git instaweb --httpd webrick
automatically launch a web server and browser to your get repository!
Way Cool!
Source
Pretty cool indeed!
June 2010
1 post
May 2010
22 posts
“Try to avoid burdening your users with choices on how to perform an action....”
– How To Critique An Interface « Aza on Design
Efficiently Rendering CSS →
So we know that ID’s are the most efficient selectors. If you wanted to make the most efficiently rendering page possible, you would literally give every single element on the page a unique ID, then apply styling with single ID selectors. That would be super fast, and also super ridiculous. It would probably be extremely non-semantic and extremely difficult to maintain. You don’t see this...
Children Of Men: Extended Takes
I learned about ‘Extended Takes’ a while ago, and yesterday I watched one movie from the list ‘20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History’: Children of Men.
This movie contains a lot of these long scenes without cut. Two of those immediately got my attention. But first, here’s some context on what the movie is about:
Set in the United Kingdom of 2027, the film...
nikf.org: An Observation →
I’m all for pointing out the iPhones flaws: it may be polished, but we’d all agree it has some. But to sting it in reviews based on the promise that a third-party will ship a media plugin at a yet-to-be-determined date, seems petty. […]
I guess judging a device based on actual features and user experience, instead of its ‘inability to run a hypothetical, hither-to-unseen media plugin’,...
Duncan's Journal: Android VM Performance is not a... →
A faster VM will certainly help things out. But Android’s eventual fate will have little to do with how fast the VM is or how long method dispatches take on the iPhone. Instead, it’ll have to do with harder things like user experience, service plans, interoperability, and excellent applications.
A lot of developers - and tech folks in general - seem to be so obsessed with benchmarks and raw,...
Watchfiltercake:
Pictured Fences 1 by Mntl Gassi (via rebel:art)
Incredible!
Watch5v3n:
filtercake:
“A nine-minute history of corporatism.”
Life Inc. The Movie (by Douglas Rushkoff)
OK, so “digital renaissance” was a bad catchphrase for my recent post. Apart from that sad insight - great thoughts on taylorism / scientific management & the resulting social disconnection.
5v3n.com: A Digital Renaissance? →
Is programming our era’s equivalent of literacy?
“Do me a favor, will you? Stop giving me the run around just like the rest of the...”
–
From the saddest email I’ve received today.
It’s from an Internet Explorer user, frustrated that he couldn’t get Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmarklet installed. (It’s incredibly clunky to do in IE, because IE doesn’t support the troops, poisons your children, and gives you cancer.)
...
H.R. Giger's website FAQ →
Look at the FAQs on H.R. Giger’s website. They are totally honest and straight forward; definitely not your usual ‘fake’ FAQs.
I particularly like this section (it is long, but totally worth it):
WHEN SHOULD FANS CONTACT GIGER’S AGENT?
Hardly ever. But fans being fans and not always prone to listening to reason, they will do whatever they want, regardless of the advice...
1 tag
Solving the Alt-Tab Problem « Aza on Design →
This describes a problem I experience quite often:
You’ve been using alt-tab to bounce back-and-forth between your text editor and your web browser—you’ve formed a habit. You now click over to your Twitter client to see your friend’s latest updates, click back to your text editor, type a few sentences and hit alt-tab. What happens? Because of your habit, you expect it to go to your web...
The Peter Principle →
The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.”
It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn...
1 tag
April 2010
13 posts
1 tag
Polyglot (computing) →
mwunsch:
What I’m looking at on Wikipedia, right now.
In the context of computing, a polyglot is a computer program or script written in a valid form of multiple programming languages, which performs the same operations or output independently of the programming language used to compile or interpret it.
Here’s more from this article:
The two most commonly used techniques for...
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design,...”
– Twitter / Jeffrey Zeldman: Content precedes design. D …
1 tag
Nikon D40 – Modern Classic [REVIEW] →
In a nutshell, the D40 was affordable, weighs less than 500g and can make great photos. Build quality is better than you’d expect from an all-plastic body and a dinky 18-55mm kit lens
I love this camera. I’ve had it for two years now and I don’t plan to replace it anytime soon. I shot thousands of pictures and it is still as good as on day one - even heavy rain didn’t do...
2 tags
2 tags
“Clarity is a sign of strength.”
– John Gruber in Daring Fireball: It’s Not the Control, It’s the Secrecy
2 tags
Real life comics nails the "waiting for liveblog"... →
pbjorklund:
So good.
1 tag
How to create your own global settings in Rails
Very rarely, I need to create my own global settings inside my Rails apps. If you want these settings to be different for each environment (development, test, production), you can use a YAML file to do so.
As I always need to look up how that works, I finally created a Gist, so I can look it up more quickly.
Here it is:
March 2010
8 posts
2 tags
Use ⌘~ to switch between windows of an application
On a mac, you can use Cmd-tilde (⌘~) to switch between the different open windows of an application.
The tilde is conveniently placed right above the Tab key (⇥). So this combination is very similar to the one used to sitch between apps (Cmd-Tab ⌘⇥).
I just found out about this. Woohoo!
(On the german keyboard layout, the default combination is ‘⌘<’, which is not as...
“If you’re not sure of what you love, that means you can be talked out of it, and...”
– one forty plus.: Depends on Who You Ask.
“But we take pride in our technologies. If I’m not striving for my guru ranking...”
– Dan Mall in A List Apart: Articles: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web
“The phrase ‘I don’t have time for’ should never be said. We all get the same...”
– Scott Berkun: The cult of busy (via marco)
There is a lot more good stuff in this article. Go, and read the whole thing!
3 tags
Memoization →
In computing, memoization is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by having function calls avoid repeating the calculation of results for previously-processed inputs.
In Ruby f.e., this can be achieved with the good old ||= operator.
1 tag
:-)
February 2010
16 posts
See the music →
bobulate:
Alex Stenweiss invented the album cover as we know it to create a new art form:
“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.”
So:
In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper...
Tech Journalism Near Death as iPad Coverage Has...
nostrich:
CUPERTINO, CA — Experts expressed grave concern for the health of technology journalism this morning, one week after hundreds of tech blogs suffered extreme, adverse reactions to a routine Apple product launch. One witness commented, “they just couldn’t handle it. I don’t think some of these guys will ever recover.” A spokesperson for Engadget said that coverage of the iPad was...
2 tags
“Computer nerds got a sneak peek at a largely still world that has never made...”
– Frank Chimero has a blog.: The Attack of Momputing