January 2012
1 post
Three Chrome Extensions For Twitter
I prefer using the the browser version of Twitter over native applications.
Here are three chrome extensions that make this experience much better:
ParrotFish by Embedly. See a preview of just about any link/image/etc without leaving your stream.
Tweet Filter. As the name suggests, this extension makes it easy to exclude tweets or people matching a pattern.
Buffer for Chrome. I am a big...
June 2011
6 posts
ImageOptim →
ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.
Crappy People →
When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.
Javascript Grid Bookmarklets →
Ever want to quickly see a grid overlay for 960.gs or Blueprint?
If you're going to work...work hard →
Being right doesn't always have to be the goal →
May 2011
1 post
Speeding up Rails startup time →
If you are using RVM, you should definetly give this a shot. I saw an almost 50% improvement in my start up time on rails.
Looks like some great work.
November 2010
1 post
3 tags
Installing PostgreSQL 8 via HomeBrew
The PostgreSQL formula for homebrew has already been updated to version 9.
Thankfully, with a little help from google, I found Adam Vandenberg’s 8.4 formula.
brew update
brew install http://github.com/adamv/homebrew/raw/versions/Library/Formula/postgresql8.rb
September 2010
3 posts
The cult of busy →
…people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well.
ZSH and Rake Parameters
I wanted to pass a parameter into a rake task which uses a format like this:
task :name, :first do |t, args|
puts "Hello #{args[:first]}"
end
To execute the task:
rake name[Scott]
However, I kept getting an error that ZSH could not find the command. It turns out, I was tripping over ZSH’s globbing feature.
Thankfully, adding a simple alias resolved the issue for me:
alias...
[Insert Technology Here] Can't Scale →
If you’re having scalability problems and blaming it on a single technology, chances are, you’re doing it wrong.
August 2010
1 post
Flexibility and Power →
Flexibility is the ability to change how software works; power is the ability to do more with less effort.
July 2010
5 posts
1 tag
Scarcity in Design
Great interview of Fred Brooks in the August 2010 Wired magazine (sorry, no link at this time).
The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you think that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scare; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation...
1 tag
“Your #1 competitor starting out will always be the BACK button, nothing else.”
– Gary Tan
1 tag
Lost Time →
The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.
1 tag
Derek Sivers - My Loss →
We all underestimate our ability to massively change our life when it’s gone off track.
4 tags
Reading PDF eBooks on an iPad
The recent update to iBooks added PDF support. Unfortunately, the reading experience is no where near as good as the epub experience.
This was a bummer for me since I own quite a few eBooks in PDF format (and converting them to epub does not yield better results).
Thankfully, a tweet from John Grubber lead me to SimplyPDF which makes the PDF experience much more tolerable by allowing you to...
June 2010
18 posts
3 tags
2 tags
You are as Dumb as You Ever Will Be
A great line from Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen in talking about You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI):
Barring a sharp blow to the head, as you stand here today you are as dumb as you ever will be.
You get smarter every day. Your users (generally) understand your app and their needs better every day. Unnecessarily trying to solve future problems is really just guessing, so why do...
Coder.io →
It’s my attempt at fixing the process of discovering and maintaining knowledge and references relating to development topics I’m/you’re interested in.
In short, you tell Coder.io what you are interested in and it filters through the content and presents you with a list of fresh content.
1 tag
3 tags
Stack Exchange Making the Internet Better →
Everything contributed to the Stack Exchange network of websites is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike. This means it belongs to everyone, and can be freely reused (even commercially!), so long as it is follows our simple rules of attribution. That’s our contract with the community — it’s your generously contributed content that makes these websites worth visiting in the...
2 tags
1% Better
In reading Tony Hsieh’s excellent Delivering Happiness there is a blog post by CFO, Alfred Lin, about what can be accomplished by getting 1% better everyday (personally, community, company, etc.).
Imagine yourself making 1% changes every day that compounds and will make you and Zappos 37x better by the end of the year. Imagine if every employee at Zappos was doing the same. Imagine how...
1 tag
Great Git Reference →
This is the Git reference site. This is meant to be a quick reference for learning and remembering the most important and commonly used Git commands. The commands are organized into sections of the type of operation you may be trying to do, and will preset the common options and commands needed to accomplish these common tasks
The doc and ProGit book integration throughout is great.
4 tags
Mongoid - Hottest OSS Project Site Ever →
Definitely something to aspire to.
2 tags
RVM
I have been using a tool called Ruby Version Manager (RVM) for the last couple of weeks and it has been pure gold.
RVM is a command line tool which allows us to easily install, manage and work with multiple ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. RVM itself is easy to install!
When I first set it up, I was still using Ruby 1.8.7 at the system (non-RVM) level and set up a quick...
RVM & Textmate →
Looks like this has been out for a while, but it was new for me.
if you get an error executing “rvm wrapper” you will need to update rvm.
3 tags
Cache Hit Ratio →
The great memcached hit ratio is great however even more than that you should target eliminating requests all together. Hit rate is very bad indicator to begin with. Imagine you have application which gets 90 memcache gets (hits) to retrieve some data plus there are 10 more requests which resulted in misses and caused MySQL queries. The hit ratio is 90%. Imagine now you have found a way to...
2 tags
Readability
Some nice updates to the excellent Readability bookmark tool.
2 tags
Purpose Vs. Profit
This really gels with a great book I am reading, Start With Why.
Once you loose site of the purpose (WHY), nothing else really matters.
What have you shipped? →
Less talk, more shipping. I think we all could use more of this.
5 tags
VoltDB
VoltDB looks like an interesting new data store for those who want to stick with the RDBMS model (SQL, Acid, etc) and still want to achieve scalability (I know, this is a loaded definition).
VoltDB is a distributed, in-memory database that scales out linearly on a cluster of shared-nothing servers. Transactions are defined as Java stored procedures, using ANSI-standard SQL for data access....
Encourage People To Be Better At What They Are... →
Smart companies are the ones that identify someone’s natural talent and help them become even better at it. The result is a highly motivated employee who feels like the company is really looking after his or her career.
3 tags
Good Parts
Douglas Crockford: “JavaScript - The Good Parts” @ Yahoo! Video
“I have found it is much easier to write software when you only use the good parts of a language” (note: paraphrased quote)
I came across this video via Dave Ward’s review of Douglas Crockford’s excellent book, “JavaScript - the Good Parts”. I highly recommend you check out both...
May 2010
11 posts
1 tag
Simplicity and Convention →
It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention.
4 tags
What Matters in an Asynchronous Job Queue →
An asynchronous job queue is a key element of system scalability. Job queues are particularly well-suited for web sites where an HTTP request requires some actions to be performed that may take longer than a second or two and where immediate results aren’t necessarily required
Great overview on what’s important in a job queue. It is one of the posts that has really peaked my...
1 tag
Life is Beautiful →
Kids can keep you up all night but it’s all worth it. Domestic animals give love freely to the least deserving, but their lives are short and their ends are often brutal. And it’s worth it. It is all worth it. Every day, even a sad day blurred by headaches and filled with business meetings, is magical and infinite. This dance, this particular proton dance, will never come again. This tune we’re...
3 tags
MongoNYC →
If you use the discount code, blog, you can still attend MongoNYC for $75. The list of sessions looks great and appears to be well beyond the typical 100 level conference crap.
I am really looking forward to attending.
3 tags
FlockDB
It is great to see companies like Twitter and Facebook open sourcing various pieces of their infrastracture.
The latest component to be released (which I noticed) is called FlockDB.
FlockDB is a database that stores graph data, but it isn’t a database optimized for graph-traversal operations. Instead, it’s optimized for very large adjacency
lists, fast reads and writes, and...
3 tags
Resizing iTunes
In moving my iTunes library from a 15 inch MBP to a 13 inch MBP the iTunes window got stock at a window size which exceeded my 13 inch screen. For the most part, iTunes was still usable, but none of the standard resizing options fixed the problem.
Finally, after some google tips from a co-worker, I found a mac support thread which recommended holding down the option key and clicking the...
3 tags
Focus, Focus, Focus →
Think of the resources that went into this new Kin platform, Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phone Series 7, Zune, and Zune HD. Imagine what Microsoft could have done if, instead of fragmenting their product line, developer community, and internal resources with all of these, they instead focused on one great platform the way Apple has done with iPhone OS.
Well said.
Complexity →
So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.
Personal media channel strategy →
We’ve come a long way from a worker having just two channels (a resume and a few references) to having the choice of a dozen or more significant ways to spread her ideas. Choose or lose.
Excellent Redis Overview →
If you have not had a chance to look at Redis yet, I highly recommend checking out this tutorial.
2 tags
Jobs on Flash →
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
I do find it a bit funny to read Jobs + Apple + Open in the same post, but I think he does make some really...
April 2010
37 posts
ASP.Net MVC in Action V2 →
Jeffery Palermo announced the book ASP.Net MVC in Action V2 is being released under a Creative Commons licenses.
You will notice that the raw files in GitHub are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. That means you can use the content in blog posts, whitepapers, and you can use the code samples in any way you like.
Really Bad Powerpoint →
Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.
Click through to read Godin’s 5 rules for a great presentation.
Massachusetts Data Security Law, 201 CMR 17.00 →
If you have personally identifiable information (PII) about a Massachusetts resident, such as a first and last name, then you have to encrypt that data on the wire and as it’s persisted. Sending PII over HTTP instead of HTTPS? That’s a big no no. Storing the name of a customer in SQL Server without the data being encrypted? No way, Jose. You’ll get a fine of $5,000 per breach or lost...