I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next is a great post on Medium about a deep dive into Node and dependencies.
I started my investigation by installing the “babel-preset-es2015” package. This package allows twenty-something web developers to write a newer, worse version of JavaScript that no one else on their team knows.
The above quote is just about one of the modules detailed, but needless to say it turns out it’s a big, ugly, hairy, mess.
ResearchKit is now out there on github. I’m sure the Apple haters will still complain, but it’s out there and available, and (in theory) will help researchers do great things. Now how about that FaceTime Apple…?
On Imgur: Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s Operating System.
Somehow this makes me incredibly happy that the spirit of geekiness lives on. I seriously contemplated doing this in the late 90’s in university. Got a book out of the school library called something like “write your own OS in assembler” and was hell bent on doing it. Never did, but at the time, why the heck not.
My buddy Darren has published an Object Oriented Programming Primer.
Also available on Medium.
Ruby 2.1 In Detail goes through the new changes and features of the new Ruby 2.1 release.
OpenSSL Valhalla Rampage is a great, uhm, rampage through the OpenSSL source code, and ripping it apart a bit at a time. From their site:
Tearing apart OpenSSL, one arcane VMS hack at a time.
The awareness recently on OpenSSL has been a great catalyst to look at some of the “but it’s there and it works” for some of the most used Open Source software.
Very cool news this morning, Light Table is open source. Light table is a pretty sexy concept for a developer IDE that I first saw back in 2012.
Getting back to some “light” linux programming this holiday season? Check out Ben Collins 5 part series on Writing an ALSA driver. It’s all there, and if you’re interested in a jump start to kernel and deep linux programming, this is an excellent start.
Via Miles comes this link to Hacker News:Data Structure Visualization, with awesome animations of things like recursion, sorting, and a host of other common programming paradigms that you may not totally understand until you see them visually. Super cool and super nerdy!
Cool look at the Average Income per Programming Language. PHP is close to the bottom at $94k, Ruby and C# almost neck and neck at $98k and $97k respectively, and my old friend Perl breaking the six figure mark at $100k. Top of the heap is ActionScript at $108 (just over Java by $5k/year).
Very interesting, not only in the fact that all of these “average” salaries are way above what I make, but also how there’s only $20k separating the bottom from the top (well, lets put that “only” in some big air quotes, $20k a year is a salary).
A Great Article about legacy code.
How To Spot The Legacy Code Writer In Your Company
jQuery 2.0 Released is released.
Highlights:
Next Evolution of Facebook Platform for Mobile was announced today for mobile developers.
We’re launching three important products that further our transition to a mobile-first platform. We’re making it easier to implement Open Graph on mobile, improving Facebook Login, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS. We’re also announcing a new partner program to help developers integrate Facebook on a variety of mobile platforms.
Looks like good stuff if you’re doing iOS or mobile facebook integration.
Fascinating read about EXIF orientation handling is a ghetto and how most online services (and hell, even the iPhone) handles image rotation horribly and inconsistently.
Liking performance is Facebook’s attempt to speed up the web and all the slow (and terribly designed apparently) like button.
Coding Confessional is just what it sounds like, a place for developers to confess their sins.
Awesome.
Fascinating: Duke Nukem 3D Code Review
Silverman would write a new engine for 3D Realms but he would keep the source code. He would only deliver a binary static library (Engine.OBJ) with an Engine.h header file. The 3D Realms team on their side would take care of developing the Game module (Game.OBJ) and would also release the final executable DUKE3D.EXE.
When my buddy @halkeye send me over the link to Vivify I was a bit confused, but if you click on one of the languages, then click on part of the code, it lets you edit the color scheme right there. Very cool stuff, and very slick.
Kinda big news from Opera Developer News this morning, they posted that they are going to move to WebKit for the rendering engine for Opera.
The short answer is that it shouldn’t affect your day-to-day work. Keep coding to the standards, not to individual rendering engines; test across browsers - Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer; use all vendor prefixes and an unprefixed form in your CSS and JavaScript. However, it remains important to keep the following in mind:
(Via Reddit).
The reasoning they give is:
The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.
This is interesting. On one hand, I agree with the top reddit comment about how it’s got to suck for the people who have been working on the Opera rendering engine since 1994. It was the first “alternate” engine that I used and had, and still has, some pretty awesome stuff, and it’s still (I believe) one of the fastest browsers, and has some great performance on low end machines.
On the other hand though, maybe the market has spoken and crowned WebKit the third browser engine and said there’s just no place for another engine. In reality I think this is the better way. Web developers have enough to deal with writing cross platform compatible code for:
I dislike redundancy, so I applaud this move. While I love openess and choice, having 18 different media players, all 3/4 baked and none complete or fully tested is a far worse thing (in my opinion) than having 2 or 4 really awesome media players that have full communities and momentum behind them. Sounds like Opera is up with this too.
Of course, really respectful web developers will still have to support Opera (which is pretty standards compliant already, so it’s not a huge deal) for a few years, as I hear there’s a fairly vocal Opera user group out there :)
Time for a Forward Thinking CMS via The Brooks Review.
That’s all well and fine, but isn’t it time someone built a CMS that actually works for users? I like WordPress a lot, that’s what I use here, but it’s about as user friendly as Windows, which is certainly better than MS-DOS, but falls a long way short of OS X.
I love the idea, and as someone who’s written a few CMSs in my time, have no idea how it’d be done.
Yet.
The biggest issue I’ve seen is that everyone want something just a tiny bit (or sometimes a lot) different. To accommodate this, at least the old way of dealing with it, is you either:
That said if someone can give me the power of wordpress, the ease of use of squarespace, the ability to use dropbox as a store, and does a bunch of nifty things out of the box… I’m all over that.
Kudos to the folks at Bitbucket for their nicely new redesigned site. You probably know bitbucket as “that site that’s just like github but has a slightly different pricing model but does the same stuff”.
So this is a neat project for you Ruby on Rails learners…. Reddit on Rails is an exercise to use your knowledge of Rails to replicate the functionality of reddit.com.
By now you have the knowledge to accomplish much with Rails. We will use that knowledge to build a website from scratch similar in functionality to http://reddit.com.
Learning a new programming language or system generally go faster if you have a specific goal in mind, and (in general) a typical “hello world” works great, until you decide you need user logins and permissions and suddenly things get a lot harder. This helps that a lot.
Great and funny write up on Vim called Vim Creep I found today.
Staying late one night to finish an assignment that was due at midnight, you happened to catch a glimpse over one of the quiet uber-programmer’s shoulders. Your eyes twinkled from the glow of rows upon rows of monitors in the darkened computer lab as you witnessed in awe the impossible patterns of code and text manipulation that flashed across the screen.
“How did you do that?” you asked, incredulous.
The pithy, monosyllabic answer uttered in response changed your life forever: “Vim.”
Google has the code for developers who want to add support for Opening links in Chrome for iOS for developers of iOS apps who want to skirt around the “can’t set a default browser” iOS issue.
As a user as long as you ask me (sometimes I want to use mobile safari, sometimes I want to use mobile Chrome), go for it.
Very cool page over at Github is a way to Try Git In Your Browser, letting you run real git on real github via the browser.
This is a bit geeky, and when I first saw the post from 37 Signals Announcing Pow 0.4.0 with xip.io support I really didn’t get it. However, going to the xip.io domain was a bit more revealing.
10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
www.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
mysite.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
foo.bar.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
If you’re a developer doing web development you will (hopefully) see just how cool this is.
Many thanks to my buddy staticred for pointing me to the github repository xdissent/ievms which provides a set of pre-build Virtual Machines (VirtualBox) setup with IE6, 7, 8 and 9 for testing if you’re not running windows, or need to test multiple copies of Internet Explorer at the same time (not an easy feat on Windows).
Great resource to have in your back pocket!
Via Engadget: Microsoft pulling free development tools for Windows 8 desktop apps, only lets you ride the Metro for free.
Microsoft has instituted a big change with its free Visual Studio 11 Express suite that’s leaving some current- and soon-to-be Windows 8 developers up in arms: it’s pulling support for creating anything but Metro-native apps. After 11 becomes the norm, desktop developers will need to either cling to Visual Studio 2010 for dear life or fork over the $500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional.
Kinda sucky.
The guide to implementing 2D platformers is a super-geeky look at how platforming games are implemented (and how to if you’re a programmer). Fascinating look at different methods for dealing with things like obstacles, slopes, etc.
Ever wish there was an easy way to get up and running with Git and GitHub on your Windows computer? Turned off by command line utilities and setting up SSH keys? Want to join the incredible world of open and closed source collaboration that happens on GitHub.com every day?
Today we are releasing GitHub for Windows which is available immediately as a free download.
You a programmer and want to help others? Hit giving.github.com and check out what they’re doing there.
are you a charity, scientist or engineer in need of programming help? are you a programmer who wants to spend just five minutes helping make the world a better place?
As someone recently moved into the world of PHP programming, PHP: a fractal of bad design hits it right on the head.
You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.
Ziptastic is a simple API that allows people to ask which Country,State and City are associated with a Zip Code.
So if you are doing web form programming you can let the user enter the zip code first and auto-fill the country/state/city for them. Magic! Grab ziptastic on github.
GitHub has announced their Instantly Beautiful Project Pages project pages, which lets you set yourself up a great looking project page with an automatic page generator.
Ever pushed a new project to GitHub and wished you had the time or talent to make a beautiful page for it? Stop wishing. We’re proud to present the new GitHub Page Generator.
I’m not sure how this affects private repositories, as it publishes a page to user.github.com/repository
A series of mixes intended for listening while programming to aid concentration and increase productivity (also compatible with other activities).
Marco (of Instapaper fame) has released Second Crack on github, his static blogging engine. The FAQ section of the readme is particularly awesome.
Janky was open sourced today from the fellows over at github. This is a system built on top of a few other open source systems (Jenkins, Hubot, Heroku) and looks like it could be a nice addition of usable software for a small office.
Proggit pointed out the Doom 3 GPL source release has happened. You can see the source here on github. Also noted in the reddit comments is this guide to the previously released Quake source code.
iD Software - you are awesome.
Great news for 3D engine hackers, John Carmack of iD Software, says that Doom 3's engine ready for open-sourcing, awaiting 'OK' from legal. Huge kudos (again) go to Carmack and iD for making their "old" engines available as open source software. I wish more companies did this.
Good link off of Hacker News on how PHP needs to die. What will replace it?
I await the Next Big Thing. I want to switch away from PHP, I really do. I don't want to be the Perl dinosaur. But whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be here yet. Am I wrong?
Interesting look at what's there in terms of MVC, Rails, Perl, etc.
Nick Farina - Git Is Simpler Than You Think. Really nice tutorial and view of some of the innards of git, and how to understand the mechanics behind it to get around better.
Did you know the top result for "git tutorial" is this manpage on kernel.org? I will give you a gold star if you can read the whole thing without falling asleep.So instead let's pull over, open the hood up, and poke around.
Interesting article of An iOS Developer Takes on Android and details porting his iOS app to Android.
Overall, the Android frameworks are very well designed and consistent, and the API works harmoniously with the Java language. It's actually similar enough in the fundamentals that our app has almost the exact same class structure on Android as on iOS.
Lots of good bits in there.
Learn Python The Hard Way second edition has been release. Download in a variety of free or pay formats. Kudos to the great Zed Shaw for this.
Rails people who enjoy the windows version via RailsInstaller will be happy to see that the RailsInstaller for Windows 2.0.0 Preview Release has goodies like 1.9.2 and 3.1.0 rc support.
Many thanks to loyal UFies reader Zacsek for passing on this note:
I recently received these links, and I thought of sharing them with you, maybe they are interesting enough that you will post them: different sorting algorithms illustrated with traditional folk dances from Transylvania.
I think it's an awesome display of culture and worst case performance of the algorithms :))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPA7zE8mx0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZQPjUT5B4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROalU379l3U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns4TPTC8whw
Definitely worth the link! Thanks for compiling the selection for me!
Pow is a new hotness from the guys at 37 Signals. Single command, no gems, no extra bits, it just runs. Site looks great on the iPhone too.
Xcode 4: the super mega awesome review:
diting: Xcode gets brains There have been many criticisms of Xcode, especially from those coming from other platforms. "The UI sucks", "the key bindings are different", "it doesn't give me a blow job upon a successful build". Most of them are silly complaints that boil down to either a) Xcode is different, or b) an inability to check if a preference exists. However, there are lots of valid criticisms about Xcode, especially with regards to code completion, refactoring and other similar features. All these ones boil down to a very simple fact: Xcode doesn't really know much about your code. Thankfully Xcode 4 is more than just a pretty face, it also has brains.
Also, screw you Apple for not allowing free account apple devs to download the new version and selling it for $5 in the app store, that's just lame :(
Nice article on why It's time to stop using Subversion.
Very cool blog article on learning vi and vim - This is Your Brain on Vim.
It's 151 pages, and the HTML link is currently broken, but if you're interested in learning perl (as you all should be), check out Impatient Perl, a free eBook by Greg London.
Enterprise JavaScript Provides proven high performance, enterprise-level and scalable JavaScript tips and best practices.
Cool idea.
Interesting article over at GuildWars.com on how to make a successful MMO. Good guide for the next time someone ways they have a "WoW killer" and just need you to work for a couple of weeks until they get funding....
Vizeddit is a very cool javascripty magic thing that lets you see reddit votes and comments in realtime. Works on chrome and FF (possibly others). Note: If it's just falling reddit aliens, give it a bit more time, soon it will show up properly (unless the server's crashed again of course). Very cool stuff!
I'm not sure what sort of failover you need to support it by getting hit with more than one client at a time, but the fact that a webserver written in postscript exists is pretty damn cool!
Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier - from Slashdot.
No, the "DOS" in DOS on Dope isn't funny or ironic :) I'm not saying that this is useful or practical in any way, but it is pretty cool.
Very cool video of Making Metagun, a time lapse of the creation of the game Metagun from start to finish.
Very interesting to see the various different phases from conception to completion, art creation and refinement, level design, and so on.
Very cool article on porting an old DOS game to Windows.
An older post that I just saw... The Six Stages of Debugging. So so true.
Where the printf() Rubber Meets the Road is a great look down the deep, deep rabbit hole that is "where is printf() implemented" in a language that doesn't support inline assembler. For deep programmer geeks only :)
Coding horror has a good look at What's Wrong With CSS. As someone who doesn't 'do' CSS, it's pretty interesting to see the analysis and some of the solutions he's come up with.
Missing the point (kinda) but still awesome is the second answer to this Code Golf challenge on Stack Overflow.
For you Windows Developers out there, you'll be happy to hear that Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has been released.
Signal vs Noise has some good stuff on the ejector seat analogy. This is a nice follow up to the spikey buttons post a while back.
I'd love to see this sort of UI element thought go into some of the more common operations we do every day.
Git Ready is a site that looks to collect and display tips and tricks for learning git for users of all levels.
Very awesome Color Theme Generator for Vim/EMACS and TextMate from a link on reddit. Great work from Sweyla.
I have to give Vimcasts some advertising and props. I've been using Vi/Vim since I was introduced to Unix in 1994 or so and learned new things in the first podcast. That's either a great compliment to Drew Neil or saying something about my ability to learn new things over almost 15 years :) Either way, if you use vim at all, this is a must-subscribe.
Passed on through an IRC channel is Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. Really it has almost nothing to do with Gay Marriage, but more the act of iterating through a (seemingly) simple problem for a database design. A good read.
Interesting new look at the IDE: Code Bubbles Project.
LumberJAPH (awesome title btw) has a preview of github explorer, a visualizer for github projects using the github API. Very cool.
The GitHub blog just Introducing GitHub Compare View. Nice way to view the differences between branches for projects hosted at GitHub.
My buddy Curtis wrote a good article on Why Rails Feels like a Developers Only Playground.
Yeah the guys I work with at the Fv.rb are joking, but otherwise it seems to be a mentality that goes through dev's heads. They can't design but don't want to take the bit of extra time to help someone get up to speed. Most designers are more than smart enough, and many are willing, to learn some new technologies if someone is willing to give them a helping hand.
I don't think that devs aren't willing to help someone learn, in fact, I think that the Rails (and indeed, programmers in general) are more than happy to help out.
However developers know how developers think, and helping out someone who knows how to program (sorry, but HTML and CSS isn't "programming") is a lot different than helping a non-developer. Speaking as someone who tried to help their drama major ex-girlfriend (not major drama ex-girlfriend, that came later) through a simple while loop to increment a variable, I can attest to you 100% that different people's brains work differently, and that creative people and programmer-type people sometimes have a huge chasm of grokking between them.
Rails doesn't feel like a designers playground because it's a web programming framework, designed by developers for developers, and if you ignore some of the cool CSS and HTML frameworks built in and around it, there's really not much there for designers doing designer work in rails. Maybe I'm just daft, but other than pointing to the directories where various templates are stored, and showing someone what loops look like and what to style, I'm not sure that rails has anything over any other framework design wise. IE: none.
Now designing a site is a completely different matter. You want a good, knows their shit designer like Curtis involved in your project from the start, and maybe that's what the rails community is missing, someone to help shape their programmatic designs based on good web design. This involves site setup, layout, page headers and meta-data, etc, but, IMHO, doesn't infringe much into the "programming" world.
OK, this is just awesome. Check out a few Reddit.com clones written in a variety of languages. Also note the comment to code ratio in the Perl example! ;)
Sweet little ruby gem (pardon the pun) to allow you to access RDoc via OSX's Dictionary.app. Very nice little hack! Thanks for passing it on @dkubb!
Great article on why you should Build an Application (Even if it Already Exists) as a programmer, especially if you're trying to learn something. There's been many many times in my question to learn say, Ruby on Rails where I've thought of a good idea (to me anyway) only to find that it already exists in 18 different forms already, so I've dismissed it as silly to re-invent the wheel. Good thoughts in Caleb's article.
Interesting looking Google TechTalk by Phusion on How They Built A More Efficient Ruby 1.8 Interpreter.
Great tutorial on how to Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition, nginx and Passenger (aka mod_rails) on Ubuntu. There are a bunch of nice subtle things that this tutorial goes through and learns you that you might not have gotten (or have had to search for anyway) with just doing a standard "apt-get install rails" on your shiny new Linux server. Wow, english is hard for me today.... "learns you"? Geez...
Every day that I am a programmer I am thankful that I don't have a job like figuring out The "Who Knows?" Code that this poor guy had to deal with.
*shudder*
Those who didn't get to go to RubyConf will be happy to know that the RubyConf 2009 videos are out.
In Coding Horror's Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way, you really get the idea that parsing HTML with regexes is a bad idea. From the article:
Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living.
For those of you who do your Ruby on Rails coding in an IDE, you'll be no doubt excited that JetBrains RubyMine is 2.0. Rubymine is a very cool app which I've been experimenting with for some of my projects. Very reasonably priced, and very complete if you read through the docs and check out the screencasts.
Coding Horror notes that Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome has launched. This is a free CV hosting system which builds on their peer reputation system. Very cool idea.
JWZ writes up on his ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process. Lets just say he's not impressed.
Update: Fake Steve Jobs has weighed in on the conversation.
Check out this Whitespace Tutorial for a look at probably the most dastardly and horrible idea for a programming language, ever. So dastardly it might just work!
An awesome article / confessional on Dirty Coding Tricks used for PC and console gaming.
Pro Git is a free online book from the guys at GitHub (along with a dead tree version).
Holy crap, how cool is this!? Amidst all the rest of the 40th Anniversary of Man On The Moon fever comes the Apollo 11 mission's source code!
To commemorate this event the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project.
If you think about it too hard, your mind will be blown. First of all, man walked on the freakin' moon. Secondly they did it 40 years ago. Lastly they did it with computers with less processing power than your phone. In fact, you can't even really compare your iPhone to the Apollo 11 computer, it's more like a quarter of the power of the original IBM XT, ie: about 1mhz.
As expected, the SDK for iPhone OS 3.0 is now available from the Apple Developer Connection. You don't need to join the $99 program to get access anymore, but you will of course have to have your Apple login setup.
Using Git with Vim is a great new article over at OSNews. It details some plugins for using Vim with GIT and other information. For those who don't know, GIT is the new hotness in source control, and Vim is the old hotness and best text editor ever. :)
Ever wondered how to Choose Between Two Great JavaScript Frameworks? This site gives some of the pros and cons of the MooTools and JQuery frameworks. Note: Written by the MooTools author.
Hivelogic has their list of Top 10 Programming Fonts. Some good ones in there, looking forward to installing them on my systems.
Found via digg: 20 Excellent JavaScript Navigation Techniques and Examples. Some very cool stuff in there for designers and web monkeys alike.
The Ruby on Rails hosting/provisioning service Heroku has just announced their Commercial Launch. The free service will remain, with users getting a "dyno" and database as they have been (and that system is still perfectly adequate for hosting smaller apps.
The Book of Ruby has been completed. 425 pages, 300 Sample Programs, free for download on the linked page.
Visualising Sorting Algorithms. For all your nerdy needs :)
Coding Horror: The Eight Levels of Programmers. Funny cause it's true.
Via reddit. Seems the folks producing the E Text Editor (think TextMate for Windows) are Releasing the Source on github. This is cool, as TextMate is the de-facto programming editor for Mac, and it'll be cool to see something with it's power (and from the screencast on the main page, pretty much the same capabilities) out there for Linux and Mac as well. From the article it doesn't look like it's purely an open source license (a la GPL and friends), but it's a great start, and I'm excited to see what happens with this.
Any Ruby on Rails programmers out there will know that version 2.3 was just released.... Railspikes has 10 Cool Things in Rails 2.3 to wet your appetite about what's new in this release.
Awesome article from the Microsoft site on Reverse Engineering the Twelve Days of Christmas written in obfuscated C code (circa 1998).
Looks like Subversion1.6 has been released. Hit the link for changes/info/etc.
Along with the free Rails Magazine available, check out The Rubyist which has two issues and a free PDF download.
If you're interested in Ruby on Rails, you'll be happy to know that Rails Magazine Issue 1 is now available. Free digital download, or you can order a dead-tree version.
xkcd - A Webcomic - Not Enough Work
I'm not normally one for funky javascript effects, but I have to say that this is very cool.
Remember a few years ago when Ruby on Rails first made itself known and the canonical example video was the one where a weblog was written in 15 minutes? Ahh.... memories. Good to know that there is a New 15-minute blog video on Rails 2.2 to do the same thing with all the new shiny stuff in 2.2.
Not much to say here, Rails 2.2 has escaped from the developers.
Rails 2.2 is finally done after we cleared the last issues from the release candidate program. This release contains an long list of fixes, improvements, and additions that’ll make everything Rails smoother and better, but we also have a number of star player features to parade this time.
Course, I'm still in chapter 1 of my Rails 1.1 book, so this is way too much for me to process on how good or bad it is :)
Found a link on reddit with examples and code for 33 String Matching Algorithms. Even if you're not into deep coding, it's very cool to see just what goes into something which seems fairly simple and is so common in computers.
Joel on Software has launched a new project called Stack Overflow... basically an answer to the crappy results out there for programming problems.
So the links. Here's the blog and the actual site. It basically looks like "digg for programming problems" which I'm undecided if this is just a following of a fad or a decent idea. On one hand if it was digg for programmers it'd be lame, but for programming problems it has potential I believe.
7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code.
Couple of links for the Ruby folks out there. First up is 6 Optimization Tips for Ruby MRI with some nice and simple suggestions for optimization. Next is an excellent list of resources for getting up to speed with Rails 2.1.
Any rails programmers out there want to let me know what the best way to keep up with the ruby and rails community is? It seems that every week the way to do things (plugins, svn vs git, github, etc) changes way more rapidly than it's possible to learn as a newbie. Should I just stick with reading and learning from the RoR 1.2.x book I have, or try to learn from whatever the latest-and-greatest RoR technique of the day is?
Very cool article on techcrunch about How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000. It's actually more interesting in the way of viewing what tools are suggested and the idea of taking a break for the grind of work to do something quick and creative to re-invigorate a development team.
I remember doing this once long long ago while working in the basement of the company-that-was-Netmaster... at some point or another the boss (that'd be now-windows-security-expert Dana for those not familiar with my work history) got into a discussion with someone on some mailing list and we ended up taking the afternoon off to build a web portal. It never actually went anywhere, but it was fun, fast, and a good mental exercise to get the juices going again. I recall doing this again years later in the company that Netmaster morphed into to create a three factor authentication addon for our security product, but it was far more stressed, more work, less fun, and that it never went anywhere was kinda a pissoff cause it was a really cool system. Ah well, live and learn :)
Riding Rails: Free Rails 2.1 Book - via the riding rails blog.
Coding Horror has a nice article on Understanding Model-View-Controller. Well worth the read for people not so up on it like myself.
Nice simple chat wall Merb tutorial, giving you a full demo from start to finish using Merb, a Ruby on Rails type web framework.
There's been some benchmarking doing a Performance comparison: Rails 1.2.6 vs 2.0.2. According to the blog entry rails 2.0 gives about a 30-50% speed increase. Good to see that things are getting faster as they mature!
Interesting looking set of articles on Rails 2.0 and Scaffolding Step by Step. So far there are 2 parts of fairly in depth and well written information about Ruby on Rails 2.0.
Via the rails envy podcast I found Super-fast bulk data imports in Rails with ar-extensions. Basically a scaling issue is that importing a billion records into rails via ActiveRecord sucks, this lets you do bulk imports and makes them much faster.
Rails Is A Ghetto is a potentially explosive rant from the Mongrel (a Ruby/Rails webserver) developer, slamming a lot of the rails people out there. Interesting to see what (if anything) this turns into.
Just a quick nod to Akita on Rails for his Rails 2.0 Screencast and tutorial part 1 and part 2.
He commented on my original "Rails 2.0 is out" story with them and from what I've seen it's good stuff, so I wanted to give some more exposure.
Rails 2.0: It's done! proclaims the RoR blog. Good job guys! Looking forward to playing with the new stuff.
Phil Hofsetter goes to some lengths to figure out mod_php, LightTPD, FastCGI - What's fastest?
Nice post by Raymond Chen about pushing operating system limits, in saying that if you're pushing the OS limits, nesting things 255 levels deep, or adding more than 65k objects on a form, you're probably needing a bit of redesign. Definitely a good point, though he does not that that is a big 'probably' as I'm sure there are cases where programmers are needlessly hindered by random OS limits.
Case in point, a story from back in the day.
When I first embarked into the IT world I was doing tech support for the Real Estate board, and eventually a bit of programming. This programming was done in a basic-type language whose name I don't remember, and it was used to do screen scraping and data manipulation from a dial up program (ie: call in, do a search, get the results, format them, output to a file for upload to a different system).
One day they wanted me to move from the text based language to a different system, again, similar but slightly different. Many times I really needed to compare code from one program and use it in another... a simple operation these days, and it's pretty common to compare two source files at a time. In this system, instead of a nice system where you could open the code in notepad (or edit at the time), it was:
Granted, that's not an OS limit, but a application limit :)
The Ruby on Rails weblog has a nice look at the Rails 2.0: Preview Release. Sadly no quick list of new stuff, nothing I can summarize easily anyway.
A good presentation on writing scalable rails apps from RailsConf in Berlin.
Kevin Rose found a nice tutorial on Starting Ruby on Rails. Much nicer than some of the other ones out there, quick and to the point and oriented towards other programmers.
Hows this for making source control more fun for programmers? Check out this video of a Wii controlling Plastic SCM.
I seem to be the only person programming in HTML::Mason anymore, so this link about Filters And HTML Fill In Form, showing how to use HTML::FillInForm to automatically for checking / filling in the values. Different way than the way I do it, so good to know.
Some good stuff on ways to write more comprehensible code.
Found on planet gnome is a howto on Creating An Automated Staging Server using CVS.
It’s easy to create an automated staging server for content that doesn’t need to be compiled (like most web content.) The trick is that CVS has a very flexible logging system. All you need to do is have your CVS server send an email on each check in and have the staging server take that email and check out the files that changed.
Details follow in the link.
This guy is a machine, coding a raytracer over 48 hours on a weekend... he called it PixelMachine and has a full log (with pretty pictures) of progress starting Saturday the 17th and ending Sunday the 18th.....
This is cool, ViEmu/VS: vi-vim editor emulation for Microsoft Visual Studio. Basically looks like it allows you to use the vi modal model for visual studio editing. This might make me go and check out MSVS again (sorry Microsoft, but my fingers only seem to know how to do vi editing while programming)....
While I'm not a really big fan of JS, I am a huge fan of pre-made systems that easily plug into existing code and solve problems, say, easy and quick Table Sorting, Filtering, Etc. This solution from JavascriptToolbox has some really nice features. The only thing I don't see (yet, I might have just missed it) is a combination of sorting and paging.
Still, definitely something to plug into my next web project.
A nice post on Math For Programmers. Finally justification that algerbra in school really was torture! Via jwz.
Aaron Bockover writes up a cool entry on Cracking down on heap abuse in Mono, telling how he did optimization work in TagLib-Sharp (a mono library for MP3 tagging) and moved memory allocation down from (for example) 103mb to 16mb! I honestly don't 100% understand a lot of what is actually going on, but seeing optimization work like this really is cool to me. Keep up the good work!
An interesting and sarcastic (yet funny) article entitled Why your startup should use Ruby on Rails. All good points in there (for those too lazy to RTFA the point is really saying why you shouldn't use RoR), however I think a similar article could be written about your favorite language or framework. In fact, your favorite language sucks! :)
For anyone who has looked at RoR or Catalyst or any of the newer frameworks web frameworks available out there it's an interesting read. Amazingly the comments to the story haven't devolved into a flamewar yet. We can still hope though!