January 2010
7 posts
Bayesian Classification on Rails →
simple tutorial on the classifier gem
300&65 Ampersands →
Realism in UI Design →
good advice to steer away from making symbols in design overly realistic
“For consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been...”
– Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Simple Numbers, Complicated Dates →
Some really innovative designs here.
Can functional programming be liberated from the... →
Interesting article stating Monadic IO is really a non-solution.
Mount options to improve ext4 file system... →
Not tried this yet but helps speeds up tests
December 2009
5 posts
Ruby interface to encoding.com
At work we use encoding.com to encode videos. Up until now there hasn’t been a ruby client library for their API, but I released one a week or so ago. It’s quite simple to use:
require 'encoding_dot_com'
queue = EncodingDotCom::Queue.new('your id', 'your secret')
# loads of options, see the encoding.com documentation
output = EncodingDotCom::Format.create("output" =>...
tinywm →
A skeleton window manager in 50 lines of C!
Taste of Haskell →
presentation on Haskell and XMonad from Simon Peyton Jones.
Web forms design guidelines →
Another set of form design tips based on eyetracking studies
qc.js →
QuickCheck for javascript - kind of like fuzz testing with properties from the haskell community.
November 2009
1 post
JRuby presentations →
A whole boatload of JRuby (& duby) presentations
October 2009
2 posts
“Over-engineering is poison. It’s not like doing extra work for extra...”
– Paul Graham
Pearls Before Breakfast →
September 2009
2 posts
Developing a facebook app locally →
Useful tip for any local development that uses web hooks / callbacks, not just facebook.
Snakes on the Web →
another take on the concurreny is going to eat us all meme - focused on web development
August 2009
3 posts
Swim →
Or fly…
A/Bingo: RoR Split Testing →
Google Website Optimizer seems a bit dirty - this looks like a cleaner way
Collection: Design Patterns →
July 2009
6 posts
Pro Git →
a full book from Scott Chacon on git, online, free!
exljbris →
some nice free fonts which can be used with @font-face.
Readying for the rumble
Rails rumble has come round again: if you’ve not registered yet it’s probably too late, but there are still people out there looking for teams to join. I did it last year, came 39 out of about 120 as a single person team and made something I’m still using. If you’ve not rumbled before, here are some tips (some of these I did last time, others I didn’t). These tips are...
Groovy Does Not Have Optional Static Typing →
clears up a misconception I had about type systems.
“Google’s explanation for six hours of downtime was basically, “Shit...”
– Ted Dziuba
The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News →
why you can’t write StackOverflow in a weekend. The point about developers just seeing two DB tables rings true.
June 2009
6 posts
Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted? →
As much about why industries die out because of disruptive change as SciPub.
10 Useful Firefox Extensions to Supercharge... →
a useful set of tools - I wish I’d found these sooner.
Easy Markup Validation →
A simple gem to ensure valid markup. It can also take a schema to validate XML.
Lightning talk on Sinatra and Rack
There was a great dynamic languages evening at the BCS this week - people from the php, perl, python and ruby communities gave a series of lightning talks. I did one on Sinatra and Rack - focusing on the benefits of simplicity.
Web simplicity: Ruby, Sinatra & Rack
View more Microsoft Word documents from knaveofdiamonds.
“Dudes all over the world, in every city, even ones that haven’t banned plastic...”
– Joel Hayhurst on writing web applications in C
The 48 Laws of Power →
May 2009
9 posts
A History of the London Tube Maps →
rhomobile →
found out about this at londroid last night - write mobile apps in ruby.
“Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. With...”
– Eric Ries
Presentation on Treetop
I gave a presentation on Treetop last night at lrug - seemed to go down well. There aren’t many examples of treetop grammars I’ve seen, so it might be useful if you find the main site’s documentation a bit impeneterable.
Treetop - I’d rather have one problem
View more presentations from knaveofdiamonds.
Demystifying Irb's Commands →
irb has a lot more to it than I thought.
Multiple Sinatra applications in one process →
a neat way to compose applications
Oberon →
a ZUI that apparently you can get to run under parallels. Need to check this out.
The Craft of Text Editing →
An odd book about implementing text editors - fairly emacs focused
Wu-Tang Design Remix Project pt.1 →
Wu-tang clan album covers in the style of Blue Note records.
April 2009
3 posts
Skew, The Frontend Engineer's Misery →
HTML may be simple but this shows exactly why being a FE dev is hard and miserable.
Better Best Practices →
well written discussion as to how “best practices” impact those at different skill levels
“The difference between good systems and bad ones is that, in the good ones, you...”
– Michael Feathers
March 2009
5 posts
Concatenative programming in Ruby →
An interesting experimental approach.
Musca →
looks like this might be even more lightweight than fluxbox.
“It baffles me that people think making really, really brilliant, stupendous,...”
– Rory via trivium
Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment →
useful. Get rid of design.
Clojure - Functional programming for the JVM →
looks like a useful reference.
February 2009
5 posts
IDE-as-a-service: Bespin is only the beginning →
interesting idea about making everything to do with development a series of services.