Weekly Digest, 2-8-09
by Trevor Turk
Trevor’s Links
Tip: Instead of nesting, just return early.
More time doesn’t mean a better product
It’s easy to fall into a trap of nitpicking over things that don’t really matter. Instead, focus on the essence of what you’re doing. Press record, get it done, and get it out there. (And that’s even more true if what you’re creating is something you’ll get to improve upon after it’s released.)
We like to think that we live life on the edge here at ENTP. If we’re not writing the bleeding edge tools, we’re probably using them. We were talking a little earlier in our Campfire chatroom about how it might be cool to go through the tools we use every month – so welcome to the first installment. It’s a doozy since it’s the first, so grab a cup of coffee and get ready to read a novel.
6 Scrum lessons every Rails developer should know
1. Always work from a prioritized list; 2. Make a commitment publicly; 3. Get feedback regularly; 4. Time-box your activities; 5. Work sustainably; 6. Make your work visible;
Prognostications from the Horse Latitudes
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the fractal network of information systems that we call "the Internet" is not some monolithic entity or construct. The "thing" we call "the Internet" is no thing at all: it’s much more like a "phenomenon." And "the Internet" is much more like a series of related happenings than a self-contained entity of any type for the painfully simple reason that "the Internet" is simply human consciousness writ larger, thanks to the invention of more efficient and robust means of communication. Basically, it’s the same thing we (humans) always did, but now we do it much bigger and better than ever before with the help of millions of miles of copper wire. That’s it. That’s all it is.
Increase the size of click targets and get more call-to-action conversions. Say goodbye to boring ‘Read More…’ links by turning your entire content block into a clickable target!
There are more resources available today for building a personal brand than ever before. Anybody can start a blog for free, sign up for social networks, create podcasts and internet TV shows, and be a part of the Big Conversation in hundreds of different ways. But getting recognized—getting heard— is actually tougher than ever. [I totally agree with this one. That's why I've been using the same awesome Costco Membership Card photo as an avatar for all my stuff lately
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Machinist and Rails controller tests
Machinist, my test-data generation plugin for Rails, has just gained some features that make it useful for controller tests. [I'm a big fan of this plugin. Being free of fixtures makes testing more fun. And faster.]
This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
Until some future version of HTML gives us new native controls to use in a browser, at Google, we’ve been playing and experimenting with controls we call “custom buttons” in our apps (among other custom controls). These buttons just launched in Gmail yesterday, and they’ve been in Google Reader for two months now.
Announcing the Article Search API – NYTimes
We are pleased to announce the initial release of the New York Times Article Search API. Articles are the basic building blocks of The New York Times. As a child, I was often reprimanded for (among other things) not sharing my blocks — well, today, I am happy to share.
“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing.
Show Git dirty state (and branch) in the prompt
[Note one of the last comments, which turned out to be my favorite version: http://gist.github.com/49265]
Wouldn’t it be better, I was thinking to myself, if this machine would just go into sleep & hibernate mode only when the battery was really low and I’d be at risk of the machine crashing if it ran out of power?
Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes
Rails 2.3 delivers a variety of new and improved features, including pervasive Rack integration, refreshed support for Rails Engines, nested transactions for Active Record, dynamic and default scopes, unified rendering, more efficient routing, application templates, and quiet backtraces.
Some support for ‘engine’ plugins has been merged into the Rails core codebase in Rails 2.3. In this guide, I’ll try to explain what works, what has changed, and what is currently missing compared to the original engines plugin.
Timothy’s Links
Inside Programmable Road Signs
Link courtesy of Schneier. I cannot WAIT to try this out.
Microsoft offers to just ‘Fix it’
This news item’s next stop is failblog. Apparently what remains of Microsoft, the company that made "browser security" everybody’s problem and whose wage-slave programmers horizontally developed the operating systems that power a full 100% of the world’s botnets, is now telling users to remotely execute "fixes" (i.e. scripts that run with admin privileges) from its website. Makes you wonder where you can go to start making bets on how exactly this is going to massively backfire.
Total Linux nerd pr0n. So awesome though.
Need a supercomputer? This guy builds them himself
Bruce Allen builds Debian Beowulf clusters. Which is about the baddest-ass thing a guy can do, short of skinning a dinosaur with a Bowie knife.
Visual representation of edits to the Wikipedia page on "evolution"
Cool if for no other reason than to consider how much of the original text from 2001 makes it to us today and then consider that this sort of rapid-fire redaction is basically a condensed version of what has been happening to pretty much all antique literary works for the last 3000 years.
Courtesy of LifeHacker: add the above URL to your bookmarks in Firefox, right-click it and set it to be on the sidebar and BAM! gmail tasks in your FF sidebar.
This is a review of a little app for your G1 that alerts you when you get an SMS message. Personally, I think the overhead bar gets the job done quite well, but the features that come with this app (like choosing vibration style, setting reminders, etc.) make it kind of must-have.
You thought New Age Guru type dudes vanished with Patrick Bateman and the Bright Lights, Big City 80′s? Think again.
Svchost Viewer Shows Exactly What Each svchost.exe Instance is Doing
This would be a very useful utility to have the next time one of your users is convinced that Firefox is causing explorer to become non-responsive and you wish you could make him understand that in reality it’s one of his svchost processes run totally amok.
Perspectives: Ars community compares iPhone and Android G1 – Ars Technica
Yeah, we’ve all had it up to here with the G1/iPhone comparisons. But this one is really worth reading. It’s Ars, for X’s sake. Just read it: if you don’t keep your talking points current, you’ll end up sounding like your step father.
Obsolete Computers That Still Do the Job – BusinessWeek
This article should make you giggle. I mean, it will certainly make you giggle if you, like me, work on the Internet and are used to giggling at MBA-types who don’t know bupkiss about hardware, software or information systems in general beyond what they need to know to "do email and Word". But still–giggle-factor aside–there’s some hope for the future in this article. I spent this last Sunday using mdadm to turn four scrap HDD’s and an old PC from the 90′s that I scored off of a buddy when he moved last summer into a RAID5 backup for my big fileserver (which is itself a P3 with 256MB of disc) and I can honestly say that it makes me slightly hopeful for the future to see an article written for MBA-types that advocates for hardware recyclery.
dokuwiki is my new favorite F/OSS wiki solution. It’s got a nice minimalist aesthetic, is drop-dead simple to install and administer and doesn’t use an RDB (i.e. stores everything on the filesystem). Good features and incredible ease of use.
AdFreak: A pair of galactically odd child-abuse PSAs
Watch these and try not to giggle. I defy you.
Thanks for the link!
Mischa – nice posts lately. I hope you keep it up!