Weekly Digest, 5-29-10
by Trevor Turk
The Thumbnailer is a Google App Engine application which gets a thumbnail out of any URL you throw at it. AGPL. [Embed.ly seems to be gather quite a following!]
A jQuery plugin for shuffling a set of elements.
When AJ Jacobs learned multitasking was bad for you, he decided to kick his chronic addiction to mental juggling.
Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions. [A good companion for SizeUp]
Why your company should have a very permissive open source policy
…great programmers will be less inclined to work for you if you have a restrictive open source policy because being involved in open source projects is one of the best ways for a programmer to increase his market value.
Designed by DBMS design pioneer Mike Stonebraker for companies that have outgrown the performance limitations of traditional SQL databases, open-source VoltDB provides a very fast, scalable, fault-tolerant and ACID-compliant, distributed SQL database for transactional (OLTP) applications. Unlike NoSQL Key-Value stores (K-V stores) or sharding, which require the application developer to manage the complexities of data consistency, VoltDB handles data integrity and consistency for you.
State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report
Because New Relic RPM is used by more than 4,000 organizations to manage their Ruby on Rails and Java applications in production, we have unique insight into how thousands of applications are deployed.
Scalable Work Queues with Beanstalk
There is an abundance of different job and message queue systems, in part because they are so seemingly simple to write. However, if you ever tried to build your own, you will also know that the scaling and the features available in Beanstalk are non-trivial to replicate.
Profitable and proud: Campaign Monitor
Never lose sight of the fact that you’re starting a business to give you more freedom to do what you enjoy in life. Don’t let it consume the very thing you’re aiming to improve.
Automate EC2 Instance Setup with user-data Scripts
The Ubuntu and Debian EC2 images published on http://alestic.com allow you to send in a startup script using the EC2 user-data parameter when you run a new instance. This functionality is useful for automating the installation and configuration of software on EC2 instances.
iPad definitely a threat to Windows
I can check my email, look at my various RSS feeds and scan my schedule in less than 30 seconds. On a Windows based PC, I’d still be waiting for Outlook to get done doing its thing or dealing with some Windows update that came in during the night that rebooted my machine.
The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8
VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it’s an upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats. [Skip to Addendum C: Summary for the lazy]
[Lots of interesting announcements]
Hacker News | I am a junior angel in Silicon Valley. AMA
I occasionally invest in startups. Please chime in if you are also an angel. [The founder of Delicious on angel investing]
From Twitter and Facebook To Boxee
I’ve stopped interrupting my day watching videos that I come across on the web and email and I load up Boxee after dinner and do my video watching from the comfort of my family room. Now I can do that with Facebook and Twitter too. Very cool. Thanks Boxee.
