YouTube - Authors@Google: Michael Lewis

June 29th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

YouTube - Authors@Google: Michael Lewis.

The best part of this is that the youtube adult content warning is about the words of a three year old.

Photos of our visit to Kew Gardens

June 26th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

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Velocity 09: John Allspaw, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr”

June 26th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

Velocity 09: John Allspaw, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr”.

Broken Social Scene @ Courthouse - New Song - Forced to Love

June 23rd, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

Broken Social Scene @ Courthouse on Vimeo.

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YouTube - John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner

June 20th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

YouTube - John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner.

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YouTube - Andrew Bird - “Cold Blooded Old Times” Smog Cover - Live at Grimey’s

June 20th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

YouTube - Andrew Bird - “Cold Blooded Old Times” Smog Cover - Live at Grimey’s.

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2009-06-15- Today’s Ruby/Rails Reading

June 15th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

Dramatic Tiger @ Highbury Hall

Tender Lovemaking » Blog Archive » Easy Markup Validation

Gem to test for markup validity

Code Stinkers Anonymous

Great set of slides from a RubyNation presentation about Testing & Refactoring. No video yet. Anybody know if there will be some?

EdgeCase Ajax File Uploads Made Easy (screencast)

10 minutes. Using JQuery & Rails to upload a file. With a nice show of firefox and firebug debugging. Then shows how to use jaxy file uploads plugin.

How to select an array of values in Rails @ Ramblings on Rails

A cheat: sql = Model.send(:construct_finder_sql, :select => ‘id’, :conditions => [...])

Model.connection.select_values(sql)

Improving the Usability of Your Ruby on Rails Applications - Confreaks: MountainWest RubyConf 2009

30 minutes. Can the user do what they want? 7 principles of Usability.

Agile Ajax » Agile Development Improves ROI – But RFP Processes are Stuck in Waterfall. » Pathfinder Development

An attempt at how to manage RFP in an agile way. Cost estimates are unreliable look at Team Composition, Iteration Costs, Experience and Skill match, Compatibility, References

LakTEK – [Rails Tips] ActiveRecord Querying : Be Smart and Vigilant

An example of using group option with active record to reduce queries.

Profiling Ruby With Google’s Perftools - igvita.com

Perftools.rb - a ruby adaptation htat can do CPU profiling and provide visualizations.

Ian Bogost - Cascading Failure

Interesting post on the cascading implication of having your site hacked by the malwariens and Google detecting it.

linkiblog (linki… what?) | How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of

Walkthrough of the logic of creating a popularity algorithm.

Ruby at ThoughtWorks

A wonderful detailed analysis of thoughtworks’ experience with Ruby.

Designing for Sign Up (video & slides) - Bokardo

Webstock video 45 mins - Signup is hard. Free account sign up is around 8% and pay accounts are around 1% with a big drop off after the first month as well. Interface friction - password strength, check user name availability, refilling fields on error, sending user name in email. Motivation is the primary problem. Several examples of start pages.

Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Developer Testing: Welcome to the Beta Test

23 minute m4v video of a talk about the whys of testing. A bit of Java focus but really language independent stuff.

Ruby Best Practices - “And your Mom, too.” Ruby-talk best practices.

Best Practices for participating in Ruby mailing lists. Basically - be nice, don’t top post, be specific, show your code, do your homework first and search archives and the web.

GitHub Firewall Install - Pricing

Published prices. Given that their github.com hosted Giga plan gives you 60GB for 100 users for $2400 I am pretty surprised that unsupported local costs for the same number of users would be $60,000. The premium for moving off the cloud is a bit too steep and doesn’t reflect any economies of scale but I guess that says more about the premium that the github guys put on their time. I’d prefer to see cheaper licensing per user after a (hefty) install fee and more expensive support particularly since it is really just a web GUI for an open source source control applicaiton but I think the real message here is that they don’t really want you to host your own github but they will let you if you bring bags of cash.

Agile Ajax » Cucumber Rocks - But it’s not a replacement for unit tests » Pathfinder Development

Cucumber is great but it seems to often break TDD. Use Cucumber with unit tests and functional tests for the best results.

Ajaxian » Web Developer Collection: Packaged up Firefox extensions

Firefox plugins for web developers

YouTube - Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

June 14th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

YouTube - Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie.

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YouTube - Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks music video in HD Veckatimest out now

June 12th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

YouTube - Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks music video in HD Veckatimest out now.

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YouTube - Neil Halstead - Elevenses Music Video

June 10th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin

YouTube - Neil Halstead - Elevenses Music Video.