Posts

I think this is pretty cool: Ads while you’re browsing are constantly becoming more and more intrusive and annoying.

The Add Art firefox plugin works in conjunction with AdBlock (also part of the download) to block the incoming ads and place a curated art exhibit in their place. The images are local so as not to slow down your browsing experience.

Love this. Anything to beautify the browsing landscape. Now if I could just somehow to do the same with billboards in the real world.

The fine buccaneers at The Pirate Bay have published an interactive map of people seeding and leeching torrents ~~bad link~~~ around the world with data by country (percentage users and connections through country at a given time).

Great and fascinating snapshot of p2p activity globally. China is far and away the highest poller and well over 30% of world activity every time I’ve looked. Would be even cooler I think if you could divide this into seeders and leechers with these stats.

OMG, I am so going to see these guys when I get to Vegas. Yet another reason I must go to RailsConf .

Palm, Ditch, Steal, Load, Simulation, Misdirection and Switch.

Probably equally appropriate to watching politicos…

This is great dev tip. The number of times I’ve accidentally cap deploy-ed something without checking I’d git committed everything is beyond counting, so this visual indicator on the command line is great - as well as telling you which branch you’re using:

Git Status in Your Prompt

(though I also use the excellent ProjectPlus Textmate plugin for scm status badges which I’d recommend if you’re using Textmate).

Really great article from the creator of Gmail on how important it is to be experimenting constantly with live code to drive innovation and how much more strongly is speaks than a fat PPT deck.

Two great gems here, the first on time for unapproved ideas:

The other point is that it’s important to make prototyping new ideas, especially bad ideas, as fast and easy as possible… This is also where Google’s “20% time” comes in – if you want innovation, it’s critical that people are able to work on ideas that are unapproved and generally thought to be stupid. The real value of “20%” is not the time, but rather the “license” it gives to work on things that “aren’t important”.

I’m noticing an interesting trend amongst geeks in the last year. A lot of them are rolling their own CMSs as a learning exercise and for their own personal sites. And most of them have a few things in common :

1. They publish to static html or minimally, build static files and don’t have a database
2. The source files are straight up text, markdown, textile or they’re using an editor like MarsEdit, Ecto or TextMate through XML-RPC to post
3. It then deploys or rsync’s for them from a local copy (a la capistrano or rake)
4. It’s all source code version controlled with rollbacks (a la git)
5. Backups are a snap
6. Portable (as in, copy or deploy files over to a new hoster)

Now I can respect and totally understand this since, I do dev and have to admit before I put my migrated wordpress installation under git and capistrano deploy it would have been an utter pain to manage.

I had one of those weird little sinking feelings this morning as I looked at my friends’ facebook feeds. One of my friends, AG had been keeping his bookmarking on magnolia, which apparently suffered a major outage today and took some of his precious bookmarking with him. When I checked at time of posting the service was still down and they say they’ve got data corruption and loss. Not good.

Little uh-oh moment right then, realizing that I had no backups of my delicious bookmarks which, ever since Yahoo released the fantastic Firefox delicious add-on , I’ve been using in-the-cloud bookmarking exclusively. I was suddenly recalling someone’s Stallman-esque blog rant about how the cloud was all fine provided :

I figured someone was going to do it before long, because I’d already thought this would make a great business (provided Amazon don’t just do it and eat your lunch):

Put an easy to use console over Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3) for people who don’t want to mess with infrastructure so you can focus on the dev side.

So, Scalr’s web service is fundamentally a management, deployment and monitoring web console that sits on top of Amazon’s EC2, EBS and S3 services to let you roll your own automatically scalable server farm with failover via web interface at just $50/m over the Amazon charges.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, it’s probably not hard to figure out that I really, really like git and capistrano. They’ve made my development and deployment better and much less painful. I’ve also been using github quite a bit lately (as well as pondering here on the ranch how we need to redesign our set of development and deployment tools in order to gain some consistency over our php, java and rails development as well as make them as painless and easy as possible).

Just pointed out to me that the latest Skype beta includes a iChat-like screensharing feature for users so that collaboration between OSX users is possible. Very cool. Haven’t had a chance to test it yet, and probably not as polished at iChat’s but still have to say this will be a killer feature when it works between OSX, Windows and Linux. It is definitely needed.

Apparently video and audio quality are also improved (great for my parents to worry about how I’m not taking care of myself).