Glad to see improvements to Github performance after the Big Move. Hope it continues.

• jQuery quickSearch plug-in
  Niftly little search plugin for filtering data.
• Google Chrome Frame — technical notes
  Some good notes about using Google Chrome Frame.
• UI Fundamentals for Programmers
  Video of a talk given by 37 Signaler, Ryan Singer.
• StackOverflow cool Ruby questions
  The first in an “endless series” of posts from Khaled alHabache covering selected ruby questions on the popular question and answer site. Good stuff!
• Fork Support – gemcutter
  gemcutter is trying to make some headway regarding the forked gem problem and is asking for your opinions.

Duct tape programming turns out to be a sticky meme.

• jwz – that “duct tape” silliness
  A “meh” response from the actual “Duct-tape programmer” to which Joel refers.
• Quick Screencasting Using Quicktime X in Mac Snow Leopard
  Could be a handy way to make a quick screencast if you don’t want to shell out for more heavy duty software.
• Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery
  Images outside of the browser viewport are loaded only when needed.
• Github Migration Architecture
  Part 1 in a series of in-depth posts by Github’s migration team regarding their new architecture.
• Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?
  A self-loathing diatribe mostly about Microsoft and the Windows 7 Parties campaign. Some choice quotes in this one. I liked – “The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials. So you show them how to burn a CD, how to make a little video, how to change the wallpaper, and how to, oh no, hang on it’s not supposed to do that, oh, I think it’s frozen, um, er, let me just, um, no that’s not it, um, er, um, er, so how’s it going with you and Kathy anyway, um, er, OK well see you around I guess.”

The problem with the Duct Tape Programmer theory is that every programmer that’s too lazy to test or learn design patterns or the other hard stuff in programming thinks *he* is one of these Duct Tape heroes, when really he’s trying to hold his code together with Scotch tape, calling it Duct tape and shipping it.

• The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software
  “Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature.”
• The Duct Tape Programmer – Response from Uncle Bob
  “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m the “Clean Code” guy. I want your code clean. I don’t want you making a mess. On the other hand, I want you to ship. I don’t want you gilding the lilly. I don’t want you wrapped up in endless polishing. I want you to ship, but I don’t want you to ship sh*t.”
• PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT
  “In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up.”

My 82-year old grandmother is on Facebook and regularly writes and responds to status messages and wall posts. My 2.5 year old daughter can navigate my iPhone to find games she wants to play or look at pictures. These are crazy times.

• prawn – 0.5.1
  A new release of Prawn is out. Looks like with the merger of prawn-grid and its advanced CSS 3 support, you have tons of new options for doing grid-based or columnar layouts in your pdfs.
• TweetStream: Ruby Access to the Twitter Streaming API
  Ruby gem for receiving data from twitter via push instead of polling.
• Arial versus Helvetica
  A cool graphic showing the typographic differences on individual letters between Arial and Helvetica.
• rack-chromeframe
  Middleware that injects the necessary code snippets into outgoing html response to use Google Chrome Frame.
• Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters
  “CSS is the weakest link in the web developers toolbox. The problem goes deeper than CSS’s lack of variables. Unlike the “function” in programming, CSS has no fundamental building block.”

I always enjoy attending the local Ruby user group. It’s the one place in my life where I can really let my geek flag fly and I’m not the biggest geek in the room. At last night’s tulsa.rb meeting we had wide-ranging discussions about such things as Ruby 1.9, Sinatra, Dvorak vs. QWERTY, vim, customizing the irb shell, a comparison of the Ruby, Python, and PHP communities, as well as a truly rousing discussion as to whether or not recycling was a net energy loss or gain and how to harness methane from a landfill. OSIM! (Join us next month if you are in the Tulsa area and want in on the fun)

• watchr – Flexible Continuous Testing
  A replacement for autotest that advertises simplicity and more flexibility.
• Introducing Google Chrome Frame
  Did Google just kill Internet Explorer? Wow. This could be all kinds of win.
• Email Testing with Email on Acid
  Designing emails for proper viewing across lots of different clients is incredibly hard (particularly since Outlook refuses to use a standard rendering engine). Email on Acid looks like a nice tool for testing out your designs.
• Animation woes in jQuery unit tests
  Tammer Saleh shows a nice trick for stopping animations in jquery so that they don’t blow up unit tests.
• A Mess is not a Technical Debt.
  Uncle Bob distinguishes between messes and true technical debts.
• 10 Reasons Pair Programming Is Not For the Masses
  This (and the NYT article referenced) is causing quite a bit of discussion in hackerville.

Sigh. Two years ago Textmate was the “HAWT” editor (and not a small part of why I moved to a mac). Now all the “cool kids” are moving to vim. Color me nonplussed.

• There’s No Such Thing As A Good Client
  “…a business model is about equity, and consulting is only useful for income. This is why consulting is a terrible business model.”
• Firefinder for Firebug for Firefox for Fiddling with jQuery
  Firefinder is a plugin for Firefox/Firebug that can use to test jquery selectors. Looks like a nice little tool to add to the toolbelt.
• Deployment: Diffs and Dependencies
  A couple of nice rubygems here for checking diffs between local and remote code and local and remote gem repositories.
• Why You Should Switch from Subversion to Git
  Wait, what? Git? What’s that?
• Shades of Gray: Ruby 1.9′s String
  A question was raised on the tulsarb mailing list today about strings in Ruby 1.9 and how they are no longer Enumerable. Here’s some more info from James Edward Grey, including the justification and some tips to handle incompatibilities if you need code to run on 1.8 and 1.9.

I thought cloud computing was supposed to be the silver bullet for scalability. Now everybody wants to move to “real” servers. Me is confused.

• SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers
  Creates a pretty nice looking site map for your website
• Ruby on Rails git pre-commit hook
  A quick look at how to setup hooks to run code (for verifying your tests/specs, updating documentation, etc) when you do a git commit.
• GitHub is Moving to Rackspace!
  GitHub makes the official announcement. Really interesting read of the technical details behind the move.
• Need serial key – CodeSmith Community
  An ignorant user asks for a “crack” serial code for a product IN THE OFFICIAL PRODUCT FORUMS. A company official with a sense of humor responds and geek hilarity ensues.
• 33 Killer Web Icon Sets for Free
  Because I am design-challenged, I’m always looking for good, free icons. Here’s a bunch.

I meant to get these links out earlier but Kanye interrupted me.

• cloud-crowd
  A ruby gem to assist with doing parallel processing in “the cloud”
• Mac Tips you may not know
  Some good keyboard shortcuts here.
• Acorn 2.0
  Just discovered a new version of Acorn is out. This is my favorite “poor-man’s Photoshop”. Mac only.
• 10 Really Helpful Traversing Functions in jQuery
  If you use jQuery, you’ll want to commit these to memory.

Eight years, 2 home address changes, 2 office changes, 4 computers, 3 cars, 1 dog, 1 (and a half) kids, umpteen projects, countless sleepful and sleepless nights later, we still remember. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember 9/11/2001 like it was yesterday.

• Online innovation going strong in state
  Good stuff about the numerous online entrepreneurs/companies that reside or got their start in the great state of Oklahoma – including sites like Ping.fm and twitpic.
• Textmate: Re-Usable Command Basics
  Up your Textmate game and dive into this tutorial that shows how to really utilize Textmate and Unix to accomplish some nifty stuff.
• Animate Image Filling Up Using jQuery
  Incredibly cool demo. I could see some cool uses for this.
• fitter_happier
  A Rails plugin that adds uptime monitoring to your application. Came across this yesterday – looks interesting. More info here.
• To self. or not to self.
  The author discusses the merits of prefixing ruby public instance method calls with self. I tend to agree with his conclusion, but suppose I could be persuaded that it adds more noise than value.