I wonder if watching hours upon hours of children’s programming on television makes adults dumber too.

• 10 Tips on Writing Hero-worthy Error Messages
  Some good reminders here. Error messages need love and care.
• Scrollbar Contents (aka Visual Page Contents)
  An interesting little jQuery plugin that creates a visual area next to the browser scrollbar to denote page contents vs. comments and jump you between each.
• Behind the Typedia Logo Design
  Note that I’m a developer with very minimal design skills, but I came across this behind-the-scenes look at the way a serious craftsman created a very nice looking logo. The rigorous process and focus on the details will be relevant to anyone serious about their particular craft.
• How to Achieve Cross-Browser @font-face Support
  A really excellent tutorial on using custom fonts with @font-face. Seems much less daunting after reading…
• RFPs Will Kill Us All
  Similar to the NO!SPEC movement, some people feel that submitting bids in response to RFPs for technical services is bad mmmkay.
• rack-bug
  Debugging toolbar for Rack applications.

Agonizing over whether to go desktop (27″ iMac) or laptop (17″ MBP) with my next computer purchase. Not that I have the cash for either at the moment. But if I did…

• jQote – client-side templating
  A nice jQuery-based way to do client side html templates. Thinking about using this for some customizable widgets I wrote.
• 55 Unconventional And Original Free Fonts For An Unique Design
  Some really nice fonts here. Not sure if this is 100% the case, but all of the ones I checked were free for commercial use as well.
• Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5
  Deep Blue Sky does some investigation into browser support for various CSS3 and HTML5 features. Good info.
• Devise
  A full stack Rails authentication engine built on top of Rack-based Warden that uses a strategy provider pattern. Use of Rack allows authentication to be shared across different types of applications (Rails, Sinatra, etc) and strategy pattern allows new, customizable strategies (i.e. Invitable) to be created and shared. Very interesting…
• Part II: We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned.
  I’m enjoying this series. If you are developing a customer-facing software service (or want to someday), you should follow along. Good tips.
• How We Made GitHub Fast
  Lots of red meat here.
• Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC
  More info and GitHub’s data serialization and RPC protocol. BERT and ernie – too funny.

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.”

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 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.

• Railscasts – 7 Security Tips
  New railscast from this week shows common Rails security flaws and how to avoid them. Important.
• 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned
  I wouldn’t call these tricks so much as intermediate CSS techniques that you need to know if you don’t want your designs to look sloppy.
• Create a Funky Parallax Background Effect using jQuery
  Parallax backgrounds are neato, but hard to do right, and certainly can be overdone. This shows how to do it. Use sparingly.
• gsub with a block
  Did you know gsub can take a block? – I knew this (thanks to The Ruby Way), but it’s good to be reminded.
• If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers
  This was making the rounds the last few days. Pretty funny.

Hate it when I think something will only take half an hour and it costs me an evening. And by the way, note to future me, loading javascript and css files dynamically cross browser is HARD.

• Phiculator, the Golden Ratio calculator
  phi, considered the “golden ratio” and often used in architecture, art, etc can be a great way to make your design aesthetically pleasing. This tool helps you calculate the ratio.
• jQuery Tools 1.0.1 released
  A collection of jQuery plugins/tools from the folks that make flowplayer. I’ve used several of these previously and they are top notch. The overlay plugin addition looks really nice.
• Flowplayer 3.1.3 is out
  Speaking of flowplayer, looks like those guys have been busy, and have a new release of it as well. This is my go to flash player these days. Lots of really nice config options.
• SVGWeb Brings SVG Support to Internet Explorer
  Uses flash on IE to replicate and make SVG a viable cross-browser technology.
• Pretty checkboxes with jQuery
  A tutorial showing some pretty spruced up checkboxes.
• New OS, more pane! (Passenger preference pane v1.3)
  New Passenger pref pane for Snow Leopard.