Flashblock plugin for Firefox is a nice thing.

• bullet
  A Rails plugin that will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use counter cache. Cool.
• the update | gemcutter
  Gemcutter (soon to be rubygems.org) will become the default gem host for the ruby community, replacing rubyforge.
• White House opens Web site coding to all
  White House goes Drupal. I’m pretty sure this article was written by somebody with no clue what open source is. Some of the descriptions are nonsensical.
• Why seeding is important for random functions…
  or, How to Cheat at Bejeweled.
• and another thing… – Announcing Refraction
  Refraction is Rack middleware that can provide “mod_rewrite” type functionality using an easier to understand Ruby dsl. Some performance tradeoffs, but not as much as trying to use Rails routing.

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.

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.