Bookmarks
2009
A fundamental rule of the internet
Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision. Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.
Oblo didactic puzzle :: Industrial Design Served
I love this awesome nerdy handmade didactic puzzle. Still a bit too advanced for Jack, but I’d love him to get the hand-eye coordination and problem-solving abilities from a toy like this.
www.industrialdesignserved.com/Gallery/ObloA-didactic-puzzle/335901
The power of “no”
I love Jacob’s suggestion that it’s the “open source development model” and the exercising of the right to say “no” that makes open source projects like Django so successful. It’s in answering only to the needs of the software—not management or marketing—and that model canbedeployed anywhere, even in commercial products.
Video for Everybody!
Use HTML5 video where available, falling back to Apple QuickTime® or Adobe Flash® in older browsers.
Why do we have an IMG element?
A fascinating history of the image tag — or more importantly, the manner in which the HTML evolved — from Mark Pilgrim. Such a rich history here, it tickles the nostalgia bone a good deal.
diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element
Video on the Web - Dive Into HTML5
From Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5 comes this excellent & thorough chapter on the new <video> tag.
Fellowship Technology’s Design Patterns Library & Code Standards
There are certainly some stylistic preferences in here, but Fellowship One’s internal code standards guide is overwhelming good advice and best practice when front-end coding. If you “dabble” in HTML, CSS &/or Javascript, following these conventions will give you the confidence you’re doing things correctly. I would like to put together a similar guide with my coworkers on the K-State Webteam.
Helveticons
“icons, glyphs and symbols based on the Helvetica Bold typeface” Wow. I want to go to there. Love these.
House of Flying Reference Marks, or Quillon & Choil
Jonathan Hoefler at H&FJ describes another favorite character to design: reference marks, particularly the asterisk, dagger & double dagger: > There are standard fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order reference marks, too: they are the section mark (§), parallels (||), and number sign (#), after which the cycle repeats with doubles, triples, and so on: , †, ‡, §, ||, #, , ††, ‡‡, §§, ||||, ###, , †††, ‡‡‡, etc. The whole series is worth a read: ¶, ß, and &.
Victorinox Special Edition Airstream
Two of my favorite brands, Airstream and Victorinox, collaborate on the ultimate product for my favorite pastime: road-tripping. At only $59,000, feel free to get this for me for any special occasion.
www.airstream.com/products/victorinox-special-edition/index.html
SoundManager 2: Javascript Sound for the Web
Some very cool Canvas + JS MP3 players & visualizers.
Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering | Holovaty.com
Adrian Holovaty describes a clever technique they use at Everyblock to render templates in two phases — the first to generate and cache the expensive, data-intense part of the site; the second to render the final, uncached bits (the “You’re logged in as…” bit). Includes code
Django NamePaginator snippet
Here’s a very cool pagination snippet that allows you to create an alphabetical list of objects like: Browse by title: A-G | H-N | O-Z. NamePaginator works almost exactly like Django’s Paginator: you pass in a list of objects and how many you want per letter range and it dynamically generates the pages so that there are approximately that many objects per page. I wish this were a full-fledged app, like django-pagination, with all the features of that app, but this is a great start and a very useful bit of functionality.
Sharing the wealth - The Daily Nightly
A preview of the NBC Nightly News segment featuring B&W and my dad, Joe Works, during their “Acts of Kindness” special series.
Haystack - Search for Django
Haystack, Daniel Lindsley’s search app for Django, looks like a perfect addition to my Django toolkit. The API matches how Django’s admin works, trading indexes.py for admin.py and autodiscovering indexes in the same way manner. Supports a variety of backends, including Solr.
jQuery Sparklines
I love both jQuery and I love sparklines, Edward Tufte’s data-rich, word-size graphics, so I’m bound to love this full-featured jQuery plugin for generating sparklines and other small graphics. Can’t wait to use this in practice.
Tomorrow, in a year
Tomorrow, in a year is a Darwin opera, celebrating The Origin of Species’ 150-year anniversary, with music by The Knife. > The performance falls into two parts – analogous to the development and publications of The Origin of Species. The first part of the performance concentrates on studying the subelements – the underlying DNA sequences and interrelationships of the image, the narrative, the movement and the music – a kind of micro-biological, morphological study. The second part of the performance is a synthesis where an enclosed totality emerges before once more mutating and passing into new forms made of the same material. New editions appear with echoes in the surrounding world. It debuts in November 2009 in Copenhagen and I’d love to be there.
The Morning News, On Suits
A modestly, well-dressed man has never failed to impress. Yes, never. Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack of The Morning News weigh in “On Suits” in this classic guide to Men’s Fashion.
www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/mens_fashion_part_1_suits.php
NYTimes’ Article Search API
NYTimes has debuted their developer API for searching articles published since 1981. I’ve already got a couple projects in mind that could definitely utilize this, but I sure hope they continue to make older articles available. Regardless, this is very awesome.
Simple Django Debugging Tools
My two biggest weaknesses in Django development are debugging and testing. Malcolm lays down some simple tools, already built into Django, to help with the former. I’ve always found a way around these issues, but these are exactly the tools I should have been using. Very glad to have these pointed out. I would still like to see someone lay out exactly how to debug SQL queries, since I have no inkling the right number of SQL queries for a particular kind of page. How do you spot issues? What number of SQL queries is clearly too many?
www.pointy-stick.com/blog/2009/02/03/some-simple-django-debugging-tools/
GE Induction Cooktops
Alton Brown explains the latest innovation in cooktop technology: induction cooktops. I love to cook & bake and have been pretty unsatisfied with our current halogen-style stove, but this new technology looks amazing. If you’re building a new house or shopping for kitchen appliances, be sure to consider this style. Sounds like it would be great for people with young kids, as well.
gei.portals.streamos.com/cc/channel.php?emcid=994&empid=4691&packageid=0000