Brent Sordyl’s blog

• Automatically posting JIRA defects links to PresentlyApp.com « Brent Sordyl’s Blog
  On our team we thought it’d be useful to auto-post Blocker defects from Jira to our present.ly stream. The gems httparty and jira4r made it easy.
  (tags: collaboration jira HTTParty present.ly)
• Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life: David Allen
  Readers are guided through the process of obtaining control and perspective, organizing tasks and goals to reach the Getting Things Done (GTD) holy grail of an empty in-basket and e-mail inbox. Although the book purports to expand on the principles of GTD, there's very little new material in this latest offering,
  (tags: tweet gtd books)
• Is your Netflix queue destroying the environment? – Slate Magazine
  The green marketing gurus at Netflix go even further, arguing that the mail is going to be delivered to your house anyway, so the environmental cost of delivering one of their DVDs is effectively zero. They use this theory to arrive at an enormous estimate for the number of gallons of gas saved by delivering DVDs through the U.S. Postal Service.
  (tags: netflix)
• ruby gem Facebooker Tutorial
  The purpose of this tutorial is to explain many aspects of the Facebooker project. The general approach here is provide running live code to be used as a reference for you own implementation. All the code samples in this tutorial are from the actual live code running the application. The facebooker plugin is pulled in as an external as well so the tutorial should be up to date with the latest code.
  (tags: rubyonrails facebook gem)
• How to Send Your Facebook Status Updates to Twitter as an RSS Feed
  you would THINK would be simple, was pretty time consuming. Facebook, for some reason, makes it very difficult to find the RSS feed for your own posted status updates.
  (tags: twitter facebook microblogging)
• rfacebook – facebook api for ruby and rails
  RFacebook is a Ruby interface to the Facebook API. It hides all the nitty-gritty details behind a beautiful Ruby front-end, allowing you to focus on writing great code.
  (tags: ruby facebook gem)
• The iPhone's Golden Touch – washingtonpost.com
  Released in November, Ocarina racked up 400,000 downloads in less than a month.

  Smule, which originally set a goal of taking in $100,000 in revenue this year, will end up making closer to $1 million. "It's amazing," Smith says. "The business is already profitable."

  (tags: iphone appstore)

web2.0

• The 48 Laws of Power
  Law 5
  So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life
  Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once you slip, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.
  (tags: productivity strategy)
• JiraSoapService (JIRA RPC plugin 3.13.2-1 API)
  (tags: api SOAP jira)
• Now, Brevity Is the Soul of Office Interaction – NYTimes.com
  Yammer started in early September, followed a few weeks later by Present.ly. Each of those two services reports that it has been tried by more than 10,000 businesses.
  (tags: twitter collaboration presently)
• Scalability Strategies Primer: Database Sharding
  I feel confident saying that we’ve covered much of what I consider to be the bare conceptual basics of horizontally scaling your application’s database layer, and that was the intent – to provide a solid primer and no more. This subject is easily worthy of a book, and in fact, the absence of such literature was largely the motivation for this article
  (tags: scalability mysql)
• User Interface Design Patterns
  It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are called design patterns; standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him.
  (tags: webdesign)
• FOAFlicious – generate a foaf file from delicious
  FOAFlicious is an application for generating a FOAF file from your del.icio.us inbox.
  (tags: semanticweb delicious foaf)
• Boarding – Where are you boarding today?
  Spending to much time at the airport? Boarding helps you find other stranded travelers by simply twitting #boarding along with your airport code (LAX, JFK, CDG, …). Therefore, Boarding will send you a reply with a link to the other Twitter users who you can message directly to meet up with.
  (tags: twitter travel)
• Twitter t411 message server
  Here is another idea – information server on the top of Twitter. Twitter 411 service lets you easily build your own information system, uses Twitter as a transport. The idea is very transparent. You can define your own keywords as well as data, associated with the selected keywords. Users will ask service via direct messages in Twitter and receive responses as direct messages too. Direct messages for the requests are just user-defined keywords. Direct messages for the responses are just user-defined reactions (data associated with the keywords).
  (tags: twitter saas)
• JBoss-Rails 1.0 Beta 3 Released
  This release includes updates of JRuby to 1.1.6 and JRuby-Rack to 0.9.3. It also adjusts our own version-numbering scheme to be JBoss and RPM-compatible.
  (tags: tweet rubyonrails jboss jruby)
• opensocial ruby client library – Google Code
  Each library enables developers to retrieve profile information and persistent data from supporting containers without having to concern themselves with managing network connections, signing requests, or other lower-level details.
  (tags: ruby gem opensocial)
• 100 ways to increase your software sales in 2009 « Successful Software
  38. Add case studies to your website.
  (tags: marketing)
• Freemium business model case study: AdultFriendFinder ARPU, churn, and conversion rates
  Funnel metrics
  And in fact, they list some of the key conversion rates between each of these numbers:
  * Visitors: 59 million uniques worldwide
  * Members: 4 million new member registrations (on 270 million members total)
  * Subscribers*: 900k paying subscribers
  * ARPU: $19.06 per paying subscriber/paid user
  (tags: freemium)
• What is Hindley-Milner? (and why is it cool?)
  Hindley-Milner (or “Damas-Milner”) is an algorithm for inferring value types based on use. It literally formalizes the intuition that a type can be deduced by the functionality it supports. Consider the following bit of psuedo-Scala (not a flying toy):
  (tags: programming scala)

web2.0

On our team we thought it’d be useful to auto-post Blocker defects from Jira to our presently stream. The gems httparty and jira4r made it easy.

Here are the steps:

1. Install JIRA, create a user

2. Create a Filter for the defects you want to auto-post, get the ID for that filter from the URL when viewing it. ‘jiradmin’ in this example

3. Create a user on presently to post from. ‘jira’ in this example

4. Create a cron or windows tasks to run the following ruby code once per hour:

jira_presently.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘httparty’
require ‘rexml/document’
require ‘jira4r/jira4r’

# make a HTTParty object for integrating with presentlyapp.com
class Presently
include HTTParty
# Presently api url
base_uri ‘https://[EXAMPLE].presentlyapp.com/api/twitter’
#jira presently user credentials
basic_auth ‘jira’, ‘[PRESENTLY PASSWORD]‘
default_params :output => ‘json’
format :json
end

# link to your JIRA server and credentials
JIRA_URL = “[http://jira.url.com/]”
jira = Jira::JiraTool.new(2, JIRA_URL)
jira.login(”jiraadmin”, “[JIRA PASSWORD]“)

#  Look at key in JIRA filter URL to get ID for the filter
issues = jira.getIssuesFromFilter(10112)

issues.each do |issue|
# post for the last 1 hour
if Time.parse(issue.created.to_s) > (Time.now – 60*60)
issue_post = “Blocker: ” + issue.key + ” – ” + issue.summary[0..75] + ” #{JIRA_URL}/browse/” + issue.key
puts Presently.post(’/statuses/update.json’, :query => {:status => issue_post}).inspect
else
puts issue.key + ” is older than 1 hour”
end
end

collaboration, httparty, jira4r, present.ly, presentlyapp, ruby, twitter, web2.0

• Vertor.com – Verified torrents
  (tags: bittorrent)
• Top 10 Java Performance Troubleshooting Tools | Javalobby
  GCViewer is a free open source tool to visualize data produced by the Java VM options -verbose:gc and -Xloggc:<file>. It also calculates garbage collection related performance metrics (throughput, accumulated pauses, longest pause, etc.).
  (tags: performance java)
• 7 Ways to Improve Your Software Release Management – CIO.com
  Understand the current state of release management.

  You can't begin to fix something without understanding what it is, and how and where it is broken. Our first step in improving our client's release management system was to form a detailed picture of the current release process. We began with a number of walk-through sessions with key individuals involved in the software process.

  (tags: scm)
• NASDAQ MarketReplay application uses only S3 and AIR. No servers.
  All in all it’s a very good application and a good use case for combining services like Amazon S3 with clients like Adobe AIR. It also provides a very dynamic, engaging way to do stock research.
  (tags: aws s3 adobeintegratedruntime)
• URL Rewriting for Beginners – Apache – Added Bytes
  URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site. It can also be the source of near-unending misery and suffering. Definitely worth playing carefully with it – lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
  (tags: apache urlrewrite)
• mysqlplus at master — GitHub
  == MySQLPlus An enhanced MySQL database driver. With support for async operations and threaded database access.
  (tags: rubyonrails mysql ruby gem)
• UserFix – social feedback hub
  A community of web enthusiasts crowd-sourcing user feedback by reporting bugs and requesting features for any website. Empowering the users to surface the most requested features and to reproduce the most reported bugs on their own environments. Users interact directly with the product team members to fix, improve and shape the websites/apps they love.
  (tags: crowdsourcing feedback)
• Facebook Marketing: College Prowler Caught Using Fake Accounts and Facebook Groups to Build List
  This looks like a classic class of guerilla marketing gone wild. As Butler’s Ward discovered, there are a lot of aggressive marketers out there taking advantage of Facebook Groups to reach hundreds or thousands of Facebook users.
  (tags: facebook marketing)
• Zappos CEO and COO Blog: Everything I Know About Business I Learned From Poker
  If there are too many competitors (some irrational or inexperienced), even if you're the best it's a lot harder to win.
  (tags: poker quotes strategy)
• SenCSs – sensible css reset
  SenCSs stands for Sensible Standards CSS Framework, but if you want, you can pronounce it "sense", which makes it sound pretty cool. SenCSs supplies sensible styling for all repetitive parts of your CSS, allowing you to focus on actually developing your website's style. The current version is 0.5
  (tags: css frameworks)
• Seth's Blog: Service worth paying for
  service suffers, because it's expected for free. So charge. Or at least act like you could if you wanted to.
  (tags: customerservice monetization)
• Kude Labs : Textmate script to restart mongrel
  just put in a few shell commands that will be executed directly. I like to do a clean restart so that the same script works even if this is the first time starting it up
  (tags: textmate rubyonrails mongrel)

web2.0

• 5 Apple TVs streaming from one Mini at once | 9 to 5 Mac
  In case you ever wanted to know how well the Apple iTunes streaming scales, here is your answer…
  (tags: itunes appletv)
• PR 2.0: Saying More with Less: A Directory of Short URL Services
  Top Responses – In order of votes
  1. TinyURL
  2. Bit.ly
  3. Is.gd
  4. BUDURL
  5. Tr.im
  (tags: tinyurl)
• Twitter Tools README | alexking.org
  Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
  (tags: twitter wordpress)

web2.0

• iPhone Programming Tutorial – Creating a ToDo List Using SQLite Part 1 | iCodeBlog
  If you have been following my tutorials, you know that we have been working primarily with UITableViews. This is mostly because SO many applications can be developed using this simple control. This final UITableView tutorial will be taking all of the skills learned from previous tutorials, putting them all together, and adding SQLite to create a prioritized To-Do list. I will also be showing you how to add multiple columns to your table cells and we will be exploring some of the other controls that the iPhone has to offer. What good would the tutorials be if we didn’t use them to create something useful.
  (tags: iphone development)
• Azure Services Platform
  The Azure Services Platform provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the internet.
  (tags: cloudcomputing msft)
• Apache ESME
  Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME) is a secure and highly scalable microsharing and micromessaging platform that allows people to discover and meet one another and get controlled access to other sources of information, all in a business process context.
  (tags: opensource twitter adobeintegratedruntime esme apache scala)
• Source Code For Twitter-Like App, Trillr, Now Available | OStatic
  Developers of Trillr, a microblogging project similar to Twitter, announced this week that its source code is now available to anyone who wants it.
  (tags: opensource twitter)
• FilePhile: Free Unlimited File Transfer
  Any Computer, Any File, Any Size, Anywhere
  With Professional Grade Encryption
  (tags: filesharing)
• FeedMyTorrents.com – Your source for automatic downloading
  What if you could automatically download the latest episode of your favorite TV-show? You can use any of our TV-show RSS Feeds, and add them to your favorite BitTorrent program or media center. These RSS Feeds are filtered, and contain no duplicates. You get the correct file, without hassle.
  (tags: torrents)

web2.0

• LogoInstant.com | Download Free Web 2.0 Logo Designs
  (tags: logo)
• Black Holes: It Costs Digg $5 Million a Year to Run the Internet
  Perhaps Digg really is the future of the news business. The headline-discussion site, once an icon of the Web 2.0 movement, is losing millions of dollars a year.

  BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante got ahold of Digg's financial statements. They are frightful, even for a startup. Last year, the company took in $4.8 million and spent $7.6 million, for a loss of $2.8 million. In the first nine months of this year, losses grew almost as fast as revenues: Digg took in $6.4 million and spent $10.4 million, resulting in a $4 million loss. At an annual clip, that's more than $5 million out the door a year.

  (tags: web2.0 digg)

web2.0

• Long Tail theory contradicted as study reveals 10m digital music tracks unsold – Times Online
  a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this “long tail” theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.
  (tags: longtail marketing)
• Ruby on Rails: Merb
  Merb and Rails started sharing more and more of the same ideas and even implementation. This led to a fair amount of unnecessary duplication on both sides of the fence and led to some paradox of choice. When do I choose one over the other and when?
  (tags: rubyonrails merb)
• Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway.
  In 1998, a company received $4.8 million in funding to "beam money between Palm Pilots." I'll code-name this product: MoneyBeamer. Would you have invested in them? Not with an idea like that. You'd be wrong though — it was PayPal.
  (tags: startups)
• Krunchd.com – Krunch Multiple URLs into One Short URL
  What makes Krunchd special is how many URLs it allows you to shorten at once. You see, with Krunchd, you're not just shortening one URL, you're crunching (pun intended) an entire list of URLs into one short URL. It's a concept similar to Agglom. Only instead of using browser tabs, it brings the recipient to a list of URLs you'd like to share.
  (tags: tinyurl)

web2.0

• schnell-jruby – Google Code
  schnell-jruby
  schnell is a zippy (Fast), yippy (Easy) and hippy (Cool) tool for testing websites
  (tags: monitoring ruby)
• The Pirate Bay Launches Free Mobile Video Converter | TorrentFreak
  The ViO converter reduces AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV and others videos to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality, and claims to do it faster than any other converter. The tool is completely free and comes with pre-configured settings for the most wisely used mobile devices, including the iPod, iPhone and BlackBerry.
  (tags: bittorrent converter)

web2.0

• Tweet Weather | Chicago, IL, US
  Tweet Weather was built with great haste by @aviel, and made possible by the wonderful Twitter and Weather Bug APIs.
  (tags: twitter mashups weather)
• Easy Tweets – Sign Up
  EasyTweets is a marketing tool that makes it easy to promote and grow your business by marketing on Twitter. With EasyTweets, you can manage up to 100 Twitter accounts from one central web-based platform, automatically post content, schedule items to post in the future, as well as read, reply, and follow conversations.
  (tags: advertising twitter)
• Digg’s Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product
  So Business Week gets their hands on Digg’s financials and reports that the company had 2007 revenues of $4.8 million and losses of $2.8 million. The first three quarters of 2008 Digg had revenues of $6.4 million and losses of $4 million. That implies total 2008 revenue of $8.5 million, with $5.3 million in losses.
  (tags: digg monetization)
• sIFR lite
  Looking at their code, I decided I would create a "lite" version of sIFR using a more object-oriented approach. sIFR Lite is a bit easier to read, and more intuitive to use. The only drawbacks are that it is currently unproven on a large scale in the real world.
  (tags: sifr)

web2.0

• Snipt – code snippets
  Snipt is your collection of frequently used commands or code snippets.
  Because even Subversion gurus forget the 'svn merge' syntax sometimes.
  (tags: programming snippets)

web2.0

• Season 2 Online Premiere – Flight of the Conchords
  Season 2 Online Premiere – Flight of the Conchords (US Only)
  Bret and Jemaine are back and finally so is The Flight of the Conchords (US Only – sorry, Kraplakistan)
  (tags: humor fotc)
• How To Download and Play Flash Games Offline | MakeUseOf.com
  File2HD can help you download flash games from most of the online gaming sites. That being said, it doesn’t work with Kongregate, one of the best sites for Flash games. Althou I had no problems getting flash games from hugely popular sites like AddictiveGames.
  (tags: flash)
• Secrets – prefPane to change hidden settings
  A database of hidden settings for Mac OS X
  (tags: osx prepane)
• StomperScrutinizer Eye-Tracking Simulator
  StomperScrutinizer Eye-Tracking Simulator
  (tags: testing usability)
• JumpBox Instant Infrastructure
  JumpBox Open is a subscription service that provides IT at small and mid-sized organizations with a suite of over 30 ready to deploy applications. Each application is packaged as a "JumpBox," a virtual application enhanced with JumpBox technology that allows you to deploy in minutes. Whether you want to develop software, manage customers, enhance education, or build communities, JumpBox Open is your essential IT ToolBox.
  (tags: aws ec2 ami jumpbox)
• Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips
  # 2. Use a cheat sheet
  # 3. Combine all your scripts and minify them
  # 4. Use Firebug's excellent console logging facilities
  # 5. Keep selection operations to a minimum by caching
  # 6. Keep DOM manipulation to a minimum
  # 7. Wrap everything in a single element when doing any kind of DOM insertion
  # 8. Use IDs instead of classes wherever possible
  # 9. Give your selectors a context
  (tags: jQuery)
• Top 29 Free UX Tools and Extensions | UX Booth
  Ever wonder how usable your site appears to someone with a disability, slower connection, or different setup? This list of tools highlights some of the most useful tools and extensions for making your website more usable.
  (tags: usability ui accessibiliy)
• Amazon Web Services Blog: JumpBox – Ready To Use Applications For EC2
  now supporting Amazon EC2 with a lineup of 12 public AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) containing pre-built and pre-configured open source applications. You can launch blogging tools, CRM tools, development tools, and lots more.
  (tags: aws ec2 jumpbox)
• Coding Horror: Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface
  If you're considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design. When you build a "desktop in the web browser"-style application, you're violating users' unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption.
  (tags: webdesign ria ui)
• Wonderfl Build Flash Onine
  flash browser based ide
  (tags: flash ide)
• SpringSource releases a fully supported, business-friendly edition of Tomcat 6.0
  early next year version 1.0 of tc Server, a fully supported, business-friendly edition of Tomcat 6.0, will be available
  (tags: tomcat springsource tweet)
• Monitor SNMP
  Monitis offers a unique and easy to use monitoring system. Extra value is added by Monitis support team, and we get quick response to questions and reports. The unique interface is easy to use and informative at the same time making setting up monitoring in a browser anywhere a breeze.
  (tags: monitoring)
• Windows crushing Linux in netbook market
  "Our Windows XP netbooks are outselling Linux machines by more than 9 to 1," Henry Lee senior product manager – retail channel manager, Acer Computer Australia
  (tags: netbooks)

web2.0

• Redmond Developer News | JavaFX Faces off Against Adobe, Microsoft
  JavaFX 1.0 joins Microsoft Silverlight 2 and the Adobe stack of Flash, Flex and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) as the third major RIA offering. Many industry watchers are skeptical of the late entry, but Michael CotŽ, industry analyst for RedMonk, says JavaFX enjoys some of the same advantages that have made Silverlight a success. "As with Silverlight, JavaFX has the huge advantage of an existing developer community — namely Java," he says.
  (tags: javafx ria)
• GoDaddy hosts Exchange to offer first desktop mail service – NYTimes.com
  GoDaddy is offering two plans for individuals and small businesses that want to use Microsoft Outlook e-mail client and Exchange messaging server hosted on GoDaddy's infrastructure. One plan offers one Outlook mailbox with 2G bytes of storage for US$9.99 a month. The other offers five Outlook mailboxes with a total of 20G bytes of storage for $59.99 a month.
  (tags: msexchange)
• Slashdot | Drop-In Replacement For Exchange Now Open Source
  "Over 150 man-years of work were added to the Open Source community today when Zarafa decided to put their successful Exchange server replacement under GPLv3. This is not just the typical mail-server-that-works-with-Outlook, it is the whole package — including 100% MAPI, web access, tasks, iCal and Activesync. (The native syncing works great with my iPhone!) Binaries and source are available for all major Linux distros."
  (tags: opensource msexchange)
• Scoop is an RSS Feed Reader Adobe® AIR™ Application
  Scoop is an RSS Feed Reader Adobe® AIR™ Application with offline/online Google Reader synchronization built in. It keeps track of multiple Google Reader accounts simultaneously. Read, tag and star your scoops/posts on the train or wherever you like and Scoop will synchronize your changes with Google when you’re back online.
  (tags: adobeintegratedruntime rssreader)
• Fuzebox – Open Source Game Console
  The Fuzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into designing and creating their own video games and demos. A full-featured core runs in the background and does all the video and audio processing so that your code stays clean and easy to understand.
  (tags: opensource hardware)
• A quick way to get memcached status | MySQL Performance Blog
  There are all sorts of different interfaces to memcached, but you don't need any of them to make requests from the command line, because its protocol is so simple. Try this, assuming it's running on the usual port on the local machine:
  (tags: memcached)
• Rational Survivability: The Big Four Cloud Computing Providers: Security Compared (Part I)
  Below is a table that lists these key players, and compares their offerings from the perspective of four core defining aspects of clouds. As this is a comparison of apples to oranges to grapefruit to perhaps pastrami, it is not meant to be a ranking of the participants, nor a judgement of when to choose one over the other. Instead, what I hope to do here is to give a working sysadmin's glimpse into what these four clouds are about, and why they are each unique approaches to enterprise cloud computing in their own right.
  (tags: cloudcomputing)
• Yii PHP Framework: Best for Web 2.0 Development
  Yii is a high-performance component-based PHP framework best for developing large-scale Web applications. It comes with a full stack of features, including MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, jQuery-based AJAX support, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, input validation, widgets, events, theming, Web services, and so on. Written in strict OOP, Yii is easy to use and is extremely flexible and extensible.
  (tags: frameworks php)
• Google’s Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More
  Google’s Apps SLA may guarantee 99,9% uptime, but this little loophole makes it darn easy for the company to honor that.
  (tags: sla)
• Livescribe and the Pulse Smartpen on the Mac – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  Unfortunately the Mac beta lacks a few key features for some: printing your own paper, archiving and exporting Flash animations are possible deal-killers. If you can live with those in the short-term (assuming Livescribe will rapidly update the software), I would certainly recommend the hardware.
  (tags: livescribe smartpen)
• HTTP Client – Mac Developer Tool for HTTP Debugging
  A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.
  (tags: debugging testing http restful)
• Netflix Awards $50,000 Progress Prize in Year Two of Multi-Year, Multi-National Netflix Prize Competition – Yahoo! Finance
  BellKor in BigChaos team members will travel to Netflix headquarters on December 17 to receive the $50,000 at a ceremony at which they will publicly present the team's results to an audience of Netflix executives, academicians, computer scientists and others. Netflix will publish a detailed description of BellKor in BigChaos's submission for the benefit of companies, entrepreneurs and academicians.

  In the meantime, the competition for the grand prize continues until someone hits the 10 percent milestone and captures the $1 million purse.

  (tags: recommendations)
• Introducing Cache Money « Magic Scaling Sprinkles
  A solution to this brittle, messy coding style is now available, and ready for production use. `Cache Money` is a plugin for ActiveRecord that transparently provides write-through and read-through caching functionality using Memcached. With `Cache Money`, queries are automatically cached for you; and similarly, cache expiry happens automatically as after_save and after_destroy events.
  (tags: scalability rubyonrails caching)
• Yahoo! Query Language – YDN
  The YQL platform provides a single endpoint service that enables developers to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo! and beyond. YQL exposes a SQL-like SELECT syntax that that is both familiar to developers and expressive enough for getting the right data. Through the SHOW and DESC commands we enable developers to discover the available data sources and structure without opening another web browser.
  (tags: scraping restful ygl)
• Salasaga – GUI authoring environment for learning material
  Imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we're well on the way to a first release for doing that.

  Initially similar to Adobe Captivate, but will eventually incorporate an AJAX (browser based) playback capability for advanced content. Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning, and this appears to be addressed by the existing capabilities of AJAX in browsers these days.

  (tags: e-learning ide contentproduction)
• YQL – converting the web to JSON with mock SQL
  Here comes the kicker though: for all the open services that don't need authentication you can use these YQL statements as a REST API with JSON output and an optional callback function for JSON-P by adding it to http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?. For example to get the latest three headlines from Ajaxian's RSS feed as JSON and wrap it in a function called leechajaxian do the following:
  (tags: scraping restful yql webservice)
• Deploying Rails on Dreamhost with Passenger // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
  There are three steps. Create your site, capify your app and deploy. Once you have done this a few times, it will only take a few minutes to do all of these steps, but if you are new to any of this, don’t get frustrated if it takes you a few hours. Each time it will get a little faster.
  (tags: rubyonrails dreamhost passenger)
• Deploying Sinatra on Dreamhost With Passenger // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
  Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby with minimal effort, as quoted from the Sinatra website. It is great for really simple, really fast services and in general is fun to make apps with. Since I showed how to deploy your Rails apps on Dreamhost, I thought I would also cover how to deploy your Sinatra apps as well.
  (tags: sinatra ruby dreamhost passenger)
• HTTP Status Code
  # 424 Failed Dependency
  # 425 (Unordered Collection)
  # 426 Upgrade Required
  (tags: http)
• 7 Good Rules to Log Exceptions | Code Monkeyism
  1. Only log technical exceptions not user exceptions
  User exceptions are either ok and need not to be logged (”login name already exists”) but shown to the user, or no exception at all (”user has no credit left”). Technical exceptions are those you need to debug (”no file storage left”, “could not book product”) and react to. If you log everything you will probably get too many log entries to have a meaningful reaction to exceptions in your log. You should inquire into every exception in your log files and find the cause for it (”is it a bug?”). Too many exceptions will make you sloppy with exceptions in your log files (”nah, just another exception”).
  (tags: programming exception)

web2.0

• 52 Must Read Quotes from Legendary Investor – Warren Buffett | Investing School
  #7: I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
  (tags: quotes investing)
• MathBin.net – Math pastebin for equation rendering
  Now that you know the basics of MathBin, you need to get up-to-speed on the basics of LaTeX. Don't be alarmed when you start looking at it, it's really quite simple! Try searching for introductions to LaTeX equations.

  We also have a handy LaTeX reference page on this site for you to use.

  (tags: equationediting latex)
• Trouble in the (99-cent) App Store – Apple 2.0
  “But what happens when we start talking about bigger projects: something that takes 6 or even 9 man months? That’s either $150K or $225K in development costs with a break even at 215K or 322K units. Unless you have a white hot title, selling 10-15K units a day for a few weeks isn’t going to happen. There’s too much risk.
  (tags: iphone appstore)
• Meetup's Dead Simple User Testing – Boing Boing
  On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed of someone using Meetup. Said user was having a hard time figuring out a new feature, and the product people, riveted, were taking notes. It was the simplest setup I'd ever seen for user feedback, and I asked Scott how often they did that sort of thing. "Every day" came the reply.
  (tags: usability ux)
• Exceptional | Exception tracking and managing for Rails folks and their apps
  Exceptional is an exception tracking and managing utility for Rails folks and all their apps.
  (tags: rubyonrails exception production)
• 10 Ways to Cut Down Web Development Time – Six Revisions
  8. Invest time in requirements-gathering and planning phases
  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Though some schools of thought emphasize on not wasting too much time on planning out the path from start to completion – it’s still essential to appropriate enough time in making sure you’ve gathered all the information you need to know. Not committing time to requirements-gathering can also lead to feature creep because of unanticipated feature requirements.
  (tags: requirements)
• Easy Upload via URL with Paperclip – almost effortless
  I've been using Paperclip to handle file uploads lately, and I wanted to be able to accept file "uploads" with a URL. We already knew how to accomplish this with attachment_fu, and getting it working in Paperclip wasn't too difficult.
  (tags: rubyonrails filesystem plugins)
• Projects – Paperclip
  Paperclip is a plugin for Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord that lets files work as simply as any other attributes do. There are no extra database tables, only one library to install for image processing, and the ease of being able to refer to your files as easily as you refer to your other attributes.
  (tags: rubyonrails filesystem plugins uploads)
• Google cranks up the Consensus Engine • The Register
  Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

  Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

  (tags: seo)
• Robby on Rails : Launching Ruby on Rails projects, a checklist
  As mentioned, these are just a handful of things that we have learned to avoid overlooking (through trial and error). I’m hoping to share more thoughts on launching in the near future and would love to hear from all of you on things that you’ve come across. What works? What doesn’t work?
  (tags: rubyonrails production)
• 25 Amazing JavaScript Games (Some Fun And Inspiration)
  JavaScript, with the rise of Ajax, is definitely a must-know-well for every web designer/developer.

  Besides form controls, alerts & similar simple JavaScript usage, you can almost do anything with the help of JavaScript (& Canvas).

  (tags: javascript ria ajax games)
• List of open source games – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Open source games are computer games assembled out of, and are themselves open-source software; public domain games are also listed. For some of these games, only the game engine is open-source software, and the game content is not open content, and is under a different license.
  (tags: opensource games)
• Need help with class? YouTube videos await (AP)
  Math videos won't rival the millions of hits garnered by laughing babies, but a YouTube tutorial on calculus integrals has been watched almost 50,000 times in the past year. Others on angular velocity and harmonic motion have gotten more than 10,000 views each.
  (tags: e-learning crowdsourcing youtube)

web2.0

• basecamp firefox scripts – Userscripts.org
  (tags: greasemonkey basecamp)
• Visual jQuery 1.2.6
  (tags: jQuery)
• Turn your iPod touch into a VoIP phone with Truphone | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com
  You will need a second generation iPod touch and a headset with a microphone to use Truphone, but with the large number of iPod touch and iPhone users there could be a real community of people available that you can now call for free when connected to a WiFi access point. Plus, as Andrew pointed out there are some amazing features coming soon.
  (tags: iphone appstore voip)
• Ruby, Rails, Web2.0 » Thinking About Switching to jQuery?
  Here are some articles and stuff I found useful when I was in your shoes:
  (tags: rubyonrails jQuery)
• Pancheros Gets Twitter … Kinda | Ted Murphy
  How about holding a Tweetup with free or discounted product at Pancheros in each city they have locations. Perhaps people could get a free taco by Tweeting out a phrase like “@pancheros hooked me up with a free chicken taco at the Orlando tweetup”. Utilize the network effect of Twitter to spread the word at low cost.
  (tags: twitter)
• The Plagiarism Checker
  Instructions: Cut & paste your students paper or homework assignment into the box below, and click the "check" button. This free plagiarism detector will find plagiarized text in homework and other essays/reports.
  (tags: e-learning plagarism)
• EC2 Infrastructure – MindTouch Developer Center
  The migration of the wik.is cluster to Amazon EC2 (using RightScale) has vastly improved the architecture of wik.is. Here are some of the technical challenges we faced and how we addressed them using the RightScale/EC2 platform.
  (tags: haproxy aws ec2 loadbalancing ebs memcached rightscale)
• Eventually Consistent – Werner Vogels
  *Eventual consistency. This is a specific form of weak consistency; the storage system guarantees that if no new updates are made to the object, eventually all accesses will return the last updated value. If no failures occur, the maximum size of the inconsistency window can be determined based on factors such as communication delays, the load on the system, and the number of replicas involved in the replication scheme. The most popular system that implements eventual consistency is DNS (Domain Name System). Updates to a name are distributed according to a configured pattern and in combination with time-controlled caches; eventually, all clients will see the update.
  (tags: database eventualconsistency)

web2.0