Links from 2009

@font-face tests. "The same typeface looks very differently on different platforms, and even on the same platform if settings differ."

Some handy tips, not all 100% obvious. Like the phrase "infinite crawl space".

Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.

A system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure. The guilty developer can be identified and harassed without human intervention.

Under 5 minutes? WOW!

"Well, they suck." Yes, they do.

"What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites." Or perhaps, "what you always get asked to provide, whether you like it or not".

Youtube specs and, more usefully, guidelines for creating a brand channel (in case one should ever be so unlucky to have to do such a thing).

Probably the world's most sophisticated free web-based online barcode generator, based on Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript.

Friends tired of forking out for a Classic Super Club or a Wild Crayfish and Rocket to eat at their desk have asked me to chuck a few suggestions their way for something they can make themselves to take to work.

Mushrooms and roots in a paper or cloth bag; "bananas avocados, melons, marrows, courgettes, peppers, cucumbers and beans all become mushy and blackened much faster in a domestic fridge than a fruit bowl at room temperature."

There’s plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that’ll help you write a site using Django… but then what? You’ve still got to test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means all your beautiful code is for naught. This tutorial examines how best to cope when the Real World intrudes on your carefully designed website.

A hybrid web application/testing harness that automatically runs YSlow on a suite of pages of the user’s choosing at scheduled times, stores these results, and provides a host of graphs and other data concerning the results of these tests.

An evolving index of practical subjects for the Arduinotm and Freeduino microcontrollers

Offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

Here you can find the full content of the book, a blog with tips and updates about Git and the book and open source projects related to Git or referenced in the book.

feedly weaves your favorite content into a fun, magazine-like start page. based on Google Reader and Twitter.

Customer information collected with a FormSpring web form moves automatically into your Highrise contact database.

Most of which are fairly obvious. Still, useful to point at.

Nicely done. "slideViewer is a lightweight (1.5Kb) jQuery plugin wich allows to instantly create an image gallery by writing just few lines of HTML such as an unordered list of images".

""Toy Chest" collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects."

A classic quote from last time round: "The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster."

This short tutorial shall attempt to explain the git system to people who have no, or minimal experience on SCMs and version control tools.

While OmniTI has enormous breadth in the Internet space, we are primarily known as an Internet performance and scalability company. This made the fact that we received an F on YSlow! all the more embarrassing. This was a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing — something we evangelize against. I decided that I would fix that and aim to do it by the end of Steve’s presentation. A play-by-play follows.

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite. Here’s the list so far.

Enter the URL of any CSS file to view and modify its color spectrum

A Python library and command-line tool designed to streamline deploying applications or performing system administration tasks via the SSH protocol. It provides tools for running arbitrary shell commands (either as a normal login user, or via sudo), uploading and downloading files, and so forth.

The most interesting thing for Python fans will be undoubtedly their selection for the Web application framework. Maybe again unsurprisingly, they chose...Django

Wikia measures exit rate - the percentage of users that leave the site from a given page. Here they show that exit rate drops as pages get faster. The exit rate goes from ~15% for a 2 second page to ~10% for a 1 second page. This is another data point to add to the list of stats from Velocity that show that faster pages is not only better for users, it’s better for business.

This video was shot every Monday during March. All ‘news’, text and information was taken from internet news sites on the same days. All fauna was growing and prospering within a 2 mile radius of the Canary Wharf financial district.

Si Begg's next release out for free. "Don't get me wrong I'm all for me making money out of my music. But as I say, i'm not exactly churning out platinum hit singles here. I'm thinking its more likely I'll make my money a) from possibly licensing the tracks to compilations b) PRS royalties from radio play etc c) maybe getting the tracks used in film and TV d) gig, remix and production work encouraged by generally raising my profile. All of which is more likely to happen the more people that get to hear and hopefully enjoy my music."

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

'isReady' never gets set in FF3.5 if jQuery loaded after domready

I've heard that [this is good].

"According to parliamentary written answers received by Labour MP Tom Watson, the majority of departments still require staff to use IE6. Most have plans to upgrade to the more secure IE7, and some to IE8, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has no plans to change." Deary me. Hardly surprising. IE6 still unfortunately a player.

Does about a billion things to optimize sites. Tempting but not sure how much I'd trust this; feels like a sledgehammer option.

"Social networking for your toaster". Heh. A "web platform for remote control and monitoring".

"Web Workers allow you to run JavaScript in parallel on a web page, without blocking the user interface." Mmm, cool.

It's funny because it's true.

notes: Dear Royal Mail, here’s an idea for you

“How about you make something that would take away that hassle, but still let us send postcards to the people we love – printed objects that would arrive through the letterbox and make those people smile? Hmm?”

Please do this, Royal Mail. Or someone else?