Links from 2010

A minimap plugin for TextMate.

Essential Tools for developing Javascript in TextMate

More than 30 of the most successful FontFont families are now available as Web FontFonts®, including FF DIN®, FF Meta®, FF Dax®, and FF Kievit®.

Provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement.

Akira Kiteshi – Ming The Merciless (Hexstatic video edit)

Occasionally I get asked how I have time to write a blog, a book and whatever ads need doing on a particular day. The short answer is that I just get up and, at some point, do them all.

In the second extract from his book Eating Animals, the novelist reveals how intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement is essentially underwater factory farming.

Code and configuration used in [Jacob Kaplan-Moss'] Django Deployment Workshop.

The Movement Method Cards are a collection of strategies gathered to inspire, guide, and elevate the creative process. Use the cards to spark ideas, facilitate conversations, categorize strategies, or for designing your own design processes.

Cat -> Pigeons.

A unique social networking website dedicated to travel overland and water by any means possible.

Because we are so fixated on what the next thing might be, we hurry to get the current thing out of the way, even if that means doing the minimum required rather than playing with style. In this sense, games’ standard strategies of motivation are strangely demotivating.

Swywths are those voices inside your head telling you want you want to hear. Send in your secret thoughts and we'll say them for you. They might even feature in an Radio 4 Afternoon Play.

I’m interested in looking at the loudness for the recordings of a number of artists to see how wide-spread this loudness war really is. To do this I used the Echo Nest remix API and a bit of Python to collect and plot loudness for a set of recordings. I did two experiments. First I looked at the loudness for music by some of my favorite or well known artists. Then I looked at loudness over a large collection of music.

Use this application to look at tempo plots for any song to see which bands have a machine controlling the heartbeat of the band. Type in the name of an artist and/or track and get a click plot of the track. If a machine is setting the beat for the song, the click plot will show only small deviations from the average tempo. A flat line means a machine is setting the beat.

Lots of rather exciting music analysis APIs.

django-devserver provides a simple drop-in runserver replacement. It allows you to run a command, python manage.py rundevserver, and to get some additional information. As of writing, that additional information includes real-time SQL logging (aka mass query spam in your terminal), and a summary of cache calls.

Allows you to upload files using HTML5 Gears, Silverlight, Flash, BrowserPlus or normal forms, providing some unique features such as upload progress, image resizing and chunked uploads.

Arrange a meeting or event. Work out which day is good for everyone and keep track of who is coming

What differentiates this thesaurus from any other is that it is, as the title announces, historical: combining the data of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Thesaurus of Old English, it presents meanings in chronological order, noting when terms first appeared, often when they disappeared, or whether they were one-shots, lovely doomed coinages such as “moonling”.

Exciting!

"The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices." Overstating things somewhat but still a useful reminder.

In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon (plural taxa) is a taxon that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later.

More money isn't one of them.

Cake or death?

These font-stacks are created after considering the font-share percentage on both Mac and Windows platforms and then checked in browser for x-height and other issues (like: readability).

What my shell script does is allow you to automate correctly backing up a standard MySQL database, or databases, with full end-to-end encryption to an offsite location.

The fold is one of those guidelines that has been thrown about so much that it's now become a 'rule' of web design (or maybe more appropriately a 'ball and chain' of web design) with web designers blindly obeying without question.

Facebook Page apps.

Create your own site with music from SoundCloud, gigs from Songkick or Last.fm, news/posts from Tumblr.

Uses the Last.fm API to find similar artists on Spotify. Very nice.

A comprehensive environment for interactive and exploratory computing [featuring] an enhanced interactive Python shell [and] an architecture for interactive parallel computing.

Allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys).

A new MySQL database management application written from the ground up exclusively for Mac OS X Leopard.

The V&A will be staging a contemporary architecture exhibition in June 2010 exploring the power of small spaces. A number of international architects have been asked to design structures which explore notions of refuge and 'retreat'. These buildings which examine themes such as play, work, performance and study will be built at full-scale in various spaces within the V&A.

Useful one to point clients at. "A couple of years ago, Googlers confirmed they did not use TITLE attribute in the algorithm because it was used too seldom. This has changes since then but I still failed to spot any evidence that link TITLE attribute somehow influenced the rankings."

Expensive, hefty looking font server.