Links from 2010

The next time you notice your sites not responding, try logging in and running the following command: 'for pid in $( ps -u $LOGNAME -o pid,command | grep peruser | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' ); do kill -9 $pid; done'

A program for converting between various markup formats. Input formats include markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX; output formats include HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, S5, DocBook, groff man, reStructuredText, markdown, and RTF.

Looks like a rather fine pub.

Lots of interesting bits here but the stats in particular stand out. "The death toll is not small. The UK, despite having an excellent road safety record, sees more people killed on the roads every year than died during the entire duration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; "According to the World Health Organization motor vehicle collisions are the 6th most common cause of death in developed nations, with an average rate of 20.8 per 100,000 populations in the year 2000 (30.8 for males, 11.0 for females). African nations have the world's highest road traffic injury mortality rates." (Wikipedia on traffic-related death rates.) 1.2 million were killed and 50 million injured in road traffic accidents in 2004."

Had some good recommendations for these people.

Enhances WordPress' handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality.

A classic.

Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.

Honking great lists of things to remember.

Lots of discussions re. ratios.

Comparison of "Asset managers for combining/compressing JavaScript/CSS and for versioning your media files."

However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara. Bollywood classics, Algerian Rai, Kuduro, French ballads – this is just a sample grab of the kind of sounds doing the rounds there, many of which can be found on Music from Saharan Cellphones, a mixtape put together by Portland-based blogger Christopher Kirkley.

Massive, quite useful presentation from Paul Adams at Google

An App for debugging web apps on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices.

Now you have a massive, global, ever-growing database of places which you can use for your web app.

...melted my brain.

Very practical.

A utility for arming (creating) many bees (micro EC2 instances) to attack (load test) targets (web applications)

Unexpected. "In Sweden, both Sony and UMG are making more money from Spotify than from any other retailer – online or offline."

NASA says, "the evidence for rapid climate change is compelling".

Web performance ammunition in Forbes. "The lack of consistent Internet access and speeds across geographies can be both a risk and an enormous opportunity for your business as it expands. Put simply, the businesses that can best optimize their websites and applications for better performance across the globe will have a distinct competitive advantage in the years to come."

Documented in more detail.

Or rather, how do you secure your machine?

"The following simple function in [...] functions.php file [strips] the protocol and domain name from URL strings"...

"Using a protocol-independent absolute path: <img src="//domain.com/img/logo.png"/>" Mmm, handy.

(by JimJam Graphics)

A nice-looking bit of CSS, markup and script for standardising forms.

"In the MusicBrainz/Wikipedia case, there is a deeper semantic option. DBTune.org provide awesome music datasets, among which is a MusicBrainz SPARQL service that contains relations identifying DBpedia entities, and consequently Wikipedia data, with MusicBrainz entities. A little bit of painful SPARQL, and your application is suitably enriched. And you are a happy developer because you have confidence in the join." Hawt. Hard.

a Django-inspired node.js framework

That message again, just so we’re clear – now every frickin’ band on the planet is making money for the major record labels. [...] The fact remains that in order to be fixed, the whole Myspace architecture has to be rebuilt from scratch, and they’re not going to do that. [...] My expectations were very low, and they have not been raised but confirmed. My account is closed. Tom is not my friend.

When you can only have 1% of your list unsubscribe, it means that you cannot use a service like MailChimp to clean up your list. They will shut your ass down, hard. You’ll get one warning, and that’s it.