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Snipt is your collection of frequently used commands or code snippets.
Because even Subversion gurus forget the 'svn merge' syntax sometimes.
Archive | December, 2008
links for 2008-12-19
December 19, 2008
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links for 2008-12-18
December 18, 2008
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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) -
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.
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A database of hidden settings for Mac OS X
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StomperScrutinizer Eye-Tracking Simulator
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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.
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# 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 -
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.
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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.
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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.
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flash browser based ide
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early next year version 1.0 of tc Server, a fully supported, business-friendly edition of Tomcat 6.0, will be available
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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.
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"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
links for 2008-12-17
December 17, 2008
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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.
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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.
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"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."
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Google’s Apps SLA may guarantee 99,9% uptime, but this little loophole makes it darn easy for the company to honor that.
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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.
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A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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# 424 Failed Dependency
# 425 (Unordered Collection)
# 426 Upgrade Required -
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”).
links for 2008-12-16
December 16, 2008
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#7: I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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Exceptional is an exception tracking and managing utility for Rails folks and all their apps.
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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. -
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.
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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.
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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:
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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?
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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).
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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.
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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.
links for 2008-12-14
December 14, 2008
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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.
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Here are some articles and stuff I found useful when I was in your shoes:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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*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.
links for 2008-12-13
December 13, 2008
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Since we’ve made all these changes, we have been able to scale memcached to handle 200,000 UDP requests per second with an average latency of 173 microseconds. The total throughput achieved is 300,000 UDP requests/s, but the latency at that request rate is too high to be useful in our system. This is an amazing increase from 50,000 UDP requests/s using the stock version of Linux and memcached.
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Freshbump is a daily visual inspiration source for industries including, but not limited to: Advertising, Architecture, Computer Arts, Graphic Design, Illustration, Industrial Design, Interior Design, and Photography.
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The company needs to buy 50,000 servers alone in 2008 and 2009 to manage its traffic and storage needs.
XP QoW: The Big Visible Chart
December 12, 2008
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end of Chapter 11:
“The basic XP management tool is the metric….The medium of the metric is the Big Visible Chart. Rather than send e-mail to everyone, which they learn to ignore, the manager periodically (no less than weekly) updates a prominent chart. This is often all the intervention thats needed. You think there aren’t enough tests being written? Put a chart of the number of tests up, update it every day.
Don’t have too many metrics, and be prepared to retire metrics that have served their purpose. Three of four measures are typically all a team can stand at one time.”
links for 2008-12-12
December 12, 2008
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From my own experience, team members that you can rely on to just take on work and complete tasks are rare, but worth spending the time to find. It’s not always clear from interviews or reference checks that they have these traits.
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take abandoned subway cars, mount them on a rooftop, and use them for office space, renting space to artists for 15 pounds a week. The project, Village Underground is sure to inspire other green-minded, socially conscious artistic efforts.
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Mr. Williams, who counts about 180,000 subscribers to his videos, said he was earning $17,000 to $20,000 a month via YouTube. Half of the profits come from YouTube’s advertisements, and the other half come from sponsorships and product placements within his videos, a model that he has borrowed from traditional media.
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RPX handles the UI, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data for your website. Get up and running in less than a day. It’s easy for you, and your users!
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Domain hack search utility.
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domain suggestions, name spinner,
expired and expiring domain name search,
for sale domains, whois lookup and registration -
With the new main feature, customers will pay for a local connection to the GSM network before the rest of the call is connected using VoIP. That would make an international call around $.06 per minute from the US to another country (or 3 pence if you were calling from the UK).
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NEVER Assume You Don't Have Nil
Maybe you assume that your ActiveRecord object has an association on it, like address. So you innocently type user.address.telephone and blam! Your application blows up because address was, in fact, nil.
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This document is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.
links for 2008-12-11
December 11, 2008
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The Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform specializes in presenting information to people and helping them work with it. Wherever information lives in an enterprise, a Curl application can present it right on the desktop of the people who need to see it, understand it, and use it. Curl lets enterprises break out of the "dumb terminal" trap that standard Web application practices lead to.
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Is anyone the REAL maintainer of the MySQL gem these days?
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Tweetanium is a desktop Twitter client that was built using Titanium, JQuery, Appcelerator, and the Twitter API.
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Therefore, Flash is unlikely to ever "win" the war of the Web application. The technology will continue to maintain its entrenched position at the apex of Adobe's hill, while the rest of the combatants go around them and continue to pick up more troops.
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What you may not know is just how easy it is to integrate most of these services with Rails. Between Rails-specific plugins and Ruby projects, you can quickly take advantage of the services that Amazon offers. Here's a survey of the available integration pieces.
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As with any large project, we found that a book was too big to hold in mind all at once, and definitely too big to guarantee remembering those many promising ideas that came up at times we were least able to pursue them. Some of these ideas would start as off-the-cuff thoughts and, when followed up, grow to change large parts of our major concept. So it was important to record them, and give them room. A large number of recorded ideas means, of course, that it's easy to get out of sync with project partners, and that's where the wiki as shared memory comes in. Using a wiki for your big projects keeps all participants on the same page.
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37 Phenomenal jQuery Plugins and Demos for Developers
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There is no free lunch. REST is not a panacea. The biggest problem most will have with REST is that it requires you to rethink your problem in terms of manipulations of addressable resources instead of method calls to a component. Of course you may actually implement it on the server side however you want. But the API you communicate to your clients should be in terms of HTTP manipulations on XML documents addressed by URIs, not in terms of method calls with parameters.
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Producteev is a new generation Task Management web application that drastically simplifies the way you work with your team.
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Any Device, Anywhere
Record your expenses via Email, iPhone, SMS, Voice, Twitter, IM, search box, and more.
links for 2008-12-10
December 10, 2008
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css gallery for iPhone
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Andrew Schaper, the 17-year-old founder, launched Soshiku after he himself could not find any reliable, easy way to keep track of his schoolwork. Aimed primarily at high school and college students, Soshiku has been made with ease of use and accessibility in mind.
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He’s hired someone to start vetting stories that the algorithm says are headlines, to either push them up or get them off the site entirely.
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The skimr branch is our first attempt at refactoring, but to do it we’ve sacrificed quite a lot. A lot of functionality is currently missing, and the syntax has changed slightly. I wouldn’t yet consider this to be a release candidate, but it has been getting used successfully for a few months now in production so I think it’s worth a look.
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Litmus is a cross browser and OS testing tool that, like Meermeer, takes screenshots of web sites and returns results almost instantly. Unlike Meermeer, Litmus also tests HTML email, with an impressive list of 23 supported web browsers and 16 email clients. Litmus puts an emphasis on continuous testing and organization and allows you to keep track of all your tests, marking when a page has passed or failed in a browser so you can stay on top of what needs work on your web site.
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Chicago commuters just got a new resource that may lead to more helpful mashups: the Chicago Transit Authority Bus Tracker API. As recently announced, the API provides capability for developers to get bus routes and schedules, bus stop and arrival predictions, and more. Note that the API is not affiliated with the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)
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Jcrop is the image cropping plugin for jQuery.
You've successfully unpacked Jcrop. -
Creating equal-height columns with CSS is sometimes a bear. But who needs the hassle of faux columns, “clear” divs and the rest? With this bit of jQuery, you can easily equalize the heights of any group of elements.
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Google Analytics (intro video here) is powerful stuff, but one notable lacking feature is data on outgoing clicks. If you are using jQuery, plop this code on your page and you’ll be tracking outgoing clicks in no time.
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Sometimes, especially if you think you are an outsider, it’s worth taking a few risks. I remember my colleague Paul starting off a presentation once with the line (backed up on screen) – “Headscape is not a usability consultancy”. This was in response to the clients request to engage a usability consultancy. The thrust of Paul’s argument was that we are a lot more than that.
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Pianta’s team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.
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JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans.
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Please remind me to
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KidZui, the child-safe browser maker, has put out a Firefox extension that offers all the functionality of its standalone browser right inside of Firefox.
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Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps. We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities. We believe that Native Client technology will someday help web developers to create richer and more dynamic browser-based applications.
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UK Vertical Search & Price Comparison Categories
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“Titanium apps are more than web apps running in snapped-off web pages such as with Google Chrome; they’re full blown first class desktop apps with desktop app goodies like direct file system access, local database storage, desktop notifications–prerogatives that traditional desktop developers take for granted but Web devs usually have to do without.” – Bob Walsh, CNET
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Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online.
