Definitly turn up your paranoia when dealing with e-mail, security or payements. If someone’s picture doesn’t upload occasionally due to an ill-conceived model, that not a huge problem. If 30k people get sent a bad e-mail, hacked, or overcharged due to three lines of code, that’s a serious bummer.
Sphinx is our favorite tool for the job. Written in C++ by Andrew Aksyonoff, and originally released to open source in 2001, Sphinx is a blazing fast search engine. Considering that fast and complex full-text searching is a somewhat frequent need, I’ve put together this post with my top five tips for implementing Sphinx.
Metal Lights Wallpaper by ~ToffeeNut on deviantART
Minimal desktop with two styles: Spotlights and Streaks.
Remove the Add Bookmark button from Safari 4
By default, the Add Bookmark button (+) is attached to the URL address in Safari 4. There isn't an option to turn it off, but there's a workaround...
Productivity Tip: Empty Your Dock
Inspired partially by my preparation for the Tiger upgrade and partially by my proficiency with QuickSilver, I’ve emptied everything out of the doc. Only the Finder and Trash are persistent. Everything else, in when in use, out when not.
...taking everything you own, save for the bare essentials, and moving it into storage. For a set period of time, retrieve items from the store when needed. Anything not accessed after said set period of time you likely do not really need and should be disposed of.
The wood-like wallpaper pack. Hope u'll like it.
The Funded Publishes Ideal First Round Term Sheet
Start with the Y Combinator docs for your first early angel round, and move to Adeo’s document in your first real round of venture capital.
Start a Sinatra server on port 4000; GET / to that server triggers a git pull and mod_rails restart; Hit port 4000 locally after pushing
Previous on this blog alluded to my misgivings about the big merge between Rails and Merb. I liked the trimmed-down, uncomplicated API of Merb. I knew what it was going to do and how to make non-standard things happen. Well it looks like Rails 3 is getting some of that mojo.
Rails Rumble :: Welcome to the '09 Rumble
The Rails Rumble is a 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, your team gets one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby and Rails.
SizeUp 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). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems.
After considering a number of options (some wildly different from others), we decided that working with MSNBC.com was the best fit for our site and our team.
ChangeDetection.com provides page change monitoring and notification services to internet users worldwide. Anyone can use our service to monitor any website page for changes.
Video Game Lessons for Business Strategy
I see video games as a petri dish, a place where the challenges and rewards of the real world are simulated in a simpler, more discrete fashion. Often the challenges faced remind me of the same challenges I face in my work as an entrepreneur. In the spirit of Scott Berkun’s Management lessons from Gears of War 2, I present you three business lessons I’ve learned from video games.
I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it.
Deadweight is RCov for CSS, kind of. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.
Continuous Integration Spring Cleaning at GitHub
We’re currently in the process of revamping our test suite (which we’ll blog about in the future) and moving servers, so I thought it’d be a good time to re-evaluate our options.
IHKH is a minimalist Flickr viewer. Captions and titles are omitted and metadata is hidden until needed. Images can be made large in place.
vestal_versions keeps in the spirit of consolidating to one versions table, polymorphically associated with its parent models. But it goes one step further by storing a serialized hash of only the models’ changes.
A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.
RED is a robot that checks HTTP resources to see how they'll behave, pointing out common problems and suggesting improvements. Although it is not a HTTP conformance tester, it can find a number of HTTP-related issues.
