Bookmarks for October 18th through December 20th

Thursday 22 December 2011 - Filed under Bookmarks

These are my links for October 18th through December 20th:

• Brendan’s blog » Visualizing Device Utilization – Brendan's overview of visualizing utilization is a must read.
• You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla – david ascher – RT @davidascher: New blog post about my take on Mozilla in 2012:
• Untitled (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/o11-083-ips-basics-523756.html) – I like @glynnfoster's pkg(5) summary: a good introduction.
• (500) http://ur1.ca/6hwco – Made my annual #Wikipedia donation today.
• How to Become a Kickass Plumber – with PEX | Mr. Money Mustache – "The technological revolution that made this activity drastically more easy and fun was the replacement of soldered copper pipes with flexible reinforced polyethylene pipes. These are commonly referred to as PEX (short for Poly-Ethylene-Crosslinked)…. PEX is so much better than copper in every way, you should immediately roll your eyes and sing a circus clown song at anyone who tells you they still do their plumbing with copper."
• SwiftKey X Keyboard Free – Android Market – I've just personalized @SwiftKey X for Android with my Twitter posts! Get it free at
• splinter – "Splinter is an open source tool for testing web applications using Python. It lets you automate browser actions, such as visiting URLs and interacting with their items."

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-22  ::  Stephen

Bookmarks for October 10th through October 17th

Monday 17 October 2011 - Filed under Bookmarks

These are my links for October 10th through October 17th:

• validate.js – "Lightweight JavaScript form validation library inspired by CodeIgniter. No dependencies…"
• Official Google Blog: A fall sweep – Disappointed at Code Search closing. It's an odd man out in the mostly focus-on-G+ fall sweep.
• Microcaching: Speed your app up 250x with no new code – Fenn’s Thoughts – "Microcaching is like an insulation layer for your app – Let's say your wordpress install (or rails app) can handle 20 requests/sec fairly happily. This is fine, up until the point where you get on HN and Reddit at the same time (greatest day of your life) and right at the critical time, your site collapses spectacularly amidst the deafening snarky jeers of your peers. The idea behind microcaching is to cap the amount of requests that can make it through to your app by letting nginx bear the brunt of your pageviews by caching content for a very small amounts of time (ie: 1 second or less)." Interesting technique; example nginx configuration given and explained.
• Android-x86 – Porting Android to x86 – "This is a project to port Android open source project to x86 platform…" Works in VirtualBox, at least.
• A List Apart: Articles: CSS Positioning 101 – A very clear introduction to CSS positioning.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-10-17  ::  Stephen

Bookmarks for September 7th through October 5th

Thursday 6 October 2011 - Filed under Bookmarks

These are my links for September 7th through October 5th:

• Untitled (http://www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/jenkins-user-conference-2011) – RT @kohsukekawa: My #jenkinsconf key note slides posted at
• Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What’s Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – RT @TheOnion: Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions
• Primarily Pandoc: Writing in Markdown instead of LaTeX « PhilTeX – Nice article on using pandoc for composition, rather than LaTeX. Includes example ePUB.
• Simple Quickcheck implementation for Python – Also links to a couple of other QuickCheck Python implementations. (Found based on bos's Strange Loop talk.)
• deck.js » Modern HTML Presentations – HTML/JS/CSS for in-browser presentations.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-10-06  ::  Stephen

Bespoke services: site/redis

Thursday 29 September 2011 - Filed under Software

For prototyping web applications, I have recently come to rely on having Redis handy. In various sketches or early versions, I’ve used it to store event logs, to persist a collection of simple objects, or to conveniently manage a particularly large dictionary.

To make it easy to have a redis-server running on an OpenSolaris-derived system, I’ve written an smf(5) service manifest:

• redis.xml

The default configuration of Redis is good enough for most prototyping scenarios, so this manifest assumes (a) that you’ve built and installed Redis to /usr/local, its default install location, and (b) are happy with the default configuration. In its default configuration, redis-server does not daemonize, and writes a log message every 5 seconds—you’ll very much want to change the latter if you move to production.

Exercises

1. Add a property group and property to store a configuration location, and modify the start method appropriately. This enhancement should be on the service, such that it can be easily overridden on each instance. (*)

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-09-29  ::  Stephen

Bookmarks for July 21st through August 13th

Sunday 21 August 2011 - Filed under Bookmarks

These are my links for July 21st through August 13th:

• Requests: HTTP for Humans — Requests v0.5.1 documentation – "Requests is an ISC Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings. Most existing Python modules for sending HTTP requests are extremely verbose and cumbersome. Python’s builtin urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you should need, but the api is thoroughly broken. It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to perform the simplest of tasks. Things shouldn’t be this way. Not in Python."
• Requests: HTTP for Humans — Requests v0.5.1 documentation – "Requests is an ISC Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings. Most existing Python modules for sending HTTP requests are extremely verbose and cumbersome. Python’s builtin urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you should need, but the api is thoroughly broken. It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to perform the simplest of tasks. Things shouldn’t be this way. Not in Python."
• assaf/zombie – GitHub – "Zombie.js is a lightweight framework for testing client-side JavaScript code in a simulated environment. No browser required."
• aptosid Manuals – Upgrade BIOS FreeDOS – "You may want, or have a need, to update the BIOS of your PC, when the manufacturer of the motherboard announces some improvement of BIOS software. The installer program usually offered is an application to run MS-DOS. This is a way to update BIOS from a USB in linux. This will work with USB keys, USB sticks and with micro/mini/SD cards (with a suitable adapter)."
• head.js – "Load scripts like images. Use HTML5 and CSS3 safely. Target CSS for different screens, paths, states and browsers. Make it the only script in your HEAD. A concise solution to universal issues." Multi-function JS lib, with parallel loading.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-08-21  ::  Stephen

Bookmarks for June 22nd through July 19th

Thursday 21 July 2011 - Filed under Bookmarks

These are my links for June 22nd through July 19th:

• CoffeeTable – Code – Alec Perkins – A drop-in workbench for experimentation, CoffeeTable provides a CoffeeScript-fluent console on a page, with persistent history and auto-suggest.
• Waterloo – Jobs – Google – Google opened an office a mile from my old high school. That neighborhood was all closed shoe and tire factories.
• The Observation Deck » In defense of intrapreneurialism – RT @bcantrill: In defense of intrapreneurialism: And curse you @trevoro for having taunted me with that red cape!
• matt blags – hivemind devops alert: nginx sucks at ssl – Benchmark of SSL handling by nginx, stunnel, stud, and the author's patched stud.
• smoke.js – "A framework-agnostic styled alert system for javascript. Lightweight, flexible, css3 animation, blah blah blah easy to use…"
• Eli Bendersky’s website » Blog Archive » Parsing C++ in Python with Clang – RT @tuan_kuranes_rs: Parsing C++ in Python with Clang:
• Lunch: The Patty Shack, Redwood City, CA | blueslugs.com – Bacon-wrapped hot dogs arrive in #redwoodcity.
• Jonas Galvez: HCSS – hcss is a CSS compiler that that allows you to use HTML element hierarchy to define CSS rules. hcss employs simple conventions for defining nested rules and minimalist class inheritance.
• Adam Leventhal’s blog » Flash news I wish I could read – RT @ahl: new blog post » Flash news I wish I could read
• Traffic Light Protocol – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – "The Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) was created[1][2] to encourage greater sharing of sensitive information. The originator signals how widely they want their information to be circulated beyond the immediate recipient." A simple document classification scheme.
• How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack – "Redis is different than other database solutions in many ways: it uses memory as main storage support and disk only for persistence, the data model is pretty unique, it is single threaded and so forth. I think that another big difference is that in order to take advantage of Redis in your production environment you don't need to switch to Redis. You can just use it in order to do new things that were not possible before, or in order to fix old problems." Redis's author illustrates some problems Redis makes easy.
• Gephi, an open source graph visualization and manipulation software – "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs." Java-based, uses OpenGL, cross-platform.
• Dive Into Dojo GFX | Facebook – SitePen's note on dojox.gfx has slightly more detailed examples than the base documentation.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-07-21  ::  Stephen

Menu: grilled salmon, anise, tomato, scallion, plus broiled goat cheese salad

Sunday 17 July 2011 - Filed under Cooking + House

Cooked because we had new propane, originally uploaded by schahn.

Dina took the boys out for the afternoon, so I decided to fire up the grill for dinner. The recipes are from Carroll (1999) and Brennan (2002). (The salad is not pictured; I didn’t broil the goat cheese pucks long enough, so plating was a challenge.)

Vinum California Rose for preparation and dinner.

References

Brennan, Georgeanne. Salad: William Sonoma Collection. (Free Press, 2002).

Carroll, John Phillip. Grilling. Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library. (Time Life Medical, 1992).

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-07-17  ::  Stephen

Irritating retrograde

Wednesday 6 July 2011 - Filed under Observations + Software

A government agency I interact with has updated their web-based client software. The original application was a basic sequence of web forms. Its replacement? An approximately ~50MiB Silverlight-based application. In the process of the update, they discarded my original web account and password. The backend service that the application must communicate with is still slow, operating costs now include the bandwidth to update cached copies (for performance reasons), and the application itself has new usability issues. Because of the switch from standardized Web technologies to Silverlight, the majority of their customers can’t run the application on their phone or tablet. (If it were Flash, iPads would still be excluded.) How was this change an upgrade, again?

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-07-06  ::  Stephen

Menu: Gazpacho, Grilled Steak with Chimichurri, Taco with Potato-Egg-Chevre-Salse Verde

Monday 4 July 2011 - Filed under Cooking + Family + House

Cooked for Independence Day 2011, originally uploaded by schahn.

We served a light meal for Fourth of July this year–we had only a single dinner guest, and Benjamin is still at camp. The gazpacho and steak recipes were based on those in this month’s Cook’s Illustrated, while the taco filling comes from Bayless’s Authentic Mexican. (The filling is becoming a regular offering at our house.)

Red Stripe and Pacifico served during the preparation phase; a Malbec with dinner. Sorbet for dessert.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-07-04  ::  Stephen

Lunch: The Patty Shack, Redwood City, CA

Saturday 2 July 2011 - Filed under Family + Observations + Peninsula

Nathaniel and I, after reading most of the menus on Broadway in search of a hot dog, stopped at The Patty Shack [Yelp] on Main St. Having enjoyed Tijuana Dogs at Fremont’s now-defunct Juan More Taco, I was pretty excited to have a local source for bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Nathaniel enjoyed his corn dog; he’s torn between the Shack’s better product versus Ben Franks’s location beside the train tracks at Whipple.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-07-02  ::  Stephen