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Bookmarks for October 18th through December 20th

Stephen — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:01:43 +0000

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."

Bookmarks for October 10th through October 17th

Stephen — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:01:41 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for September 7th through October 5th

Stephen — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:02:35 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for July 21st through August 13th

Stephen — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:07 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for June 22nd through July 19th

Stephen — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for May 24th through June 18th

Stephen — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 03:00:21 +0000

These are my links for May 24th through June 18th:

Twitpic – Share photos and videos on Twitter – Bike friendliness: free air by rack
Asciiflow – ASCII Flow Diagram Tool – Browser-based drawing tool for creating block comment-friendly diagrams.
Language Log » Translated phrase-list jokes – "The recently-posted Anglo-EU Translation Guide shares 3 phrases with the 2004 Economist column (some expressive details aside), lacking 2 others and adding 12 more. So a combined Anglospeak phrase book would have 17 entries, as compiled below…"
Android.com – Android File Transfer is an application for Macintosh computers (running Mac OS X 10.5 or later) you can use to view and transfer files between your Mac and an Android device (running Android 3.0 or later).
Saab Zero Emissions fleet under construction | Inside Saab by Steven Wade – Prototypes being assembled; possibly our next car. #saab

Bookmarks for May 9th through May 20th

Stephen — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:00:47 +0000

These are my links for May 9th through May 20th:

Cool, but obscure unix tools :: KKovacs – "Just a list of 20 (now 28) little-known tools for the command line." Nice presentation; a few are new to me.
[1105.1383] Topological Considerations for Tuning and Fingering Stringed Instruments – We present a formal language for assigning pitches to strings for fingered multi-string instruments, particularly the six-string guitar. Given the instrument's tuning (the strings' open pitches) and the compass of the fingers of the hand stopping the strings, the formalism yields a framework for simultaneously optimizing three things: the mapping of pitches to strings, the choice of instrument tuning, and the key of the composition. Final optimization relies on heuristics idiomatic to the tuning, the particular musical style, and the performer's proficiency.
Tweetable Sparkblocks – The Data Collective – Form to generate a sparkline bar graph that's capable of being Tweeted (and presumable pasted many places).
Blogofile – Blogofile is a static website compiler, primarily (though not exclusively) designed to be a simple blogging engine. It requires no database and no special hosting environment. You customize a set of templates with Mako, create posts in a markup language of your choice (see Post Content) and Blogofile renders your entire website as static HTML and Atom/RSS feeds which you can then upload to any old web server you like.
Twitpic – Share photos and videos on Twitter – Why I am changing a flat tire. #nail

Bookmarks for April 25th through May 5th

Stephen — Thu, 05 May 2011 19:02:43 +0000

These are my links for April 25th through May 5th:

Innovative Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins – Smashing Magazine – Good survey of best practices around login/signup for websites.
Eureqa | Cornell Creative Machines Lab – Eureqa (pronounced "eureka") is a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data.
jonashaag/bjoern – GitHub – A screamingly fast, ultra-lightweight asynchronous WSGI server for CPython, written in C using Marc Lehmann's high performance libev event loop and Ryan Dahl's http-parser_.
NodeBox | Graph – "The NodeBox Graph library includes algorithms from NetworkX for betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality, Connelly Barnes' implementation of Dijksta shortest paths (here) and the spring layout for JavaScript by Aslak Hellesoy and Dave Hoover (here). The goal of this library is visualization of small graphs (<200 elements)…"
Cyberwarriors on the Eastern Front: In the line of fire packet floods [printer-friendly] • The Register – Interview on 2007 cyberattack with Estonia MoD undersec'y: "… banning the use of cyberweapons is not realistic."

Bookmarks for 29 October through 4 November

Stephen — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 04:00:35 +0000

Fuzzy Mathematics with FuzzPy (Part 1) | Mad Python – Python module to work with fuzzy numbers, sets, and graphs. Integrated with GraphViz for visualization.
HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation – "HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension …. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites."

Bookmarks for 13 October through 23 October

Stephen — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 04:00:18 +0000

Bujagali: Incredibly Fast JavaScript Templating – Interesting approach to templating: render on either client or server as part of your application.
py-multicast – Python IP multicast library – "py-multicast provides an easy to use interface to receive multicast streams".