Classic 101 Burgers and Shakes [Yelp] makes a reliable, basic burger. It’s one of the few hamburger-serving restaurants from the tour I return to without hesitation. (When I’m not up for a new location, Classic 101, with its generally predictable serving latency, is the current default.) They make an excellent malted milkshake, too.

The Saruno Burger truck [Yelp], which is based out of Brisbane, made a stop in our neighborhood, allowing us to try its Japanese interpretation of the hamburger without our usual drive up or down US101. The Menchi burger is a hamburger and onion patty, coated in breadcrumbs, deep fried, and served on a brioche bun. Tasty.

A colleague and I are working through the better burger places on the Peninsula. We’ve been juicily making our way north; Tuesday we hit Rave Burger [Yelp], where I enjoyed the tasty Greek burger shown.

• Colllor – Turn one color into many alternative ones – "Create consistent color schemes: With Colllor it is much easier to generate a consistent color palette with just a few clicks. You should use colors consistently, so you have a common look and feel throughout your design."
• Colorbrewer: Color Advice for Maps – A colour choice advisor, targetted for cartography.
• Data Wrangler – "Wrangler is an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation."
• google-refine – Google Refine, a power tool for working with messy data (formerly Freebase Gridworks) – Google Project Hosting – "Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase."
• Induction ⚡ A Polyglot Database Client For Mac OS X – Can talk to (and visually explore on) a variety of SQL/NoSQL datastores.

• How to Build a Speech-Jamming Gun – Technology Review – Waiting for the inevitable headphones that auto-respond with "stop copying me!"…
• Why I’m ditching the Arduino software platform – Alan’s Ramblings – Alan's ditching Arduino's stack and going to the metal; write() is reason enough.
• Brendan’s blog » The USE Method: Solaris Performance Checklist – RT @brendangregg: new blog post: the USE Method: Solaris performance checklist
• brianfrankcooper/YCSB – GitHub – "The goal of the YCSB project is to develop a framework and common set of workloads for evaluating the performance of different “key-value” and “cloud” serving stores."
• Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index – "… Code Search is no longer online. To mark the occasion, I thought it would be appropriate to write a little about how Code Search worked. The actual Code Search was built on top of Google's world-class document indexing and retrieval tools; this article is accompanied by an implementation that works well enough to index and search large code bases on a single computer."
• The Trello Tech Stack – Fog Creek Blog – "We have consistently opted for promising (and often troublesome) new technologies that would deliver an awesome experience over more mature alternatives. We’re about a year in, and it’s been a lot of fun."

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

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. (*)

• 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.