October 2009
27 posts
Speed Tips: Add Cache-Control Headers →
In-depth, but accessible, articles about speeding up servers with Apache rules (in .htaccess).
September 2009
35 posts
Travel full-time for less than $14,000 per year |... →
Some great tips on how to travel, cheaply. We’ll do this. One day.
“Coveting possessions is unhealthy. Here’s how I look at it:
All of the...”
– A fine comment from one Pastabagel on Collect ‘em all! (via Code for Something w/ a fist-bump for Johanna) (via jackcheng)
TRIZ 40 Principles →
TRIZ is an innovation framework, but even just extracting their principles as vehicles for creativity is useful. Here’s a list.
A Tidbit for Working with Rails and the Twitter...
I’m working on a side project that taps the Twitter API and adds tweets into a database, and I ran into a funny problem. For some reason, there isn’t a lot written about this.
In Rails, the default database type is SQLite. It’s good for a lot of things, but I kept seeing people talk about how it wasn’t good at “concurrency” — having a lot of hits to the...
Rails authenticity token with jQuery – The Pug... →
Don’t need this at the moment, but I imagine I’ll need this technique immediately after I forget where I saw it.
Mayer Hawthorne.
FACT: This was written last year,...
A Deeper Look at mod_rewrite for Apache - Nettuts+ →
A great overview of .htaccess and mod_rewrite for Apache.
Another Rails Tidbit (Rails Docs)
I was trying to figure out the best way to get the Rails documentation (Rdoc) onto my computer, as a recent gem cleanup had wiped away my old Rails Rdocs. On Stack Overflow, I found this nice comment, which says:
The easiest I found was to just download them from railsapi.com and unpack the file into /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/doc/rails-2.3.3/rdoc/
I unpacked it into a folder (that I had to create)...
When I was in high school, I had a number of...
Rails Public Service Announcement
For anyone trying to ordinalize a date in Rails (that is, display a date as “September 18th”), various tutorials or code snippets will have you do something like this:
<%= date.strftime("%B #{date.day.ordinalize}") %>
Note that that code uses double quotes. If you use single quotes in your code …
<%= date.strftime('%B #{date.day.ordinalize}') %>
… Rails...
marco:
I wish people cared as much about anything else as they do about the trivialities of celebrities.
I was thinking about this last night as I was playing with the Twitter API, and the search term that yielded the most data in the shortest amount of time was ‘kanye’. Sigh.
On the other hand, I showed Sarah what I was working on, and she said “Who’s Kanye?”...
“Rehabilitation begins with the understanding that it’s brain-dead to build an economy on Big Macs, SUVs, and McMansions. Why? They don’t make others authentically, durably better off. In fact, their net economic effect is this: they simply transfer value from the poorest to the richest.”
— Umair Haque
From Justin.
“The Dawning of the Day,” a traditional Irish tune given new lyrics in 2002 by Mary Fahl, for the play-based movie The Guys (about a writer who helps a FDNY fireman write eulogies for all his men killed in the 9/11 attacks).
This morning early I walked on
while my darling was in a dream
The last sweet days of summer bloomed
and dressed the trees in green
Then soaring high in...
Crazy video of a volcano going off ... FROM SPACE! →
Umm … video from space. Not a space volcano.
Inexpensive User Testing →
I think the “buy 20 $5 Starbucks gift cards and give them in exchange for help” is a great approach. I don’t do it enough.
This is an interesting pricing strategy. I hadn’t heard of it, but it’s apparently a variation on Google’s IPO approach.
Here is how it works: People bid what they are willing to pay for a ticket (or multiple tickets). After all the bids are in, the tickets are set to the price where they would sell out. So if our event in New York City has 100 tickets, the price would be set at...
Presentation Zen: 7 Japanese aesthetic principles... →
Kanso - Simplicity or elimination of clutter.
Enso Fukinsei - Asymmetry or irregularity.
Shibui - Beautiful by being understated, or by being precisely what it was meant to be and not elaborated upon.
Shizen - Naturalness. Absence of pretense or artificiality.
Yugen - Suggestion, rather than revelation.
Datsuzoku - Freedom from habit or formula.
Seijaku - Tranquility. An energized calm,...
The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love →
Summary: When people help build something, they feel more ownership in it, and more satisfaction with it.
From Derek Sivers’ absolutely brilliant review-of-slash-riff-on Hugh MacLeod’s “Ignore Everybody”:
You’re better off doing something on the assumption that you will not be rewarded for it, that it will not receive the recognition it deserves, that it will not be worth the time and effort invested in it. The obvious advantage to this angle is, of course, if anything good...
Using Wordpress and Rails on the Same Domain:... →
Good tutorial on how to set up a blog on a domain that’s already hosting a Rails app.
Urinal protocol vulnerability « xkcd →
The mathematical formula behind the International Choice of Urinal Protocol.
The Definitive Guide to htaccess Techniques: Do’s... →
A good intro to .htaccess stuff.
10 Tips for Writing Better jQuery Code →
And an intro to jQuery best practices.
