My friend and former co-worker, Leonard, has written the Ruby Cookbook and now he's posting some recipes. His first is a pretty cool one which grabs author data from Amazon. I can't wait to get the book, it's on its way.
Best snippet from today's Daily Quickie:
Kevin Pittsnogle signed a 2-year deal with the Celtics? Of course he did. He looks like the previously unknown member of House of Pain.
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Werner's last couple of posts have been pretty interesting. The first talks about the queue service that has finally made it to production. It has the same economical model as S3 (pay as you go) and I think it will be just as successful.
The second post was about a new employee but also about the need to take into account scalability in their design of software.
In the Amazon world there is no such thing as a limited beta; everything needs to be production quality when it launches and scale in every possible dimension. Incremental scalability is a key fundamental concept in all of our designs such that we can handle growth reliably and cost-effectively.
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scability, s3, simplequeueservice
EventSeer is a repository of call for papers from conferences and workshops. If I remember correctly, all of the data is available in Microformats.
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microformats, callforpapers
Asaaf Arkin has put together a scraping framework in Ruby for grabbing data from Web pages. Obviously, there are plenty of tools for doing this but having a generally framework is pretty cool.
Here's an earlier post about the framework.
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scrAPI
Ryan Kennedy gave a really good overview of the strength of the BeOS filesystem and how easy it was to search for anything on it. He talked about it in comparison with the news that WinFS won't make it into Vista or beyond.
If you are interested in the BeOS filesystem, one of the authors of it published a book about it and it is now freely available online.
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BeOS, filesystems
Here's a cool Textmate command which will display the column attributes of any ActiveRecord models. This can be very, very useful instead of trying to keep track of all the attributes from all the tables.
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rubyonrails, activerecord, textmate
Isn't this a great timeline?
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lawandorder, television
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During the course of the World Cup, there have been quite a few articles and many more blog posts about the meaning of soccer (yes, I know it should be called football but I just can't) and how the United States fits into that.
Here a few that found very interesting...
The first, from collision detection, looks at how the design of the game doesn't translate easily to Americans who are used to the higher scoring sports of basketball, baseball and football. Because the games aren't higher scoring, Americans don't feel compelled to follow it. Wizard Prang continues that discussion and adds more thoughts to it, many comparing soccer with various American sports and how the media covers it.
Slate has been putting out some great content related to the this as well, from the look at the intellectuals following the game to an excerpt from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.
Finally, who would have thought you could study game theory based on penalty kicks.
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worldcup2006
The adaptive path blog has put together an Interaction Design reading list for the summer. All are PDFs and all look interesting.
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adaptivepath, interactiondesign
I saw the link to WriteRoom on 43 Folders and had to investigate. It's a text editor for the Mac which can go in full-screen mode and block out all other distractions.
It's definitely a great idea and something very beneficial to anyone trying to get something written down but being distracted by email, updates to their feed reader and who knows what else.
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writeroom