“Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.”
“Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It’s the tie to go along with jQuery’s tux.”
I recently discovered loads of Django code on Google Code. This tab sweep is meant to lower the memory footprint of Firefox on my laptop while serving as an excellent reference for those seeking prepackaged Django code.
For today’s browser spring cleaning, I will be offering several sets of links, grouped by topic.
I’m exploring the use of django for my next web project.
And speaking of that next project, I have a large stash of webdev links.I’m trying out a beta of Amazon’s new web 2.0-compliant, buzzword-friendly, ajax-driven product previews on the site today. If you want to see the beta in action, hover over the following links. If not, please ignore this post.
Canon Powershot SD200
Garmin StreetPilot c330
If you’re like me, you are intrigued by Apple’s OS X because of its FreeBSD heritage. It’s got all of the power and stability of that operating system that you run on your servers with the lovely Mac GUI that we all love.
But you want more. You want to know how everything works. You want to know what happens when the system starts up. You want to know what all of Apple’s custom command line tools do. In short, you want to know the OS inside and out, just like you know your FreeBSD systems.
And now you can.
Amit Singh has put together an excellent resource called What is Mac OS X? And from what I’ve read so far, this seems to be a very thorough guide. If you want to have a true understanding of this great new operating system, be sure to check out his site. [via Simon]
Simon pointed out an excellent essay on the differences in the cultures of the Windows and Unix programming camps. If you’ve ever been involved with software development, this is a good read.
Simon pointed out a new method for grouping tables. He states that there are problems in IE, but it looks very slick in Firebird. This builds on the sortable tables technique mentioned here previously.
Today I upgraded four Red Hat 7.3 machines to 9.0 (Shrike). Everything was going fine until it came time to rebuild Apache. Every time I typed make, the compile bombed. I was very fortunate to find a quick solution over at Fixing things. If it weren’t for Randall Lucas and Matthias Saou, I’d have a serious migraine right now. Thanks guys!
Brent Simmons recently posted a link to a CocoaTech open source release. Included in the release are the frameworks used to develop CocoaTech’s award-winning Path Finder, source for several Path Finder plugins, and a bit of code which will allow you to insert a working terminal into a plain NSView in 5 minutes. CocoaTech is leading the way with great products and now this excellent contribution to the Cocoa development community.
Simon Willison is amazing the world with his skills once again. This time, he presents a better way of entering dates in HTML forms. This JavaScript solution is elegant and user friendly. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this.
For those of you who, like me, have all kinds of passwords in your encrypted Mozilla password store, along with a rather large file of bookmarks, Mozilla Backup finally provides an easy way to save your Mozilla profile in a single archive file which can be readily backed up.
Simon Willison made note of this recent find. I think it would be nice to have a list of keywords auto-completing the search box on this site.
So while checking out some blogs seeking inspiration today, I found a neat trick.
I’m sure I’ll find a good use for this before long. It’s too bad, though, that IE can’t do the sweet 24-bit PNG shadows, though. Those look really nice in mozilla.
Simon gave a great writeup about Jesse’s Bookmarklets about a month ago. I just managed to find it today, but I am very impressed.
You’ll need mozilla to use some of them; if you aren’t using mozilla already anyway, it’s probably a good idea to at least have it installed as a secondary browser. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of brain-dead sites out there that won’t work with it.