PUBLIC MARKS with search marks-a-lot

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.

When it comes to releasing source code, I’ve always been torn. I really believe in the philosophy of open source, but I’m intimidated by putting my code out there for everyone to see. Underneath it all, I’m probably scared of being exposed as some kind of a charlatan (”You call that programming?”). So, to pre-empt that possibility, I’ll start by saying this: I’m not a great programmer. My code is clean and fairly well-structured, but don’t expect to find any particularly advanced code wizardry or complicated mathematics. I do, however, think that the projects that I’ll be sharing over the week contain some good ideas, and a lot of helpful techniques. Hopefully you’ll find one or all of them useful.

As data visualization often needs to reach a broad audience the browser is becoming the number one tool to publish and share visualizations. A lot of visualizations require user-interaction to unleash their full potential, thus interactive applets that run directly in the browser are a a great way to analyze the data at hand. Beside the usual suspects like Flash, Silverlight and Processing, JavaScript is quickly gaining ground in the field of interactive visualization embedded in websites. We’ve collected 13 16 JavaScript visualization libraries that help you get started faster, keep it flexible and develop with higher reliability.

Many folks ask about Agile project planning and total cost. As our internal project managers wrestle with this, there are a lot of questions.

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.

This is the first of two posts that will center around a modern browser engine feature that doesn’t usually get a lot of press: The Page Cache.

With all of the available tools to help you visualize data, it can be confusing where to start. The good news is, well, that there are a lot of (free) available tools out there to help you get started. It's just a matter of deciding which one suits you best. This is a guide to help you figure that out.

ReCaptcha is a troy horse. Yes indeed it can help to improve bad digitization… but a lot better than that it is a way for Google to know what has been freshly commented on the Web. It helps Google to come back in the run for fresh information won by twitter so far.

Each time someone comments on a blog, ReCaptcha is like a ping for GoogleBot. A human just commented on this blog. Come here to index.

We learned a lot through experimentation with a working prototype; we had a staging server set up that mirrored the actual site and was pulling from live databases. This enabled editors to publish actual content via the prototype, allowing us to identify bugs in the design and editorial workflows before launch.

There’s a lot of buzz on Kanban right now in the agile software development community. Since Scrum has become quite mainstream now, a common question is “so what is Kanban, and how does it compare to Scrum?” Where do they complement each other? Are there any potential conflicts? Here’s an attempt to clear up some of the fog.