PUBLIC MARKS from greut

The Burst Engine is an OpenSource vector animation engine for the HTML5 Canvas Element. Burst provides similar web functionality to Flash and contains a layer based animation system like After Effects. Burst uses a very light-weight JavaScript frame, meaning your animations will download unnoticably quick and can be controlled using very simple JavaScript methods. For example: the [-] logo above is a Burst animation attached to a mouseOver event using the following code...

canvas is the next Flash or not

The Chicken Test

If it walks like chicken and clucks like a chicken, it probably is a chicken. And if the team is treating you like a chicken, then you are probably acting like a chicken.

(Second, in this company at least,) junior executives, women, and members of the salesforce were the key actors in bridging the silos in the firm.

Results aren't built out of hours

When I needed heart surgery in 2002 and the doctor told me my life was over if I didn't get it, you might say he was being insensitive, but he was telling me something that I knew was true that I needed to hear. Three days later after the surgery, recouperating, the surgeon told me if I resumed smoking I would be dead in three years. Again, insensitive (he said it with a smile on his face believe it or not), but I'm glad he said it. The way he said it made it easier to quit. Sometimes the truth hurts. You can't blame people for saying things they believe, even if it hurts you to hear it.

…many things are hard to hear, for some reason. They are true.

I realized that instead of complaining, I could help by pointing to some papers which are easily available online and which (to me at least) point to some of the most interesting ideas about software. To me, these are classic papers which contain deep things you oughta know about code – the material you work with.

added to the toread list

Melkjug is a free open source web-based RSS news reader that personalizes your feeds to show you the most i­mportant stuff first.

CouchDB-based alternative to google reader, thanks to the state of NY.

Adding persistence is something that we will typically all have to do at sometime in most real world web applications and will definitely slow things down a little; so I thought I’d approach the problem using my latest favourite storage engine, CouchDB

a Restish example using CouchDB

The nature of corporations as they grow is to become glacial and bureaucratic because no one trusts anyone. You spend half the day reporting on what you do so execs higher up can keep an eye on you because they believe that some how, you're out to destroy the company. And probably, some number of employees are. Or at the very least, not working up to their potential. Here's an idea, do some careful hiring and recruiting, hire people who are excellent at their jobs AND have some moral fiber, and set them loose to do what you hired them for. No one gets hired to fill out status reports, but that's mostly what we all end up doing. So the good people leave for greener, entrepreneurial pastures, and the people happy about status reports stay, get promoted and the whole thing perpetuates itself until you have Yahoo, GM or any other number of glacial bureauracracies.

the only value of valleywag hides in the comments.

The data are illustrated below in the chart provided by ShareThis. The results are likely an accurate reflection of the various sharing services popularity on the web as a whole as ShareThis is extremely popular:

• Email is by far most popular sharing service getting 57%.
• Facebook is the second most popular sharing service at 21%
• Digg has dropped significantly in popularity to 2%

How people share things using ShareThis. When are we gonna see XMPP coming?

Setuptools has a feature that allows you to run the tests in a distribution by invoking the distribution's "setup.py" script with a "test" argument.

a simple and great way to run tests for your python module/application.

Many web resources provide mechanisms for subscribing to changes in their content. However, this change information is only made available via a polling mechanism.

A number of people have proposed mechanisms for subscribing to updates to pages or feeds, however, a missing element of all these proposals is a subscription mechanism. Sadly, this means that every site supporting this feature will likely end up with a different implementation.

Get Pingd pour la mise à mort de la syndication... (à coups de XRDS, d'Atom et de web hooks, tout un programme)

Building an XMPP-enabled Fire Eagle application is very similar to building a traditional web-based application. In fact, the XMPP componentry is intended to complement an existing application, simplifying it and imbuing it with real-time capabilities.

Piece of cake, not really. Nice usage of oAuth-over-XMPP though

Decisions vs. Choices

The difference between choices and decisions is subtle , some of it has to do with the quality of your ingredients and some of it has to do with compromise at the wrong stage of development. Is the process all that matters? A process that is used to constantly create new possible options and choose from those instead of making Frankenstein out of the options given? The design process will constantly emphasize the goal in the iteration of options leading to a choice. I don’t think that definition clear, but it’s the best we came up with.

hackers and painters

EvServer is a lightweight http server, created especially to host python WSGI applications. Additionally, it supports little known Asynchronous WSGI extension, which was suggested by Christopher Stawarz. Using this extension it's possible to create an output html response in many data chunks, without blocking the main server process while your application waits for external resources.

Comet the WSGI way.

Possibly the biggest mistake in any development project is failure to plan.

Hell yes!

I have a no asshole rule which is really simple: I really don’t want to work with assholes. So if you’re an asshole and you work on my team, I’m going to fire you. Now, if the whole team says gosh, that’s awful. We want to work with as many assholes as we can! then we have a simple solution. I’ll fire me!

from the build a community section.

Breathe deeply and think about how awesome you are

yes, werkzeug + nginx are awesome.

Step seven: find the love

Ask yourself: do I want to work here? You’d be surprised how clearly job indifference shows. A lack of interest begets a lack of action and initiative. A lack of action and initiative means that your colleagues are less inclined to count on you, and worse, will do your tasks themselves rather than enlisting your help. This puts unnecessary pressure on them and maximizes the chance for error.

it's time to find the love yes or to make it happen

We support open source in that we offer a better browser for Linux, Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lie told me in a recent meeting at the InfoWorld offices. But we haven’t found a business model that allows us to go fully open source.

Something old, but I recently talked with Batiste about this : How would Opera be if they had go Open Source before Firefox got (relatively) huge?

rel="canonical" to save your website from duplications or yet another google hack?

I know the argument: demand is so high, we don't have another choice. I reject this argument on the basis that most good programmers spend the majority of their time fixing problems created by terrible programmers.

ouch! Learned was is NNPP thus

I personally enjoy and benefit a lot from pair programming. It’s not something I get to do all of the time, but a solid pairing session with a good developer gets me results. I love sharing tricks, and discussing code before it’s written. However, there might be more to it than that.

Hampton and I started to speculate that we work best if someone is just there, keeping you on your toes. Someone to chastise you if you check Facebook, even if they don’t know the first thing about programming. We joked about hiring people to just sit there and watch us code. I laughed!

Well, I’m not laughing any more. I tried it, and it worked.

I'm not speaking from experience, but rather from logic. My experience is that I've learned more about programming from programming than from reading. My logic is that, given the many irrelevant parts of my personal programming-related readings, I could increase learning by focusing more on the act of programming itself.

read less, do more.

Eine kleine Pille nur, und die Arbeit läuft wie geschmiert: Die Angst verfliegt, der Stress nimmt ab, und es fällt viel leichter, sich zu konzentrieren.

Schon rund zwei Millionen Bundesbürger dopen sich am Arbeitsplatz mit vermeintlich leistungsfördernden Mitteln.

I'm for anti-doping controls at work too ;-)