BrokenRobot http://www.brokenrobot.org/ A random mix of technology-related and generally geeky links pulled off the 'net by Brian Landers en Copyright 2007 Mon, 26 Feb 2007 09:22:55 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=3.33 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Links for 2007-02-25T00:00:00-0500

]]> http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000922.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000922.html Mon, 26 Feb 2007 09:22:55 -0500 Links for 2007-02-19T00:00:00-0500
  • Rails Envy: Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial

    Great rails plugin that makes model objects searchable using Ferret, the high-performance Ruby full-text search engine based on Apache Lucene.

    Tags: lucene, programming, ruby, rubyonrails, search

  • Advanced Linux Programming

    Full text available online. Published in 2001 and described as being for "[developers] already experienced with programming for the GNU/Linux system, are experienced with another UNIX-like system and are interested in developing GNU/Linux software, or wa

    Tags: books, linux, programming


]]> http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000920.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000920.html Sun, 25 Feb 2007 11:15:16 -0500 2007-01-29 Monday
  • The New York Times has an outstanding article profiling Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.
  • Microsoft has released the full Sysinternals suite, which they acquired last year. A blog posting here gives a list of what's inside the download package.
    • ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000916.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000916.html Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:50:36 -0500     2007-01-24 Wednesday Jamis Buck: Object#with_options – Great way to simplify Rails code.

    Greg Linden: Early Amazon: Splitting the website

    Mike Clark: Managing (Rails) Plugins with Piston

    ZDNet: MySpace: IT on a Wing and a Microsoft Prayer

    Mongrel is 1.0 (actually 1.0.1)

    New Architect: From Hot Concept to Hot Site in Eight Days – Rapidly scaling hotornot.com

    Minor Emacs Wizardry – Great new emacs blog

    TFTPD32 – free TFTP server for win32 that removes the 32mb file limit (useful for newer huge IOS images).

    Crocheted Pac Man Scarf!

    Cisco TAC Case Collection: Cisco Call Manager Express / Unity Express Quick Install guide

    Cisco TAC Case Collection: Allowing traceroute through a Cisco PIX Firewall

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000915.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000915.html Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:47:55 -0500     2006-11-14 Tuesday How to Regain Control of a Spooked Camel. You wouldn't believe how many times this would have come in handy. Not really.

    New version of the Yahoo User Interface code libraries (0.12.0) have been released.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000914.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000914.html Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:23:54 -0500     2006-10-25 Wednesday Joel on Software: The Phone Screen

    RingyDingy - high-availability for RingServer-based dRB applications.

    Dual-Master MySQL5 Replication Done Right

    RubyOnRails - Indexing for Database Performance

    25 Best Free Quality Fonts

    Vim: Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000913.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000913.html Wed, 25 Oct 2006 17:37:50 -0500     2006-10-22 Sunday 15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language

    Wired News: Straight Dope on the iPod's Birth. Note quite the same story Steve Jobs likes to tell.

    MacBook Pro ExpressCard EVDO setup & review. Nice review of the Verizon Wireless EVDO card.

    How Many Mongrels to Start. Great post from Zed on the mongrel-users list on how to empirically determine the number of mongrel processes you should run to get optimal performance.

    CPAN: MapReduce.pm. Perl implementation of Google's MapReduce distributed processing algorithm. Seems to use SSH to execute jobs on remote machines and doesn't currently handle any time of distributed filesystem operations. Nice start, though.

    Bare Bones Project Hacks. Simple one-page introduction to the entire meat of the Project Management body of knowledge.

    Password Composer shell version. Shell script implementation of the awesome "master password" system for generating unique passwords for each web site for which you have an account.

    JavaScript MD5. Implementations of MD4, MD5, and SHA-1 in pure JavaScript. Also, jsSHA2 for generating SHA-256.

    JSMIN. The JavaScript minimizer. Takes a nicely-formatted JavaScript file and shrinks it by removing whitespace and comments. Useful for reducing overall page weight.

    Caching and Precaching with memcached. Ruby code for interacting with memcached and pre-loading it to further improve performance.

    Building Console Apps with SimpleConsole. Introduction to the terrific SimpleConsole Ruby library for abstracting the boring parts of console applications (like command processing, formatting output, etc.)

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000912.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000912.html Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:41:49 -0500     2006-08-03 Thursday Looks like Flip4Mac (a Windows Media plugin for Quicktime) has an incredibly stupid installer. Yikes!

    How Do I Make It: An Amazon S3 Hosted Website using Interarchy.

    jQuery looks like an interesting JavaScript library. Wonder how it compares to Prototype.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000911.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000911.html Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:34:18 -0500     2006-07-31 Monday Google Video is hosting a series of sponsored interviews between Charlie Rose and various famous people such as the cast of "The Simpsons", Mitt Romney, Warren Buffet, Salman Rushdie, and more.

    Cal Henderson: How We Built Flicker

    Typo Installer. The new 4.0 version of the Typo weblog software has an integrated installer that is a model for how Rails-based (and really, any) web applications should be delivered.\

    Totally Free Math. A professional beginning Algebra textbook (and experimental video lectures) provided for free because the authors don't care for the current trent of $110 textbooks.

    Getting to Deadline - Programmer Productivity Tips at Work

    Down from the Top of its Game. - The Story of Infocom, Inc.. From an MIT class on software engineering.

    A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems. Bonus chapter from Amit Singh's amazing book on MacOS X Internals.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000910.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000910.html Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500     WoW Legendary Caster Staves WhatAboutPP.com has posted official details of the new legendary caster staves that will be released in patch 1.11. I'm definitely going to be getting that priest staff at some point to replace my Benediction.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000909.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000909.html Sat, 03 Jun 2006 16:09:20 -0500     Cautious Advice for Accepting Online Payments James Duncan Davidson has written a new article entitled Cautious Advice for Accepting Online Payments, giving some excellent recommendations (from a technical, not legal or financial standpoint) for web applications that need to accept payments from users using credit cards. The guidelines from the credit card industry for electronic security are quite an interesting read, but I'm very glad I don't have to implement them.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000908.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000908.html Sat, 03 Jun 2006 16:07:06 -0500     C# Equivalent to Google's Web Toolkit Google recently released their Web Toolkit, a Java-based framework for building AJAX web applications. Nikhil Kothari, an Microsoft web platform and tools architect, has released a similar framework written in C# to allow Microsoft platform users to build AJAX applications using similar concepts.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000907.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000907.html Sat, 03 Jun 2006 16:04:43 -0500     Quake 3 at 10240x3072 A researcher at Virginia Tech has Quake 3 running on a 12-node Linux cluster, driving a 24-monitor video wall. Overall resolution: 10240x3072 (!). Reminds me of some of the amazing multi-monitor flight simulator setups I've seen.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000906.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000906.html Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:43:31 -0500     MacOS X Notes This is mostly for my own benefit for when I need to rebuild one of my Macs. Applications that are not yet Universal Binaries (Intel-compatible): * Microsoft Office 2004 * Microsoft Messenger 5.0 * Ecto (although MarsEdit is) * SSHKeychain (although the SVN trunk builds as Universal) * Stuffit Expander Things that need doing on a new build * Install FastScripts and setup [Terminal Killer](http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/48/victory-over-process-completed) script. * Add [word movement](http://macromates.com/blog/archives/2006/01/07/word-movement-in-terminal) shortcuts to Terminal. http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000905.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000905.html Wed, 08 Mar 2006 18:43:04 -0500 Quick Hits An absolutely incredible (and functional!) Lego Pinball Machine

    ZDNet has an interview (part one, part two) with the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose.

    A post in the WoW forums lists the locations of all 50 coins you can collect as part of the Lunar Festival quests.

    From LifeHacker: use a dollar bill as a quick-and-dirty ruler. Handy when you're at Home Depot or something and need to check a size.

    Serious Editing in iPhoto 6 looks like a solid electronic guide to doing simple (and not-so-simple) photo manipulation without resorting to an application like PhotoShop.

    Panic has a new version of Transmit, their awesome MacOS X file transfer client (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV). The latest release provides Intel compatibility, bug fixes, and a few choice new features like the ability to edit any type of file (image, Word doc, etc.) instead of just text files.

    MacOS X Hints describes some hidden preferences in Apple's iPhoto 6.

    Slingbox appears to be a device that will let you stream live television and control your TiVo from anywhere on the Internet. Doesn't work with Macs yet, so I'm not all that interested, but a great concept. Hope the TV/movie industry doesn't sue them into oblivion.

    The New Yorker reviews a new biography of Alan Turing, and takes a fairly in-depth look at his life in general.

    Gloriously geeky look at what actually goes on inside the Solaris 10 networking stack. From the author of the networking section of a new version of Solaris Internals.

    ]]>     http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000904.html http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000904.html Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:12:56 -0500