Blog & Notes

CSS Effects: Add water into text

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar: What do you have on your radar?

What the FLUCK!, by Adam Curtis. Journalism at its best.

SpinKit: Simple CSS spinners.

Test coverage with Go. Awesome.

Embed data into your Go binary.

Impressions from North Korea

WAMP, the WebSocket Application Messaging Protocol, looks like a pretty good idea

There is a second OS inside every smartphone.

GoConvey: Testing Go with a good looking interface.

What's wrong with the modern world? by Jonathan Franzen

AsciiDoc cheatsheet

Some good Nginx config files: here and here

I support editorconfig.

Description of context-aware templates in Google Go.

John Cleese lecture on creativity

Mindblowing performance by Reggie Watts at TED.

MiniProfiler for .NET.

This is it: Decentralize the internet

AlpacaJS: Easy forms for jQuery.

Parsing JSON streams with Go.

AngularJS 1.2 is out. Here's a guide on how to use AngularJS for mobile with ngTouch.

I like this diagram: The Elements of User Experience

Focus transition effect in web browsers.

“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.” (as seen on Twitter).

Vertigo: Real-time computation engine built on the Vert.x application platform. Quite a bit like Storm.

TogetherJS, by Mozilla.

How to sell your stuff via Amazon.

Creating a proxy server in Go

Word of the month: Thanatosensitivity. Its about the HCI aspects surrounding death in computer science.

Sir Trevor: A rich content editor for web content.

Apache Spark: A computing cluster similar to Hadoop.

Observations on Traffic Jams

Advanced R Programming.

“The best companies strive to empower the individual. The worst companies strive to maintain control.“

oboe.js: A progressive JSON parser, think SAX for AJAX calls.

An advanced PostgreSQL client for Go. Currently not a database/sql compatible driver, but has lots of interesting stuff in it, e.g. support for notifications, hstore, and client-side timeouts.

Wouldn't call this dribbblisation of design, but I also see this problem. Either people specify themselves to death, or they just stumble into a project. A bit of a plan, just enough concept, flexibility in mind, then slowly push forward. At least that's what I try.

Terrorism, Tracking, Privacy And Human Interactions: Daniel Cuthbert & Glenn Wilkinson at 4CON 2012. Here's a blog post about Snoopy. Scary.

Goworker is a Resque-compatible background worker implementation for Go (Source).

Booting from Rust via UEFI.

Ken Box. Nuff said.

LMDB is an ultra-fast, ultra-compact key-value embedded data store developed by Symas for the OpenLDAP Project.

An interactive resume by Robby Leonardi.

RocksDB: A persistent key-value store by Facebook. Built on top of LevelDB.

Example of Docker setup: MongoDB

Spray: Elegant, high-performance HTTP for Akka Actors. Now to become part of the TypeSafe Platform for Scala.

Bufs: A simple buffer for Google Go.

libconcurrency: A concurrency library in C.

Simple Java services? Use Dropwizard by Coda Hale.

Will definitely try out CSS autoprefixer in combination with csso.

How to effectively read JSON streams with Google Go.

Detect mimetypes by inspecting a file: Use libmagic and magicmime for Go.

Golang OAuth2 server

Stockfish: A UCI chess engine, currently ranked #2 on the computer chess rating list (CCRL), with its source code on GitHub.

Thoughts on Leadership.

Clone of Mediums WYSIWYG editor: Medium Editor

eBook: Upgrading to Rails 4

HTTP 2.0 will bring realtime to the web, among other things.

At.js: A GitHub-like autocomplete library.

nosurf: A CSRF protection middleware for Go.

Embedding resources in your Go binary with go-bindata.

God's number is 20 and more about Rubik's Cube™.

HTTP Handlers in Go are actually middleware. Here's an example of how to embrace them.

Didn't know Maciej Cegłowski of Pinboard thinking and writing so well. Smart guy. Thank you. And by the way: Here's Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience.

Barbarians at the Gateways: Article by a former high-frequency trader.

Unix-like Pipes for Google Go.

Draw.io is impressive for a web app these days.

Flowcontrol is a well-written solution to rate limiting data streams.

NATS Server and Client in Google Go.

The missing manual for Docker.

GitHub's Management Strategy, or so it seems.

How statically linked programs run on Linux.

Fira is a new free font from Mozilla.

Quote Investigator: Exploring the origins of quotations, e.g. did Ford ask really for a faster horse?

Organics is an interesting approach for seamless communication between JavaScript and Go. There also is gowss. People can build their own WebSocket-based application framework with Gorilla WebSockets.

Google Consumer Surveys: Easy to use market research.

Easy PubSub: JSON over XMPP

Best and Brightest: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

Pointers in Rust: A Guide.

“Everyone’s problem is money until it’s hiring.“

GoConvey is a good-looking testing suite for Go. Also: I really appreciate the cover tool that comes with Go 1.2. It's in the go.tools repository. Install via go get code.google.com/p/go.tools/cmd/cover, then see help with go tool cover -help. Dave has some instructions how to use it in your own projects.

Creative CSS3 Hover Effects

Shopify Point of Sale

BeeLine Reader: Using gradients to lead the eye and read faster. Don't know about you, but it seems to work. It looks ugly though.

Dominik Honnef summarizes changes in Go Tip. Related: There's a go.text repository now.

WebSuckets: Gotchas working with Web Sockets.

Throttling requests with Go. Other options here and here.

Scaling with Queues. After all, RabbitMQ seems like a really good idea for high-pressure services. I heard all good things with the Go Driver and rescheduling messages with Dead Letter Exchanges and such. I'll keep that in mind for whenever I need it.

How the iPhone Marimba theme was created. And how it could have been a different sound.

Still not quite familiar with PostgreSQL (compared to MySQL), but here's the basics of user management pretty well covered. Craig Kersiens also has quite a few postings about it, especially his How I work with Postgres. Also recommended: Postgres Guide and Postgres Weekly. If you're on a Mac, you can install via brew install postgresql or grab Postgres.app.

Cookieless Cookies. I wonder if this is covered by the EU Cookie Law (Wikipedia)?

People simply empty out. A letter from Charles Bukowski regarding working 9-to-5.

1pxdeep, a Bootstrap theme.

Tin Can, WebRTC demonstration by Mozilla.

“Every day, they are learning how brilliant Snowden was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.” (Article)

You broke the internet, we build ourselves a GNU one: GNUnet. Related: SecuShare.

If you're on a Mac, use GPGMail.

Reinvigorate: Real-time web analytics and heat maps.

Blechtley: A collection of practical application cryptoanalysis tools.

A clever approach to Perfect Forward Secrecy on mobile phones

What happens in the first 220msec of a HTTPS connection

Suspenders is a nice collection of Rails templates.

If you're on Darwin, have many TCP connections, and you're getting errors such as can't assign requested address, try lowering the maximum segment lifetime (msl) from the default 15 seconds to e.g. 1 second: sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.msl=1000. Also see sysctl net.inet.tcp.

First Lavabit, then Silent Circle, now Groklaw: Closed as a result of NSA surveillance.

Another article about encodings that I'll forward next time someone asks about ö, ä, or ß.

What you can do with WebGL, CSS, and HTML right now: 0-60 in a second. Feels a bit like the demo scene back in the 80's and 90's.

Brain Controlling Devices. With API.

Infinite Scrolling on AngularJS

“I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows.” (and other Ballmer Quotes)

Now there's Model X.

London set up bins that are tracking you

The Internet, on a DVD

How to send a file via WebRTC.

Rent Seeking Economy. Intellectual Detox is a good read from time to time.

Some more articles on Ballmer and Microsoft that showed how Microsoft lost its way: Microsoft's Lost Decade, Stack Ranking

The original Hyperloop Alpha PDF

How One Weird Trick Ads conquered the Internet.

FuzzDB: An attack and discovery pattern database for application fuzz testing

Financials in Go with gmp

Creating a Chrome Extension.

Prototyping mobile apps with Clank (code).

GitLab 6 released

Sovereign: A set of Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud.

A 1996 article on Amazon

Clever use of clipboard functionality in Trello

Kibana, from the guys that brought us Elasticsearch

Getty Museum's Open Content project makes 4600 pieces of art freely available to view and download.

Germany recognizes Bitcoin as "private money", German article in FAZ

Hacking a Transcend WiFi SD Card.

Best practices in User Onboarding

NSA Spying Timeline, visualized by EFF

Distributed, decentralized social networks: DiSo is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of distributed social networking concepts; StatusNet; Unhosted; Redecentralize; Camlistore; remoteStorage.

U.S. spy agencies Black Budget

Lonliness is Deadly. The problem is real but much more subtle than rendered in this article.

How to make perfect coffee. I prefer the French press.

Brick: UI Components for Modern Web Apps. Web Components is supposed to be the future of developing HTML applications and web sites. This goes into the same direction with e.g. Dart.

Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet, an essay by Bruce Schneier

Why put the paper into the printer when you could stack it below.

Another drift to the Soylent story: What happened when I stopped eating for 2 weeks by Tim Ferriss

Did you know? SPACEJUMP is a HTTP verb!

On the future of journalism in the light of David Miranda's detainment at London Heathrow.

A toggle switch for Bootstrap.

Building a video meeting app with Angular and WebRTC.

E-books with Calibre, now 1.0

Cost of Living around the world compared to NYC.

Smithsonian on caffeine addiction

Absolute centering in CSS. Great idea. Related: Centering Percentage Width/Height

Sweden Runs Out of Garbage. It still baffles me as to why do I exactly have to pay for garbage?!

Bootstrap released RC1. Also: The repository has moved. It's used all over the place. But there are viable alternatives. If you just want a trimmed down version, you might use Skeleton or Ribs. Of course, there Zurb Foundation. I also like purecss, especially its style.

The Future of Programming by Bret Victor. A humorous kind of presentation, a history lesson. It's really kind of sad how far we could have gone and how far we actually are.

What every web developer should have read at least once: Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask)

From the list of forgotten specs: PubSubHubub 0.4, still an interesting approach. As well as Opensearch and its extensions.

PSD.rb: A Ruby library for reading and writing PSD files.

CoreOS: A slimmed down Kernel plus some services. Just enough to run containers, like Docker.io.

Sugar.js is a nice contender to Underscore.js.

How to property configure Google Apps email, DKIM, SPF and such (and remove that nasty via field): Tutorial

Let's play ancient geometry.

Quip looks very interesting.

Instacart published their approach to searching: Searchkick

What you handwriting says about you.

Inventing on Principle. Mind changing.

Photos of famous landmarks while they were still under construction

Self reference: What every web developer must know about URL encoding

Hangover game, described in all detail

Regarding yesterdays' Towel Day: 42

Viewport Resizer. Recommended!

Learn Git Branching, an interactive tutorial.

Stephen Fry on Loneliness

Some standard CSS animations.

The Extensible Web Manifesto. FWIW I strongly support this.

Is it April 1st, again?

"Die immerwährende Suche nach symbolischer Selbstergänzung, …" zeit.de

All you ever wanted to know about floating-point arithmetic. Floats are hard!

Using Elasticsearch, Tire, and Draper via a decorator.

For self-reference: Performing a cluster update for Elasticsearch.

biogo, a bioinformatics library for Google Go

Elasticsearch is huge: Use it for Machine Learning, or on huge sites like StackOverflow or Path.

Mozilla's Heka seems interesting.

Rack::Attack blocking and throttling gem

A history of the Amiga, part 8: The Demo Scene.

Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence: A summary of everything I've learned about developer estimates over the last 20 years.

Some nice tips about settings for new servers.

Process managers, in terms of init: I personally like upstart very much.

Another nice Go project: dendrite.io (Repository), for scraping log files and re-emit them in a unified stream.

BitTorrent Sync. Think Dropbox. There's other interesting stuff brewing in BitTorrent labs.

Beginners Guide to Sales, if you think you're gonna need it.

GoCircuit: An interesting Go-like approach for distributing work among servers. Go really is a great language, and makes things like these straightforward. The repository is on GitHub.

On JavaScript API design and how Stripe does it.

Wonderful.

Everybody who claims to be a web developer needs keep an eye on HTML5 rocks.

Infinite scroll directive for AngularJS.

Try jQuery.

Grunt is the de-facto task runner for JavaScript projects.

Music: Angel Olsen—Tiniest Seed, Zee Avi – Concrete Wall, Sigur Rós - Valtari, Shout Out Louds – Blue Ice.

Atoms for Peace, a joined project of Thom Yorke and Flea, recently published Amok.

Dart seems like a rather good idea. Might be the way the next wave of web applications might be written. Did I say this before? ;-)

How Google Search works. I'll forward this to anyone who comes up with any misconceptions about how Google (search) works.

Best burgers in Munich.

JavaScript prototypes, explained in plain English.

Airbnb published a default Java stack for web apps (GitHub repo).

Branch mispredict : 0:00:10

Most tools I tried for speeding up Rails tests and rake tasks failed for me. Yes, I'm looking at Spork and Zeus. (okay, Commands is a bit different). Maybe Spring will work out fine. I'll give it a try in the next Rails project.

Casablanca, a C++ REST SDK from Microsoft.

Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network : 5:33:20

Main memory reference : 0:03:20

Use your Rails translations on the client-side with i18n-js.

Round trip within same datacenter : 11 days, 13:46:40

LaTeX templates, Tufte style.

Read 1 MB sequentially from memory : 5 days, 18:53:20

A few more EmberJS information from the Discource team.

Lego 2.0. Yay!

Alan Kay, one of my all time favorites. Here's some of his quotes combined into a story.

Yours vs. Mine: Why Dustin uses “Your profile“ instead of “My profile“ in user interfaces. I agree.

Read 1 MB sequentially from disk : 462 days, 23:06:40

Humanized version of the latency numbers every programmer should know from Jeff Dean and Peter Norvig: L1 cache reference : 0:00:01 Branch mispredict : 0:00:10 L2 cache reference : 0:00:14 Mutex lock/unlock : 0:00:50 Main memory reference : 0:03:20 Compress 1K bytes with Zippy : 1:40:00 Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network : 5:33:20 Read 4K randomly from SSD : 3 days, 11:20:00 Read 1 MB sequentially from memory : 5 days, 18:53:20 Round trip within same datacenter : 11 days, 13:46:40 Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD : 23 days, 3:33:20 Disk seek : 231 days, 11:33:20 Read 1 MB sequentially from disk : 462 days, 23:06:40 Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA : 3472 days, 5:20:00

CSS clouds in 3D

Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD : 23 days, 3:33:20

Another solution to cross-compilation with Go

fatcache by Twitter: Memcache for SSDs.

Mutex lock/unlock : 0:00:50

Emmet, formerly Zen Coding, is 1.0.

Rack::Robustness looks like a good addition to Twitter's secureheaders etc.

Bootstrap for typography: Typeplate

The Silver Searcher aka ag is very fast.

The trace route to Star Wars: traceroute 216.81.59.173 (and a how-to). Notice that you can even watch Episode IV in the terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl.

Compress 1K bytes with Zippy : 1:40:00

Holepicker looks good for checking security issues with your Gemfile or Rails project. Here's some more information.

Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA : 3472 days, 5:20:00

“Hello. I'm a compiler.
I just scanned thousands of lines of code while you were reading this sentence. I browsed through millions of possibilities of optimizing a single line of yours using hundreds of different optimization techniques based on a vast amount of academic research that you would spend years getting at. I won't feel any embarrassment, not even a slight ick, when I convert a three-line loop to thousands of instructions just to make it faster. I have no shame to go to great lengths of optimization or to do the dirtiest tricks. And if you don't want me to, maybe for a day or two, I'll behave and do it the way you like. I can transform the methods I'm using whenever you want, without even changing a single line of your code. I can even show you how your code would look in assembly, on different processor architectures and different operating systems and in different assembly conventions if you'd like. Yes, all in seconds. Because, you know, I can; and you know, you can't.
P.S. Oh, by the way you weren't using half of the code you wrote. I did you a favor and threw it away.“

Read 4K randomly from SSD : 3 days, 11:20:00

Rails guide: Working with JavaScript in Rails. For self-reference.

Disk seek : 231 days, 11:33:20

L2 cache reference : 0:00:14

L1 cache reference : 0:00:01

Great tutorial on Git branching.

For self-reference: Converting charsets in Google Go.

Sacha Greif on Skeuomorphism vs. Flat Design.

A nice Git workflow.

Database code to watch out for in Rails: rails-sqli.org

I like jQuery Mobile's new panels which comes with version 1.3.0.

Bombermine is a massively multiplayer game in HTML5.

There might be a slight chance that Oracle crushes Java?! It'd be the best they did for decades.

Quote from the Google SRE AMA: “As a general rule we like to joke that Google not only reinvents the wheel, but we vulcanize our own rubber.“

“Aaron is dead.
Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own.
Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child.
Let us all weep.“
timbl

How keys work, in one simple GIF

Awesome article on Google Chrome Performance issues

For IBM: “I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.“