Jahr: 2008

Signal vs. Noise – Git smart: How we’re using Git to track our source code: „Branching and merging in Subversion are painful. If you’ve never used it, you don’t know what I mean. If you have, you do. Branching and merging in git, though, are wonderfully, blissfully straightforward. For those two reasons alone git is…

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly – Is Google Making Us Stupid?: „As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping…

Alex Iskold – Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality: „Probably the most striking revelation about the semantic search space is User Interface. First, to go on the tangent, Powerset got it right by realizing that semantics needs to be surfaced in the UI. After a user searches Powerset, a contextual gadget, aware of the semantics…

Kurt Cagle – Drupal and The Future of News: „The role of editor as arbiter and gate keeper is increasingly becoming automated because the taxonomy systems are becoming too complex for any one person to keep abreast of. However, this is also important because taxonomy is the new navigation, something which I believe Drupal does…

Robert D. Currier at linux.com – FusionCharts Free: Cross-platform charts that rock: „If you’ve struggled with GNUplot, JPgraph or other charting applications, FusionCharts Free is a breath of fresh air. Have you dreamed of finding a charting and graphing application that is simple to install, easy to configure, and drop-dead gorgeous? Stop dreaming and download…

Gojko Adzic – Delivering useful software: „If an iteration produces software that can really be used every day, then ship it and make the clients use it. It is definitely useful to get feedback early, but having something go live, even if it causes rework or throwing away parts of software later, is much much…

Gojko Adzic – Put the web server on a diet and increase scalability: „HTTP sessions are often used to store frequently accessed user-specific information, but that is wrong. It is error-prone from the consistency perspective, but it also significantly inhibits scalability. […] I strongly suggest using a proper caching mechanism instead of session objects for…

Jamis Buck at Signal vs. Noise – Standing versus Sitting: „So I propped my keyboard and mouse up on a few encyclopedias and gave it a go. The first week was rough on my feet and legs, which ached constantly. I kept a bar stool handy for resting periodically on, but I really tried to…

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – Hire family people: „When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll…

Christopher Jones – PHP Connection Pooling Whitepaper with Benchmark Available: „The whitepaper [PDF] talks about the changes in the PHP OCI8 1.3 extension, explains some of the concepts behind DRCP and FAN, and gives best practices and tuning tips. It includes a new PHP benchmark which shows up to 20,000 connections being handled by Oracle…