Double Shot #659

I could use at least a small slowing-down of the treadmill for a day or two.

• How I reduced translation costs of 200 articles from $9000 to $46 - Second Life as an alternative to Mechanical Turk.
• Notes from a production MongoDB deployment - Some detailed stories from the trenches.
• Rapid prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby - A workflow for coming up with web site designs.
• Erector - Builder-like view framework for object-oriented HTML composition.
• ambitious_query_indexer - Another plugin for testing whether your Rails application needs more indexes.
• Flowdock Public Beta to launch - Our team has been using this tool, and it's been working well for us.
• Introducing GitHub Compare View - More analytic power from GitHub, who are clearly concentrating on feature differentiation these days.
• Unobtrusive, yet explicit - Jamis Buck tries to work out a useful pattern for UJS in Rails 3.
• S3Hub - Amazon S3 client for OS X.

Double Shot #636

And no, running HTML 5 does not make a closed proprietary device magically open.

• Panopticlick - "How Unique - and Trackable - is Your Browser?". Test site from the EFF. Turning on NoScript helps significantly.
• The jQuery Cross-Domain Ajax Guide - A whole list of ways to work around cross-domain restrictions.
• Rails Security Review Checklist - Sara Allen pulls together some notes.
• Diff for gist.github - Another useful GreaseMonkey script.
• Postgresql 8.3 on Debian Lenny - Pretty easy to install and configure, actually.

Double Shot #628

The inital round of the Developer Wellwishes campaign is drawing to an end on Thursday, when we'll be combining donations with a few other campaigns to make a contribution to charity:water. If you've done your share for earthquake relief and still want to help more people out, do drop by.

• Distributed Ruby with the MagLev VM - A nice look at what's going on with this alternate Ruby, which to my mind is more significant than Rubinius or MacRuby. Being able to store distributed objects with no ORM is likely to be a killer feature.
• Deadweight and Helium - CSS coverage tools that can report which selectors are unused in your application.
• popthis - Turn a folder of email files into a POP3 server for testing purposes.
• git-googles - Git utilities for branch management and code review.
• The least you should know about S3 with Rails - This stuff is all out there, but here's a one page overview.
• Yaml Cookbook - Turns out Ruby's YAML support is a good deal more flexible than I had realized.
• Ruby Fibonacci Shootout - MacRuby is turning out some impressive performance numbers. Too bad it can't run anything I care about yet.
• has_price - DSL for organizing things like taxes, discounts, and base prices. Wish I'd had this a year ago.
• cacheable - Gem that adds cacheify, which is similar to memoize but uses memcached.

Double Shot #626

Long days make for few links.

• Validatious 2.0 - Cross-browser unobtrusive JavaScript forms validation.
• Random Repo - A new way to waste time on GitHub.
• On-the-fly image handling with Dragonfly - Generate thumbnails and so on only when you need them.