ProjectX Blog

Here a svg image of the time line of the various web browsers.

I wonder if someone is game enough to make a timeline for mobile browsers

Business

• Interview with Joel Spolsky: What it takes to run a good software company
• How to hire a professional CEO

Tech

• Java compression comparison tool
  
• High performance javascript
• Javascript for all ages
• Squid optimisation
• Drawing with Canvas
• Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All – A programmer’s rant about statistics
• Data visualisation on Twitter
• Joel on Software – Log everything from high scalability.com

Mike sent me this link of a Google Tech talk on “Scalability at Youtube”.

Its a interesting read for a number of reasons:

• You Tube had a tiny technical team that built and ran the site.
• They show why the used various webserver configurations – apache vs squid vs lighttpd
• It explains why development of lighttpd 1.5 has stalled. (they developed the code to integrate libaio into lighttpd 1.5 and once they were brought by google they moved to google big table)
• Introduces the concept of database partitioning or shards

Enjoy!

I’ve been invited to speak at the launch of Terralinks new data product – NZ Mastermap.

I’ll be speaking in Wellington (Tuesday morning) and Auckland (Wednesday morning). My talk is on “Online Maps – Past, Present and Future”. I’ll be providing a brief look at online mapping; what’s happened over the last 2 years and provide a hint of what to expect in the future.

If you’re coming to the breakfast presentation, either tomorrow or Wednesday, make sure you come and say Hi.

(From Slashdot)

Here’s a presentation from this year’s Sig-graph about techniques for content aware image resizing. There’s a youtube video of the presentation and pdf of their research.

Using the techniques you can resize image and remove non-important components of the image. These techniques will pay dividends in developing content for mobile devices. Especially as images take up a high percentage of the total page size.

Just found a link to highscalability.com, the site is an aggregation of links, articles and blog posts about scalability. They have a lot of good overviews of various techniques and some good advice.

Here’s my pick of interesting articles:

• Denormalising your way to Speed and Profit
• Running Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
• Try Squid as a Reverse Proxy
• An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard
• Product: Hbase

I am surprised to find little about testing RJS in rails, with the exception of ARTS. However, assert_select_rjs seems to be the replacement to ARTS. This is nice, as we have now one less plugin to worry about. (I am of the opinion that testing plugins should be integrated into core if it is used in more than one test)

I’ll show you one example.

Let’s say that we have scaffolded our controllers, and now have a RJS function that we want to call when we destroy a membership. We first create our test

memberships_controller_test.rb
[source:ruby]
def test_should_destroy_membership
old_count = Membership.count
delete :destroy, :id => 1
assert_equal old_count-1, Membership.count
assert_response :success
assert_select_rjs :replace_html, “membership-action”
end[/source]

I am just testing if replace_html was called on the ‘membership-action’ element, without regard to what content is replaced into. If you want to test the content being replaced, pass the value to be compared as the second parameter of assert_select_rjs. E.g.

[source:ruby] assert_select_rjs :replace_html, “membership-action”, “Some Content”[/source]

Test and watch it go red.

Now we create our RJS template to make the test go green. The content can be anything, since I did not test for equality of the content to be replaced.

memberships/destroy.rjs
[source:ruby]page.replace_html ‘membership-action’, :partial => ‘memberships/join_link'[/source]

Run the test and feel the green.

Looking under the hood of assert_select_rjs, it seems that it is taking a copy of @response.body, and then running a Regular Expression match with the test values. Something worth knowing.

It also checks for content-type=text/javascript, so make sure your @response is returning javascript, otherwise the test will fail in a non-obvious way. If you forgot to include format.js in the controller, the assertion error message will be displayed as

“No RJS statement that replaces or inserts HTML content”

Just remember to put format.js in your controller, and you should be alright.

Biz

• Customise your own legal agreements
• Stuck on what communication tool should you use ? Use this flowchart !
• Seth Godin on Business cards
• What is Enterprise 2.0?

Tech:

• RegExPal – A cool regular expression tester
• Reg-ex cheat sheet for javascript
• Banner Blindness
• How ads affect your memory
• Testing your site in multiple browsers

Geek:

• A real shooting star

<rant>

I’ve just trying to figure out why my windows XP is running like a dog. I have discovered two alarming things.

1. Windows Divx codec and player installs a toolbar that seems to appear every 2-3 minutes  in the system tray. After some googling I found that I have to download ToggleToolbar.exe to turn it off. What the f**k ??? Why do I have to download a program to turn off a system tray icon.
2. Google Desktop. I’ve had a love / hate relationship with google desktop. I love that I can search my machine for emails, documents etc. There are a couple of things that I hate. First, its steals my window focus all the time. I tried uninstalling some widgets but it still does it. And Second it has serious memory leaks. This morning the Desktop grew to 1.7Gb of Virtual Memory. ARRRGGGHHH. So I did as little experiment I close all the widgets and left it running from the toolbar. It grew to 700Mb within about an hour. So, bye bye Google desktop.

</rant>

A mac is looking more and more inviting everyday…

As spotted on Digg…

Here’s a Microsoft error message:

Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.

As they say you’re only as good as your password….