Firefox has seemed sluggish on my Ubuntu installation, which I
attributed to my aging 1.1Ghz PIII, and rather limited memory (512MB).
In a fit of frustration, I googled for “speed up Firefox” and came up
with some good tweaks to the config that made a huge difference. If you
are a Firefox user, you owe it to yourself to check this out.
Link 1 - This
is a good start, and if you do nothing else, make these changes.
Link
2
- This is a little more in-depth. It contains the same basic tweaks as
the first article, plus several others. It also has the tweaks grouped
by whether you have a fast/slow computer and a fast/slow connection.
Hope this helps.
MySQL Cheat Sheet -
Commonly used MySQL commands, all in one convenient HTML page.
Explaining TDD to a
non-techie
- Great way to explain Test Driven Development.
Programming Language Inventor or Serial
Killer? - I’m really
surprised (or perhaps frightened) at how wrong I was on this quiz.
Why’s (Poignant) Guide to
Ruby - Yeah, this is an
oldie, but a goodie. This is chapter 3, the best (and funniest)
introduction I’ve seen to the Ruby programming language yet.
Five things you didn’t know you could do with
Ruby -
Includes things like “Process Satellite Images and Meteorological Data”.
Not a lot of practical information, but interesting to see what people
are using Ruby for.
I’m not a huge fan of MS, but there’s a fascinating
article at eWeek
on how Microsoft responds to threats (particularly this last
worm).
It’s an interesting insight into how good MS has gotten at responding
to this stuff.
If you’re design challenged (like me), you need all the help you can
get. I stumbled upon a good article that explains color theory, with
links to sites that implement various kinds of color schemes
(complementary, monochromatic, etc).
link
Ian Bicking (a python developer I have a great deal of respect for) has
a good comparison of Python and Ruby, focusing on the things that are
unique to dynamic languages.
link
There’s a relatively
in-depth
comparison of the Django
framework to Rails over at
Sam Newman’s site. It appears
to be a relatively fair comparison.
It’s interesting that both frameworks were extracted from large
development projects in roughly the same time period, although Rails has
been publicly available for longer, and has more mindshare at the moment.
I’m happy with Rails, but I wonder whether I would have bothered with it
if Django had been available when I started looking at Rails. The thing
that kept me away from Rails for a long time was that I didn’t know
Ruby. I was (and still am) well-versed in Python. I still prefer the
cleaner syntax of Python over Ruby, although the latter does have some
features that I find compelling.
I wonder about the impact of one aspect of Django though: the fact that
the model generates your databas schema, instead of the developer
generating the model from the schema (which is the Rails model). I
suspect most DBA’s would go into convulsions at the very thought of
this. I can certainly see how it would ease moving from database to
database.
Someone wrote a
programming
language consisting entirely of whitespace (you knew it would happen
eventually). Now maybe people will stop making fun of Python.
via
Kathy Sierra, who runs the excellent Creating Passionate Users
blog, is doing
a series of “passion reviews”. She’s started with
http://www.37signals.com Signals. Interesting article, but I
suspect if the Signals get any more positive PR, they’re heads may
explode.
via Ted Leung