Jacob Kaplan-Moss
← Activity in November 2009 →
Bookmarks
Cartographer.js – thematic mapping for Google Maps
Heat maps, point clustering, etc. Built on top of Raphael.
Evernote
I didn't realize that Evernote had an API. I might need to investigate switching my document management tool…
IP Failover - Setup and Installing Heartbeat - The Rackspace Cloud — Cloud Servers Knowledge Base
A good explanation of setting up simple IP failover with Heartbeat and HAproxy.
YouTube - PomplamooseMusic's Channel
Whoa, these guys are awesome!
FullCalendar - Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin
Really awesome Google Calendar-style interactive calendar rendered with jQuery. Drag & drop events, callbacks for everything, awesome.
GPG Quick Start
Very simple, plain-English “getting started with GPG” guide.
Woof - simply exchange files
Very simple local file sharing: `woof filename` servers the file over HTTP once, then terminates. It's a single script that can live in ~/bin. Coolness.
Coupling Django Style | Compound Thinking
Mark totally nails it (as usual): this perfectly sums up the positive and negative aspects of Django's coupled design. I really couldn't have said it better myself.
Entries
The power of “no”
Last week, I wrote on Twitter that “closed-source software gets worse with each release (Microsoft, Adobe, …). Open-source software gets better (OOo, Ubuntu, …).” Here’s where I try to expand on that quip.
Lessons from Rackspace’s downtime
Last night Rackspace Cloud had some downtime. Reading post-mortems is always instructive, so let’s see what we can learn from Rackspace.
On commit bits
What’d you do the day you started your job? Got your commit access to the company’s source control, right? Wait, what?
Thank you, Rails
The web development community owes Rails and the Rails community a debt of gratitude. I think we should all step back from our personal preferences and plainly say thank you, Rails, for all that you’ve done to move the state of web development forward.
The Django community in 2009
In March of 2007, I attempted to measure the size of Django’s community. That March turned out to be a major inflection point in Django’s growth: the release of 0.96 brought a lot of new features — testing and the new forms library being the critical ones — and those in turn brought in a lot of new users. Growth since then has been at a much faster pace. Today I thought it’d be interesting to review the same metrics I used back then. I was quite curious to see what’s changed, and by how much.
My travel kit
I travel quite a bit. This means I’ve often experienced a particularly geeky form of pain: the frustration of missing that one cable or power adaptor I really need. This has happened to me enough times that over the years I’ve grown into something of tech readiness geek. My travel kit now has all sorts of adaptors and cables; I thought it’d be amusing to dump out my travel bag and actually enumerate all this crap.
What to write
Tech docs can take a bunch of different forms ranging from high-level overviews, to step-by-step walkthroughs, to auto-generated API documentation. Unfortunately, no single format works for all users; there’s huge differences in the way that people learn, so a well-documented project needs to provide many different forms of documentation. This is the first in a series of posts that’ll cover the art of writing good technical documentation.
Technical style
How to develop a great technical writing style.
You need an editor
If you really want to produce great documentation, it needs to be edited.
Tracks
Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Little Girl (featuring Julian Casablancas)
Radiohead - Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Buster Voodoo
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Santo Domingo
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Master Maqui
NPR - #111 Planet Money: In The Classroom
Kevin Allison - Why Did I Do That? Part II
Bruce Springsteen - Old Dan Tucker
Regina Spektor - The Calculation
Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins - Big Guns, The
Traveling Wilburys - Tweeter and the Monkey Man
Mark Ronson - Toxic (feat. Tiggers)
Traveling Wilburys - Dirty World
Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
Chicago Public Radio - #394: Bait and Switch
Chicago Public Radio - #394: Bait and Switch
Chicago Public Radio - #394: Bait and Switch
The Moth - George Dawes Green: The Shotgun Party
The New Yorker - Margaret Talbot on nightmares
NPR - Favre Gets A Bye Week — But Will He Ever Say Bye?
NPR - #116 Planet Money: Breaking Up (Big Banks) Is Hard To Do
apm - Nov. 7, 2009: The News from Lake Wobegon
NPR - #115 Planet Money: We've Been Here Before
Chicago Public Radio - #233: Starting from Scratch
The New Yorker - Calvin Trillin on poutine
Dire Straits - Where Do You Think You're Going
apm - Nov. 14, 2009: The News from Lake Wobegon
NPR - #119 Planet Money: China Gives Us A Pep Talk
NPR - #120 Planet Money: Shopping For An MRI (Outside The U.S.)
WNYC, New York Public Radio - November 13, 2009 (On The Media: Friday, 13 November 2009)
WNYC, New York Public Radio - November 20, 2009 (On The Media: Friday, 20 November 2009)
Chicago Public Radio - #369: Poultry Slam 2008
The New Yorker - Ariel Levy on Caster Semenya
NPR - NPR: 11-21-2009 Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!
Madvillain - The Illest Villains
Ozomatli - Cumbia de los Muertos
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
The Beatles - All You Need Is Love
Regina Spektor - The Calculation
Regina Spektor - Folding Chair
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Buster Voodoo
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Santo Domingo
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Master Maqui
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Hora Zero
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Chac Mool
NPR - Car Talk 0948 November 28, 2009
NPR - NPR: 11-28-2009 Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!
Béla Fleck / Zakir Hussain / Edgar Meyer - Babar
Béla Fleck / Zakir Hussain / Edgar Meyer - Out of the Blue