John Desu » Asides

Kitsune Noir’s Desktop Wallpaper Project

John Dyer — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:08:31 +0000

If you’re anything like me then you can never have too many wallpapers. Thankfully, Bobby Solomon, the author of Kitsune Noir, has been running the Desktop Wallpaper Project for about 6 months now. Every week Bobby posts a new wallpaper from a different artist with a short blurb describing the inspiration for or the creation of the wallpaper.

I strongly suggest giving these wallpapers (along with Mr. Solomon’s great blog) a look as there are some hidden gems in there.

12:34:56

John Dyer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:45:26 +0000

If you view the date in the same format as shown in the image above, then you will instantly notice the significance of that date and time. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the date will be 123456789 not once, but twice today. This really isn’t that significant but it is a rarity as it will not happen for another century.

Found this on Kitsune Noir

Missed out on RailsConf? Me too. Here’s how I caught up

John Dyer — Sun, 17 May 2009 05:13:03 +0000

I’m sure I’m not the only Rails developer who missed RailsConf 2009 due to a plethora of various reasons. Well, I didn’t let that hold me back from gaining as much information as possible from the Conference. Although these resources are pretty easy to find, I thought I would help you out by providing you with some links.

First is the official RailsConf site, hosted by O’Reilly. This would be an obvious first choice for people, but I am still going to restate that there is a great deal of free content available here. Most of the keynotes and speeches are now up in pretty high-quality video and slides are available in PDF form for both the keynotes and most of the tutorials.

Next, if you’re like most people, you might not have enough time to watch the hours of videos or sort through all the slideshows available over at the RailsConf site. Well, you’re still in a great position to learn from those keynotes, as Nick Quaranto attended a ton of events at RailsConf and took great notes, which he published here on his blog litany against fear. Some highlights include the David Heinemeier Hansson keynote on the future of Rails and the secret to being productive using Rails, some great keynotes about git and github, and a speech given about testing with Webrat. Definitely worth checking out.

The final resource I’m providing related to RailsConf is from Rails Magazine. They just published their second issue and it is a special edition for RailsConf. I really am trying my best to support this magazine because I think it would be great to see this magazine grow into something great (not that it isn’t already) and be avaialable at bookstores and news stands. The big article goes over what’s coming to Rails 3 and details about the Merb and Rails merge. Oh, did I mention this magazine is free in digital form?

And while I’m at it, I thought I’d also point you over to a very, very detailed article about the benefit of building websites for projects on github and how things should be documented. I think if this is more heavily adopted, it would make life easier for developers using a lot of various gems and plugins. But at the same time I understand that this does take effort to create and most people aren’t exactly overflowing with free time. Either way, a good read that I though I’d share. I hope these resources help you to understand what happened at RailsConf and hopefully taught you something new.

The World’s First Web Server and Disqus

John Dyer — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:29:44 +0000

The World’s First Web Server, originally uploaded by sbisson.

It’s hard to believe, but this little NeXT cube is the first web server ever. It always surprised me that the internet has changed so much, so quickly and computers are becoming smarter and smarter every day. The crazy thing is that the internet is now “evolving” at an exponential rate and some of the things that once looked impossible are now looking very, very possible. Enough of that though, just thought it was a cool picture with a ton of history behind it.

In other news, I changed the theme to the site around a bit and also added support for Disqus, Facebook Connect, and the ability to post from your Twitter account. I encourage anyone who wants to leave a comment to post via one of those methods as it allows for very organized discussion and tracking via twitter with a community sort of comment overview available here. Anyways, pretty soon I’ll have a lot of time free and probably be spending some more time working with some Rails plugins I’ve been working on. I’ll let you know once I have any code up on Github or anything like that.

As a little side note, has anyone done any work with Sproutcore? I was really interested in using it in a rails app and was wondering if it’s relatively easy to use inside of a rails app.

50 Stunning Examples Of Architecture Photography

John Dyer — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:02:32 +0000

Architectural photography can be broadly considered to encompass views of the exteriors and interiors of domestic, commercial, religious, institutional, and engineering structures, as well as records of the evolution of towns and cities.

NIN | JA – Trent Reznor Announces New Free EP

John Dyer — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:12:15 +0000

Download the free NIN|JA EP – Featuring exclusive unreleased tracks from Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails & Street Sweeper.

Pragmatic Bookshelf: The RSpec Book

John Dyer — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:41:27 +0000

Available now as a beta PDF download over at The Pragmatic Programmers site, is the new RSpec Book. The full title of this book is “The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends.” It has six authors, most of which are developers of RSpec and Cucumber. I have had the time to read through the first 100 pages of the book and definitely think this is a very useful resource for anyone interested in BDD over TDD.

Here is the official description from PragProg:

Is your team trying to do TDD and failing? Are you finding your test suites bloated and difficult to read, understand, or maintain? Business applications today are plagued with features that are never used, highly coupled code that is hard to change, and expensive test suites that aren’t run any more because they are brittle and unreadable.
RSpec, Ruby’s leading Behaviour Driven Development tool, helps you do TDD right by embracing the design and documentation aspects of TDD. It encourages readable, maintainable suites of code examples that not only test your code, they document it as well. The RSpec Book will teach you how to use RSpec, Cucumber, and other Ruby tools to develop truly agile software that gets you to market quickly and maintains its value as evolving market trends drive new requirements.

Definitely give it a look

Help Get Git Preinstalled on Next Mac OS X

John Dyer — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:29:53 +0000

mojombo over at the Github Blog has published a new post encouraging users to take action and tell Apple what they really want. And what they really want is for Git to come preinstalled in the next version of Mac OSX.

I have a dream wherein future developers don’t even have to install Git for themselves in order to be able to use it. Apple has shown a very forward thinking attitude towards shipping OS X with various programming languages and version control systems. Right now is a critical time in which we can help push to have Git preinstalled on the next version of their operating system. The more people that use Git, the better the ecosystem becomes, and removing the installation barrier is a big step in that direction.

If this sounds like something you are interested in, Github encourages you to open a ticket on Apple’s bug reporting site.

For more info, check out the original post.