Yaketee (‘ya-ke-t’E) is a message board with a twist. To post and read messages, you have to be on the same network as the people you’re exchanging messages with.
Using WiFi at the coffee shop? You can post messages that everyone else there can read. Maybe you’re at a conference, the office, or want your roommates’ attention, if they can only lay off the XBox for a bit.
Yaketee messages are sticky so you can use it for lost and found, haikus, raves and rants, shopping list, geocaching and what not. What you do with it is up to you, but please be nice to others.
Yaketee doesn’t use peer-to-peer so there’s no client application to install. When you access our servers from a hotspot or home/office router, the router masks your IP address with its own. Yaketee uses that to match all the people accessing it from the same place.
Myth busting. According to a Nielsen report, women are heavier users of mobile social networking, and ages 35-54 are much better represented than teenagers. Just saying.
Cookie buster. Besides all its visible annoyances and CPU overheating tendencies, did you realize Flash also keeps cookies around? And offers absolutely no UI for managing your privacy. I will not use the word evil, but will point to the obviously-named Killflashcookies.
My hunch is that if we polled users they’d be hard pressed to tell you what FB activity could be seen by whom. I’d wager that most users don’t really understand that things have changed.
And then but so: those things are like being afraid of not knowing how to swim. We’re jumping, folks. And not knowing how to swim is the least of the issues.
The rest is just a matter of figure out what metric you want to use:
metric "Acquisition: Visitors"do
description "Unique visitors on any given page, as tracked by Google Analytics"
google_analytics "UA-1828623-6", :visitorsend
By my count that is a 22% decrease in conversion rates for using the madlibs signup style over the standard signups style, and the fact of the decrease (but not the magnitude) is significant at the 95% confidence level.
(Hint: if you find yourself quoting Patrick’s results as conclusive that madlibs is counter-effective, you’ve still got a lesson to learn)
Easy mark. If you want a lot of app built fast, check out Hobo. Essentially a framework on top of Rails that does much of the redundia for you.
A sizable reference. Notes from a production MongoDB deployment. I like most of what I’ve seen, but the “when things go south, they fall off the map” approach to recovery still scares me away from giving MongoDB a try.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash. A presentation about the power of HTML5, JS and CSS. I can’t believe someone thought it’s a good idea to require Flash to watch this presentation.
Come pay your respects. March 4th, Denver CO. Funeral for IE6.
It’s not just having quantifiable return on business. If quantifiable returns have to trickle from marketing to dev managers down to team leaders, then you have a bandwidth and latency issue. It’s about putting developers directly on the front line, baking metrics into the process, and measuring key business goals.
I call that “post Agile” because it build on the great foundation of Agile, but displaces “working software as primary measure of progress” with “validated learning and key metrics”. EDD is to post-Agile what TDD is to Agile.
We laugh at people who think software patents are awesome, or want to give the RIAA more power, or think big companies should have a veto power over new technologies that are “too disruptive.” Those are all positions that are coherent, understandable, and anti-meritocratic. We need to recognize that supporting a homogeneous status quo is just as dumb, and just as bad for our industry.
Level 3 powerup. Jeremy just released the Rails 3 upgrade handbook. Considering all the changes, at $12 it’s a pretty sweet deal.
Garb goes 0.7. Lot’s of awesome new stuff in Garb 0.7: slick API, OAuth and multiple sessions. Can’t wait to upgrade.
CMMI Level 5. It’s not broken. It doesn’t produce incorrect results. And it doesn’t cave under full load. Still, something feels wrong about this implementation of isValidNumber().
Interactive reading. Here’s a different way to read Ruby Best Practices. One chapter at a time, with a chance to discuss and comment on it:
If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that the Ruby Best Practices book exists. Even if you haven’t read it, you might have a sense for the sort of topics we cover based on the content you’ve seen on this blog. But now, everyone is going to get a chance to read RBP the way its meant to be read: as a conversation.
The reason that self-promotion works and self-adulation doesn’t is because self-promotion is the art of spreading ideas, concepts, and a greater vision. Self-adulation is just the promotion of accomplishments, deeds that have already been done.
HJKL.Vimium is a Chrome extension that provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of Vim.
Space Invaders Enterprise Edition. Just like the coin operated machines, and only 9MB of dependencies:
The magic of Space Invaders Enterprise Edition is actually under the hood. I’ve separated out the game logic from the Java source into a file parsed by a rules engine. This means we can easily view the game design, without it getting muddled with too much implementation code.
I finally decided to give Sinatra a spin. Considering using it for lightweight services that can be mounted inside/next to the main Rails app. The best way to learn a framework is to use it, so I wrote a simple app for a – just as simple – idea.
Ruby Learning. RubyTu.be is a collection of Ruby related videos and screencasts. 536 as I’m writing this post. That should keep you busy for a few years. Another option, at 249 strong, is RubySlide. That’s a lot of material.
The Intersect. There’s two things to be said for Redis. It’s fast. I first looked at Redis because it offers memcache performance without the reboot-induced amnesia. And it’s smart. It takes a bit to pick up the awesomeness of the Redis API, but once you do … did I mention awesome? Here’s one such example using set operations to report who’s online in real time:
The idea is to have one active set per minute. During each request that comes in from a logged-in user, we’ll add a user ID to the active set. When we want to know which user IDs are online, we can union the last 5 sets to get a collection of user IDs who have made a request in the last
Of those who would rather write native apps, a majority do so because of the App Store over any other reason (including available APIs, performance, language).
POSIX message queues may be implemented in the kernel for fast, low-latency communication between processes on the same machine. POSIX message queues are not intended to replace userspace, network-aware message queue implementations.
