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.

So you really only need to remember one URL: http://yaketee.com.

How easy is that?

There’s no guarantee you’ll get laid, but you’ll have fun using it, so check it out.

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.

The fall will kill you. Brian Oberkirch sums up the issue with privacy and discoverability:

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.

Hella cool. Petition to make “Hella” the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Smack a host. Cool URL pointing to localhost. Try http://dontmakeme.smackaho.st:3000/.

Cartoon, by H. Caldwell (via foreverdigital)

You’ll need to include the garb gem in your configuration and establish a session (using username/password or OAuth token), like this:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  gems.config "vanity"
  gems.config "garb"
  . . .
  config.after_initialize do
    require "garb"
    ga = YAML.load_file(Rails.root + "config/ga.yml")
    Garb::Session.login(ga['email'], ga['password'], account_type: "GOOGLE")
  end
end

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", :visitors
end

You can even use filters and much more, see the site for more details.

To use Vanity on a forking server (Passenger, Unicorn, etc), each child process must establish its own connection.  When you use Vanity 1.3 with Passenger it would do the right thing, but other servers need a helping hand.  Here, for example, is a portion of config/unicorn.rb that reconnects ActiveRecord and Vanity.

after_fork do |server, worker|
  ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
  Vanity.playground.reconnect!
end

Other worthy fixes and improvements:

• New documentation page that covers everything you need to know setting up Vanity for Rails (http://vanity.labnotes.org/rails.html)
• Vanity query parameter (_vanity=?) that you can use to choose a particular alternative, e.g. to tie an advertisement banner with content of the site.
• Command line “vanity list” catalogs all ongoing experiments, their alternatives (and fingerprints) and all metrics.
• Vanity loads Redis configuration from config/redis.yml (if you have such a file).
• New way to specify connection configuration: Vanity.playground.redis = “localhost:6379″. Use this instead of the separate host/port/db attribute.
• Explicit vanity_context_filter and vanity_reload_filter so you can skip them, or order filters relative to them.
• If metric cannot be loaded (e.g. offline, no db access) show error message for that metric but don’t break dashboard.
• AbTest incorrectly calls identify method instead of identity (issue #2)
• Running vanity command, automatically detects and loads Rails.
• Vanity now picks up on load_path set from within config/environment.rb (issue #4)
• Vanity.playground.define is deprecated. Bad choice for a method name. If you need this feature, make a suggestion and let’s create a better API.

On the Web, the only reliable data is yours. Rather than echo the latest discovery — the madlibs signup form — Patrick tested how well it performs on his site:

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.

How to forget. On the common mistake of finalizing with a closure reference.

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.

Want! Hackintosh Intel Core i7 920 4.41 GHz scores 14618 on geekbench.(via @russhans)

Life before Google, from the wonderful Shoebox blog.

OMG so totally Like, Python:

#!usr/bin/python
# My first Like, Python script!
yo just print like "hello world" bro

Conservative ISO broom. Garbage collection in Ruby. Interesting use of MongoDB to analyze memprof heap dumps.

Note worthy. The handy Rails footnotes plugin adds footnotes for easy debugging: session, parameters, cookies, filter chain, etc. Awesome sauce.

Add this in your app’s CSS to make the footnotes page-wide but no wider (even when showing very long values):

#footnotes_debug { background: #fff; color: #fff; padding: .6em 0; width: 100% }
#footnotes_debug table { table-layout:fixed; max-width: 960px; word-wrap: break-word }

Add this to your environment to get it to open links in MacVim:

Footnotes::Filter.prefix = 'mvim://open?url=file://%s&line=%d&column=%d'

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.

Hello Schröddy, not available in male-fitting styles.

Photo, t-shirt art with a twist, by Flying Mouse.

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.

Diversity matters. After all, we’re in the meritocracy business:

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.

Werewolf hunting. Ruby and RoR conference calendar for 2010.

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().

Cartoon, by WTTF

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.

Chapter 4 is just out, so go give it a try.

X 2.0. The 10 golden principles of successful Web App (note: slides locked behind Flash doors).

Self promote. Nathan Hangen has some good advise on how to self-promote without sounding like a “social media expert”:

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.

If you need a daily “what day is it today?” reminder, check out the Daily Hi.