Month: September 2011

The New BostonGlobe.com

The New BostonGlobe.com:

I’m beyond impressed with the new Boston Globe web site. It’s the best I’ve ever seen. Congrats to @beep and the rest of the designer/developer team. As +Craig Hockenberry said on Twitter, other newspapers are going to look at it and either realize they need to imitate it, or they’ll keep dying.

If you have a big monitor, resize your browser window from very narrow through to full screen. Go very slowly, and watch as the layout adapts to the new size, every step of the way. The images resize, the number of columns will change from 1 to 2 to 3, each column’s width changes… it’s brilliant.

(What I’ve mentioned here is just the first-glance stuff. Look around, the attention to usability and detail is intense.)

[Impressive work.]
Source: Truer Words – A Journal

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles: I danced professionally for a few years, and then taught for almost ten. For a lot of that time I had a company and was making work. I went to art school (university of the arts in Philadelphia). I thought I was going to study industrial design. I was pretty disenchanted when I realized that the industrial designers weren’t that involved in the engineering side of making stuff (or really the MAKING side of making stuff). Mostly just how it looked. How it felt. So there was a lot of CAD work, and some molding of models out of plastic. Someone dared me to take a dance class one night. I did. It seemed like much more fun than the visual arts core classes I was taking, so I switched majors the next day (“you want to switch majors!?” “Yes, if that’s possible.” “have you ever danced before!!?” “Yeah… I took a class last night.”). I stopped to catch my breath almost 15 years later and realized that I sort of hated dance. When I finally ran away screaming, building bikes seemed like a safe harbor. Can’t remember how I connected THOSE dots. [Go read the whole thing. Ezra Caldwell takes great photos, builds beautiful bikes, and continues to beat cancer. In a world where “awesome” is overused…]
Source: Cycle EXIF Update

Patagonia and Ebay

Patagonia and Ebay:

Good ol’ Yvon Chouinard. A couple of days ago, Patagonia announced a partnership with Ebay, urging consumers to buy and sell their used Patagonia garments and refrain from purchasing the new stuff. The whole thing is part of the longstanding Common Threads Initiative, and in order to be part of the buying and selling bonanza, you have to make a pledge to Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle and Reimagine. No argument here.

Sorta makes any “We made this garment with the most eco-friendly this and that” greenwashing statements a little less powerful, eh? Because really, what’s more eco-friendly than telling people to buy used gear?

[Yvon & Co. Really push the limits huh? Awesome.]
Source: Cold Splinters

Michael S. Hart, Founder of Project Gutenberg, Dies at Age 64

Michael S. Hart, Founder of Project Gutenberg, Dies at Age 64:

From his obituary at Project Gutenberg:

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or
eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one
of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He
often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had
been granted access to significant computing power at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after
being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of
Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to
transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this
beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to
be Hart’s life’s work, spanning over 40 years.

A true pioneer, who made the world a better place.

[Considering where I work, this is especially notable.]
Source: Daring Fireball

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development:

It used to be a jarring experience to setup a new machine for development, but progress has paved the dirt road into a silky smooth autobahn. These are the tools we use today:

  1. Homebrew: Remember how painful it used to be to get imagemagick installed? Now it takes about a minute. “brew install imagemagick”. Same story for git and other Linux dependencies.
  2. rbenv/ruby-build: We have some apps running on Ruby 1.8.7, some on 1.9.2, and some on 1.9.3. ruby-build makes it easy to compile all three, rbenv makes it easy to switch between them on a per-project basis. We run rbenv in production as well, so all you need to do to change the Ruby version there is alter .rbenv-version—development and production is always on the same page.
  3. Bundler: Not everyone at 37signals loved Bundler at first, but now that it’s stable, they’ve been won over. I now curse whenever I have to use an old application that hasn’t been setup with Bundler. Manually tracing down dependencies?! How prehistoric!
  4. rake setup: All our apps has a rake setup task that’ll run bundler, create the databases, import seeds, and install any auxiliary software (little these days) or do any other setup. So when you git clone a new app, you know that “rake setup” will take care of you.
  5. Pow: No more messing with Apache or nginx for local development. All it takes for Pow to add another app is a symlink. All the apps are always configured and available at basecamp.dev, highrise.dev, etc without messing with the hosts file either.

Thanks to Max Howell for Homebrew, Sam Stephenson for rbenv/ruby-build and Pow, and Carl Lerche/Yehuda Katz for Bundler. Thanks to them, starting from scratch has never been easier.

[Some new stuff to try out. RVM hasn’t really lit me up…]
Source: SIGNAL VS. NOISE

The Acquisition: An Open Letter to our Customers – Competitive Cyclist

alloy/macvim: The Acquisition: An Open Letter to our Customers – Competitive Cyclist:

Unlike the current essential structure of the bike industry, where dealer interests take priority over consumer convenience, our focus at Competitive Cyclist has always been on you. For those who asked if we sold out of financial desperation, the answer is a definitive “no.” We sold out of a sense of aggression. If nothing else, 20 years of bike racing has honed my sense of timing for an all-in attack. The moment is perfect for us to fast-track our ultimate vision for Competitive Cyclist.

[My local guys need to embrace this more than they have…]