Asides

Asides are a collection of small posts that I find around the web. A link and some commentary. Enjoy!

Namebench, find the fastest DNS servers for your provider • code.google.com

We just got through transitioning into some new offices here at ZehnerGroup. Unfortunately our new location doesn't have the most amazing selection of internet offerings to choose from, so we're using Clearwire 4G at the moment. It's doing pretty well, but the DNS services are lacking. Namebench helps you find the best DNS service for your current network provider. #

Visual Event 2 • www.sprymedia.co.uk

Sometimes you run into issues where a DOM event has an event hooked to it, but you can't specifically find in your code where that event was bound. This bookmarklet helps by letting you inspect an element and find attached events. Handy! #

How do I backport a sid package to testing or stable? • wooledge.org

Install the Debian source (and the development tools, especially debhelper), and then build the package. Step by step:

add a deb-src line for sid to your sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get build-dep packagename
apt-get -b source packagename

the resulting debs should be in the current directory. Use dpkg -i <debfile> to install! #

What is Symfony2? • fabien.potencier.org

Even though I've moved on to Python, I will always soft spot in my heart for PHP. The one thing that PHP still has going for it is it's ease of deployment. Everyone supports it, and launching it doesn't require any configuration whatsoever. That being said, there are certain instances where using PHP is actually refreshing, so seeing new stuff like this gets me stoked. I like the fact that they don't tout themselves as an MVC framework, but rather a collection of independent modules that end up being an HTTP request/response framework. Cool stuff for real. #

Batch PNGCrush a Directory • davidwalsh.name

Super handy script you can use to mass-compress PNG's inside of your project. It requires pngcrush to work (this just wraps pngcrush to make crushing an entire directory simple). For those of you with OS X, check out homebrew and then install with brew install pngcrush. #

Fantastic Python Webserver Benchmark • nichol.as

Great article benchmarking and outlining the differences between python web servers Gunicorn, uWSGI (my current choice), mod_wsgi, etc... #

jQuery 1.5 Released! • blog.jquery.com

Super stoked about the new deferreds shenanigans, and the $.ajax() rewrite. #

Tir, a Mongrel2+Lua Micro-framework • sheddingbikes.com

I've always been interested in Lua because of it's similarities to Javascript and Python, two languages that I cherish dearly. With the advent of "server-side" Javascript (node.js, V8, etc...) the need for things like Lua isn't as strong, but I'd still love to play around with it. This is Zed Shaw's attempt at challenging himself by building a micro Lua web-framework to play nice with his Mongrel2 server. Pretty neat! #

Django Class-based Views • docs.djangoproject.com

This is very exciting news for the Django framework! Hopefully the migration path over to 1.3 won't be a huge pain in the ass. #

Stay up late while you can. It pays off. • www.aiga.org

Anything I've achieved in my career I credit today to those four years. I loved working late at night. I worked on office stuff, and I worked on personal projects. I played music really loud and drank Mountain Dew. I would design anything: invitations for my friends' parties, packaging for mix tapes, one-of-a-kind birthday cards, and freebies for non-profits. #