This is a nice tutorial of some of the features of the BZR Pipeline plugin. You will want to watch this in fullscreen (click the link in the bottom right corner).

Learn how to build your own fire audio visualizer

Even a bad sitcom couldn’t make this up. I really hope the wife is hard of hearing and not so clueless to think that her husband was being held hostage by criminals that just happen to like to rhyme a lot.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-04/business/ct-met-butt-dialing-20110104_1_swat-team-winnetka-school-police-officers

This is an interesting article about how Google App Engine doesn’t make scaling as painless as one might expect.

http://farmdev.com/thoughts/89/the-promise-of-the-cloud/

Sloppy, the slow proxy, lets you see what is like to use your website from a distant or slow network. It is a java applet, so it will work any platform, but it only does HTTP unlike the more generic Linux solution to simulate latency:

sudo tc qdisc add dev lo root netem delay 500ms

In addition to Google’s PageSpeed analysis tool, they now have an apache module that will automatically apply best practices such as minimizing javascript (i.e. reducing extraneous whitespace such as indentation) or moving large chunks of inline javascript into an external file so that the browser can cache it.
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/overview.html

This is an interesting article on how to make VACUUM more effective at reclaiming space when you have a table that is so large that you don’t want to run VACUUM FULL on it, since it will lock the whole table to reclaim all the space.

http://blog.endpoint.com/2010/09/reducing-bloat-without-locking.html

Today, I went to TEDxSanAntonio, which is part of the TEDx program “that enables local communities such as schools, businesses, libraries, neighborhoods or just groups of friends to organize, design and host their own independent, TED-like events.” I was a little bit worried about how it would measure up to the normal TED talks, but I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting they all were. I don’t understand the need to fill out an application to attend a local TEDx talk, especially when the $50 fee reduces the likelihood of it getting too crowded. Apparently, there was a live video feed during the talks, but it doesn’t look like any videos are available now, so I’ll just provide links that I found to some of the topics that were discussed.

eLegs (personal exoskeleton for the paralized)

Compressed Earth Block (A green building supply with advantages over concrete and adobe.)

• Wikipedia page
• Photos of CEB buildings

Body Image (say no to “Fat Talk”):

• Time Magazine article
• TPR interview
• Body Image Program

Ahh, finally, reality will stop distracting me from my important work.

hsandbox is incredibly simple, but it is definitely something I wish existed when I was taking my first programming class in C in college.

In addition to making it easier to deal with larger snippets of code in interpreted languages like python, ruby, and perl, it makes experimenting in C, C++, Java and other compiled languages. As soon as you write the file in your editor, it recompiles and runs the code. In the screenshot below, I am using vim in the top half the terminal, and the output shows up in the bottom half of the terminal. It splits the terminal using GNU Screen.