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An explanation of #rescue_from, which was added in Rails 2.0, and is a really rather lovely way of handling all kinds of custom exception and making them not suck.
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“…this feature is one of the few nicest features in Rails made by a contributor outside of the Rails core so I couldn’t resist mentioning it.” More on #rescue_from, with some nice use cases.
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“Strictly limited edition 4Gb USB stick, shaped in Radiohead’s iconic “bear” image and housed in a bespoke deluxe box.” Full .WAV files and some natty packaging, to boot.
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“Sanskrit is a rich-text editor that outputs Textile instead of XHTML.” Also has nicely unstyled ‘button’ controls, making it easy to custoise the UI.
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“God’s Eye View portrays four key Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth.” Striking, jarring; curiously impersonal. Parting of the Red Sea is, to my mind, the best.
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Dan Hill: “The Well-Tempered Personal Environment” Dan’s talk from Interesting South. Something to watch when I have a bit more time; it looks like a wonderful concept.
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“There’s always the feeling that you’re not seen as either a real programmer or a real scientist; you kind of fall between two stools.” Some great thoughts from Andrew on the problems you get when people aren’t interested in mixing paint.
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“There are a lot of similarities between design and advertising, notably the treatment of real market feedback and the opinion of the client, and I think this book nails when and how to do proper user research.”
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Aaron had two talks turned down; both, from their abstracts alone, sound fascinating; from his fuller explanations, they sound like they had the potential to be fantastic. Still reeling from some ideas. Disappointed there’s not space for this in the world
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“Utility Belt is a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB, including convenience methods, language patches, and useful extensions.” Looks most handy, too; some stuff is OSX-only.
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“Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity.” A nice way to build site-specific browsers; shame it’s Leopard-only…
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“Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail.” Leopard only, notably. It also has a good Office Space joke in its screengrabs.
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“CommandShift3 is like Hot or Not. Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites.”
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“…our designer Sara Soskolne discovered this marvelous set of Movable Type in Chocolate, created by Sandra Kübler and Christine Voshage.” Oh my. That’s beautiful.
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“I’ve tried hard to use [sequencers] but it’s blocks in different colours and I’m only used to just seeing the waves. I don’t need to listen much to the drums because I know they look nice, like a fishbone, rigged up to be kind of skitty, sharp.”
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“Will they build RAW converters for prehistoric digital cameras?” That’s not the only biggie Fraser asks in this thoughtful piece – most of our RAW workflows are awfully reliant on proprietary technology. What happens when it’s all obsolete?
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Photographs from Pirsig’s 1968 motorcycle roadtrip, which was the inspiration for “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
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Mike Krahulik finally puts up a transcription of an interview with his grandfather about his time in the Navy during the Second World War. it’s interesting, notably when Krahulik asks him how he feels about WWII videogames. Also, it’s just a great story.
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“Seeed is a place to discuss the business of web applications.” Interesting forum implementation, too.
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“I’ll show you an example of an integration test I wrote with Test::Unit a while back and then converted to use Story Runner earlier today.” RSpec’s Story Runner looks quite interesting.
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“Drawing on inspiration from Plotr and PlotKit, software developer Ole Laursen wanted to bring the same plotting functionality to jQuery. So he built his own jQuery plugin and called it Flot.” That looks rather nifty.
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Looks useful – a plugin to generate email updates about things within your domain model.