You want porn? I'll give you porn.

posted by pete on April 30th, 2009

This link is suitable for any situation or environment; however, you might find yourself aroused if you look at it:

Firefox 3.5 for Developers

Please keep in mind that this document doesn’t even bother to mention the new native JavaScript code compiler or the Webkit-rivaling CSS3 support, both game changers in their own right.

Everyone is going to have their own pet favourites, here are mine:

There are earth shattering things in that list, but I saved the best until last. The money shot?

Now, it should be said that this is a beta of a minority web browser, and that only people developing highly targeted applications will be able to use this stuff with any reliability or consistency. It could well be a decade before this stuff is the norm on the public web, and that’s a crying shame.

True cross-domain XHR and a native JSON object would finally enable the mashup culture that web developers have been championing for years. This should remind us that we can never let up the pressure on MSFT to mothball IE6 and IE7 in the name of human progress.

We’re one critical update away from shrinking our average CSS by 50%.

6 comments

You've got to check out Nizmlab

posted by pete on April 29th, 2009

Ever since Unspace-cum-Kolor designer Lukas Dryja came on board in 2007, he’s never failed to impress me with his taste and impressive technical understanding of the challenges inherent in designing for the web. He’s been involved in some of our most demanding branding and user experience engagements to date.

Of course, Kolor has been on a roll lately: first with their awesome Globe and Mail iPhone application, and now they’ve publicly launched Nizmlab.

Best described as a video portal where the content is selected by human editors deemed to have excellent taste, this entirely subjective approach to filtering what’s actually worth watching is desperately needed on the web. It’s completely un-democratic, with excellent results. Of course, your tastes might run askew to those of the Nizmlab editors… but in that case, you might consider this an early warning sign of your own bad taste.

Things certainly seem to be picking up steam: they were on the del.icio.us front page and covered by ReadWriteWeb (which is sort of like TechCrunch if it wasn’t painful to read) today. It might be ambitious, but we hope that opinionated web frameworks like Rails are starting to give way to content that is just as proud of its editorial bias.

0 comments

Ruby deck flips

posted by pete on April 14th, 2009

I’m constantly reminded of why I love Ruby so damn much. I’m not a CompSci scholar, and I know that Lisp did everything first 30 years ago… I guess it’s all about context, isn’t it?

Luckily, this isn’t Reddit and so I’m hoping I can share one of my favourite operators with you. That’s right, I have favourite operators. They make me feel like I have crazy ninja Skate or Die skills, even though there’s very little mystery.

In Ruby we kick around && and || like nerd footbags, but there are a few operators that you might not have realized, and & is one of them.

& (aka the Intersect)

You can be forgiven if, like me, you initially assume that & is a bitwise AND operator. After all, when applied to a Numeric, that’s exactly what it is. (In brief, 1 & x returns 1 when x is an odd number and 0 if x is even. Good for alternating row colours!)

When applied to two Array objects, it returns the elements that are unique in both:

[1, 2, 3] & [2, 3, 4] # => [2, 3]


How many times have you written inefficient double-loop constructs to compare lists? There’s something deeply satisfying about replacing functions with a single character.

What can you do with this little gem? One of my favourites is a simple function to derive the Tanimoto coefficient. This gives you a Float between 0 and 1 which tells you how similar the contents of two lists are. This is useful for correlating tastes, recommending products, and other predictive applications.

def tanimoto(a, b)
  c = a & b
  c.size.to_f / (a.size + b.size - c.size)
end

x = %w[apple orange banana kiwi]
y = %w[apple pear orange]

puts tanimoto(x, y) # => 0.4
6 comments

MeshU wrap-up

posted by pete on April 7th, 2009

On April 6th, I gave a talk at MeshU called Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? which I felt was warmly received by the crowd. I was quite nervous, addressing a room full of my peers and being sandwiched between two amazingly smart people (Leigh Honeywell and Chris Wanstrath) but overall I’m not sure if I’d change much to do it again.

If you were at my talk and want to give some anonymous feedback, they’ve set up a very short survey on Rypple, here.

You’re welcome to follow me on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing; please note that I do not use LinkedIn, and my Facebook usage is personal.

Here’s a breakdown of the things I linked to:

Lim Ding Wen, the 9 year old app developer
The missing trialware business model
Ad Mob Exchange
Cydia, the jailbroken app store
Fart App Round-up
John Gilmore and the Secret Laws
Rejected Apps Dead Pool
An app that would be “too confusing” for users
Moop.me’s Lyrics app, rejected 4 times
App Lookup directory of custom protocol handlers
Alocola, GPS for your web apps
Credit card processor
Rhodes, write in Ruby deploy everywhere
Making graphics with Canvas
Mozilla Bespin web code editor
Mobile Orchard, the best iPhone development blog by a mile
Huge list of iPhone development resources
The Amazing iPhone, high-quality free research white paper
ObjectiveResource, access Rails web services from Objective-C

I have uploaded my slides to SlideShare, even though I’m not sure how useful they will be without me narrating them!

Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
View more presentations from peteforde.

Leigh Honeywell was kind enough to post a short clip of me dancing at the beginning of the talk on Vimeo:


pete dancing from hypatia on Vimeo.

Finally, my intention is to follow-up this wrap-up with a formal proposal to consider iPhone web applications and side-stepping the iTunes Application Store (and their 30% gross cut) completely.

2 comments

The road to GoGaRuCo

posted by meghann on April 6th, 2009


In two weeks, half of the Unspace gang will be migrating to San Francisco for the first annual Golden Gate Ruby Conference, where Hampton will be regaling the audience with tales of how he brought Ruby to Wikipedia. As soon as we found out Leah Silber (goddess of Engine Yard) and Josh Susser (aka Mr. has_many :through) were the two shining stars behind the event, we jumped at the chance to snag tickets and lend a hand. We began to lovingly craft an afterparty to compliment this already well-curated event.

Come by Cafe Du Nord sporting your badge after Day 1 of the conference wraps up. Grab a drink and some eats on us!

Official GoGaRuCo Afterparty
Friday, April 17th from 6:30-8:30pm
Cafe Du Nord - 2170 Market Street, San Francisco

Come and say hi!

0 comments