Blue Sky On Mars

• http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/cats.htm
  they’re everywhere.
  (tags: cats humor funny)
• DOM Helper
  somewhat live CSS editor for IE, plus DOM explorer.
  (tags: ie css editor DOM development web tools)

• Access Matters » Blog Archive » Today’s AJAX and DHTML Best Practices
  (tags: accessibility AJAX javascript webdesign)
• SQLite gains fulltext search!
  Lots of other interesting tidbits in Michael Cleverly’s notes from a talk given by D. Richard Hipp.
  (tags: database sqlite text)
• No Silver Bullet:
  Fred Brooks’ 1986 paper
  (tags: development programming brooks)

Big event announcement: The TurboGears Jam Hosted by Bruce Eckel. I’m really excited about this, because I’ve heard some great things about how Bruce runs a conference like this. This is akin to the Web Frameworks Jam that Bruce hosted this past July. They had such a good time with TG that they wanted to do more, thus The TurboGears Jam was born.

I’m thankful that Bruce decided to hold this in Ann Arbor. I wouldn’t have been able to make it out to Crested Butte, but I can definitely handle an event that is 3 blocks from my office.

The TurboGears Jam is the kind of event where you really learn things. Rather than having various people preaching  endlessly at you about how to do things, you have an environment where you can try things out and run with them for real.

(This is all my description of the event, based on what I’ve heard of the Web Frameworks Jam. Check out the official page for the full intro.)

• Pika - really really freaking cute if you ask me! The real life pikachu! - Google Video
  (tags: video cute)

• BBC NEWS | Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn
  YouTube launched in Feb ‘05. Not a bad deal selling your business after less than two years for 1.65 billion.
  (tags: news web business google)

Ian Landsman’s Mini Site Marketing Experiment is one of the best marketing ideas (and implementations thereof) that I’ve seen in quite a while. Check out the Open Source Help Desk List site that he created. This is a genuinely useful roundup of open source help desk software, though the alphabetical listing is not as useful as listings by platform or by relative maturity/usability would be. The site is not so subtly trying to get people to consider Ian’s HelpSpot product as an alternative. You know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. The resource he’s created is useful and highlights one segment of his competition. It seems likely that people perusing his list will check out HelpSpot and, assuming they’re willing to pay at all, may indeed pony up the reasonable price for it.

Good job, Ian!

• Apache Flood
  “profile based” HTTP load testing
  (tags: testing apache performance loadtesting)

At long last, the first half of Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears is now available electronically as part of “Rough Cuts”. You can buy it electronically now and keep getting updates all the way through the final copy of the book. The book is entirely in the editing phase right now and we’re working hard to wrap it all up quickly. We’re expecting the entire book to be on Safari by the end of the month, and it should be available in print next month.

• Introduction: Testing Python Web applications using twill and wsgi_intercept
  in-process testing - no web server required!
  (tags: python testing web twill wsgi development)
• Hairy Spider Blog - DOMHelper Addins you say, how do I write one of those?
  (tags: ie css)
• Natural Docs
  (tags: documentation javascript)

• Rolling Stone : Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Will The Next Election Be Hacked?
  (tags: politics voting)