Sam’s random musings

I Feel Good About Mac Open Source:

Peter Hosey’s comprehensive directory of open source code libraries and apps for the Mac. (Via Daniel Jalkut.)

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Nice list, more interest to coders then normal people

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

DateBocks, the new, intuitive date input selection for your forms:

In January, being inspired by Simon Willison, I came up with a combined method which would be the answer to my days of entering in dates through drop down selections .

I invite you to try it out on the live demo and see for yourself just how useful this tool really is. And hopefully, you may very well find yourself using it or wishing you were using it - whenever you enter a date.

this is a really nice solution to a really ugly problem. pull downs for date selection are a PIA

(Via O’Reilly Weblogs.)

PHPHacks.com: Creating charts with JGraph:

PHPHacks.com has posted a new tutorial about one of the more requested features when working with a dyanmic scripting languages - creating graphs. They show how to do it with the help of JPGraph, a popular PHP graphing package.

I have used JGraph in a couple of projects and if you need graphs in php projects this is a good candidate.

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

Transcorners: Because you are obsessed with rounded corners:

People really are obsessed with rounded corners aren’t they? If we had a simple way to express them in CSS, maybe then we would be writting JS libraries and CSS hacks to give us spikey corners or something

Well, the latest kid on the block is Transcorners, which is a mootools based rounded corners system.

Neat trick for what may be at least a the biggest example of a rounded corner I have seen

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Plug: Duck Vader:

“Luke, I am your mallard.”

(Via Firewheel Design: Sparkplug.)

What to tune in MySQL Server after installation:

My favorite question during Interview for people to work as MySQL DBAs or be involved with MySQL Performance in some way is to ask them what should be tuned in MySQL Server straight after installation, assuming it was installed with default settings.

I’m surprised how many people fail to provide any reasonable answer to this question, and how many servers are where in wild which are running with default settings.

Even though you can tune quite a lot of variables in MySQL Servers only few of them are really important for most common workload. After you get these settings right other changes will most commonly offer only incremental performance improvements.

P.S Note MySQL distribution contains bunch of sample my.cnf files which may be great templates to use. Typically they would already be much better than defaults if you chose correct one.

There are some great tips in this post mostly if you use innodb tables, but the last tip about looking at the sample .cnf files is a really good one.

(Via MySQL Performance Blog.)

mogenerator: Core Data codegen:

Core Data, like its Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) ancestor, offers to represent your persistent object instances as classes of a generic data class (NSManagedObject in Core Data, EOGenericRecord in EOF) or a custom subclass of the generic class.

This looks to be the beginning of a great tool for those of us who are getting quickly addicted to the the Core Data stuff

(Via rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed.)

Wikipedia and Genomics Visualization: Separated At Birth?:

By tim

One of the most fascinating presentations at our recent Foo Camp was one on visualization. A number of different folks ran through some of their visualization projects. There was a lot of mindblowing stuff, but what particularly struck me was the similarity between a visualization that Fernanda Viegas had done (with Martin Wattenberg) visualizing the change logs in wikipedia entries and one that Ben Fry had done on Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, or SNPs, (comparisons of the genetic varation between individuals.) While the similarities may simply be an artifact of a similar visualization technique, they are striking and thought-provoking, and suggest the organic nature of wikipedia.

Fernanda and Martin explain their technique here.

I find visualization really interesting, and these are cool ways of looking at history of documents in general, it is easier with wikipedia since the data is there and the number of changes can be cool

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)