Sam’s random musings

Noted food scientist Harold McGee takes a look at the…: “

Noted food scientist Harold McGee takes a look at the microbiological consequences of double dipping a chip into a bowl of dip.

Prof. Paul L. Dawson, a food microbiologist, proposed it after he saw a rerun of a 1993 ‘Seinfeld’ show in which George Costanza is confronted at a funeral reception by Timmy, his girlfriend’s brother, after dipping the same chip twice.

So are you a double dipper and/or are you willing to kiss everyone at a party?

(Via kottke.org.)

Representative Line: On a Budget: “

‘I was called in by a small company to make some minor changes to their software,’ Baughn wrote, ‘mostly language translations. Apparently, the normal maintainer had just up and quit.’
‘As I entered my temporary office, I got an inkling of why. On the wobbly desk sat a flickering 15′ CRT attached to a grimy, Compaq-branded Pentium II. But what made up my mind, however, was this following line.’

if (exitStatus==(3-3)) // Sorry, some ov my keys are broken

You know you are in trouble if this could happen in your home office, as a remote worker….

(Via The Daily WTF.)

MacThemes / [Growl] iPhonesque %u2014 ala the dialog box on iPhone: “iPhonesque is a Growl style imitating the ‘pop in’ dialog box on the iPhone.”

nice!

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p>Bandwidth throttling in OS X

“Advanced OS X users know that Darwin comes with ipfw, which can be used to set up a custom firewall. This same service however can be used to also limit bandwidth on specific ports.

Not too hard but good for testing web services code and other things under bandwidth constrained environments.

(Via Mac OS X Hints.)

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p>DTerm: give your Mac a little shell love”

DTerm is a utility just released by Decimus Software Inc. It’s a Leopard-only app that provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows shell commands to be run from anywhere in OS X. In case you’re wondering why, just imagine what less window switching and screen clutter could mean for productivity on jobs that require both Finder and Terminal. Yes, you can do a lot with Quicksilver, but DTerm provides bash name completion with a dropdown, context sensitivity to your current path and full output with clipboard features. You can also type ⌘-↩ in the HUD to run the command in the Terminal, which will open up to your current path.

This is a very addictive application for the geekiest around you. Well not totally the geekiest, because they might not know what a ui is other then a terminal window….

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

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p>Bingodisk and Strongspace: What Happened?

The past 10 days have not been the best days at Joyent. Bingodisk and Strongspace went off-line 12 Saturday. Bingodisk service was restored eight days later on 19 January. Strongspace limped back into service late 21 January, nearly ten days after it went off-line. Customers of these services are rightly outraged by the outage. While Strongspace and Bingodisk represent a very small fraction of Joyent’s entire infrastructure, we understand how critical it is to many of you, and have been working and investing many, many hours to bring these services back on-line as expeditiously as possible. I apologize for the outages.

This is an important read on a couple of fronts.

• it really helps one to understand the dangers of putting all your backup plans in a single ‘cool’ technology
• that the really hard part about a problem that requires restoration from a back up is the restoration
• that this kind of transparency about a problem will probably go a long way for Joyeur.

It should be noted that I am the owner of a couple of lifetime plans with Joyeur and really like most of their services.

(Via Joyeur.)

Beanstalk Subversion Hosting

Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, offering a simple web-based UI for creating and managing repositories. They also offer smooth integration with systems such as Basecamp, Campfire, FogBugz, Twitter, and Lighthouse. You can get started with a free account — free, I say — in just minutes, and can upgrade to a paid plan at any time. Beanstalk is a perfect example of a ‘do one thing and do it well’ service.

This is a nice looking service, one that I might test out for the next collaborative project that I have for a client. Traditionally I have set up the repos on a machine that I control and then have to figure out how to migrate the service later. It might be nice to take an existing service and just pass it off instead….

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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p>Automatically Version Your CSS and JavaScript Files: “

Because we’re always on the look out for ways to speed up our web application, one of my favorite tools for optimization is the YSlow Firefox extension. Based on rules created by research done by Yahoo engineer, Steve Souders (his book High Performance Web Sites is a must read for anyone interested in front end engineering), the tool hooks into Firebug and helps you diagnose issues that can shave seconds off your pages’ load times. While we were able to implement most of the suggestions fairly easily, Rule #3, which specifies adding a far futures Expires header required a bit of elbow grease that some of you might be interested in.

There are some good tricks in here, but sometimes I think that designers and developers really get into the ‘optimization phase’ way to early. There are so many sites to my mind that really could use some more time spent in who are they being built for, how are they being used and what can I do to make the experience more streamlined and useful.

Recently I noticed that the Bank of Americas around my house started replacing the ATM machines, and there seems to of been a lot done to make the experience much faster, not the machines being faster but the experience. And it really makes a difference….

(Via Particletree RSS Digest.)