There are plenty of perfectly acceptable and functional websites out there that don%u2019t use dynamic content. But what if you want to give your site that little something extra that makes your visitors say “Wow”, What then?

Some great examples of some common ideas, to give a site a little extra pop. There is something to be said about making the inial experience more enticing for a site that is an application. I do think that there are times in an informational site that these ideas to detract rather then enhance…

Put this into your ~/.bashrc script and you should see the Git/SVN status in your prompt if your working directory is a sandbox.

For SVN, it displays the current revision:

liyanage@primavera:foobar(r9851 *) $

For Git, it displays the current branch:

liyanage@primavera:build-entropy-php(php-53 *) $

For both, a * means that there are local changes to the working directory

This is really a good trick if you do lots of work with repositories and want to know both what revision you are on and if there are changes…

(Via www.entropy.ch blog.)

“So I was bored at work one day,” Graeme Job explains, “and wondered, what’s the most useless thing I could do with my time without actually doing anything. Then it hit me. I could use T-SQL to generate… Mandelbrot.” Graeme continued, “Following is a single T-SQL SELECT statement that generates a text-representation of a Mandelbrot Set. The results are best viewed in text-mode.”

Something only Face could likely enjoy…

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

If you are thinking of hunting for some query speedups in mysql this might help (now don’t be premature

(Via Planet MySQL.)

The recent Data-Intensive Computing Symposium brought together experts in system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to better understand existing capabilities in the development and application of large-scale computing systems, and to explore future opportunities.

Always interesting to read and see presentations on how the really big boys do it

(Via High Scalability – Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites..)

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.)

Amazon has a clear visual language for shopping-related buttons. (Figure 1) While the buttons vary in size, color, text, and iconography, they clearly share enough of the design elements that the variety enhances their purpose rather than complicating it.

• Color
• Iconography
• Context & Flexibility
• Copywriting

Worth reading if you do things like buttons and pretty things in your work. I tend not too, I’m the guy who builds the pigs I don’t put the lipstick on them

(Via Garrett Dimon.)

We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

If you do find yourself inclineded to do html email generation it does behoove you too check out the mailchimp inspector and take the time to read some of these links…

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

fullduplex.org » How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who [...]

Oh man so true so true

(Via Mind-NOX.)