@rmanalan

rich manalang’s curated version of the web

Marine Mammal Center

My boys and I went to the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands
(http://www.marinemammalcenter.org) this weekend. Got to see some
elephant seals and California sea lions. The most surprising thing
was the postmortem lab where you can see vets disecting marine mammals
through a window. My 5 y/o boys were glued to the window as the vet
hacked through a sea lions' skull to expose the brain, skinned the
skull, and took the eye balls out of its socket. Most of the adults
who watched just about gagged, but not my guys.

         

Posted 16 days ago
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Joseph Smarr: "High-performance JavaScript: Why Everything You've Been on Yahoo! Video

An oldie but goodie. Joseph has some great points in his slides:

"Everyone is amazed by fast apps. It hardly matters what else they do! Everyone hates slow apps. It hardly matters what else they do..."

"All your projects start off as blank web pages [which are really fast]. So, if they're slow, it's because you let them get slow. You let too many features and UIs get in there to the point where it wasn't fast, but if you can hold the line, then you can keep your app fast and refuse to not let it be fast."

Posted 3 months ago
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Get ready to have your mind blown

Posted 3 months ago
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I really want to love Posterous, but...

... it's not fast enough.  Posterous is a good service that fits a large niche. But from my perspective, if they want to be great and break out as mainstream web app, it needs to get faster... much, much faster.  Anyone else think Posterous is slow?
Posted 3 months ago
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OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail

Nice... one more step to eliminating passwords!

Posted 3 months ago
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Shareaholic for Google Chrome

This seems to be the best sharing widget available for chrome. Works well with Posterous too!

Posted 3 months ago
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Using ActiveRecord with EventMachine

So what does it all mean? Well, here’s a Sinatra application that uses plain old ActiveRecord and is completely asynchronous! Try ab -n 100 -c 20 http://localhost:9292/test to hit the app with 20 concurrent connections; it will process them all in parallel, without any painful threading issues (autoloading, misbehaving extensions, etc). Awesome!

Posted 3 months ago
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Shoes and software

The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well. Does it look good, does it feel good, is it comfortable, is it clear, is it easy? No matter what you’re selling, those seem to be the things that really matter. Get those right and you’ve got a great shot at building a successful product and business.

Posted 3 months ago
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The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps

Posted 4 months ago
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Illustrating the landingpad.org helicopter

From pencil and paper to digital form.

Posted 4 months ago
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