Week 277 - Interesting links

Brewfile: a Gemfile, but for Homebrew

Seb pointed me to this post which introduced me to the Brewfile for Homebrew. I haven’t started using it yet but can certainly see how it’d be useful. Thanks, Seb. — CR

How to do new things

The best way to learn something is to start doing it. Don’t wait for full knowledge to come to you. Often it won’t. Just pretend you know what you’re doing, and hit the walls. That helps define the shape of the problem. Make it small enough that you can start solving it right now, without waiting. Each part of the problem is smaller than the whole thing. And tell yourself you can do it, because you can.

I completely agree but still find myself floundering at times when I forget this useful advice. — CR

Glyphviewer | Peter Murphy

We’ve been doing some work with Video.js recently and this little tool helped me on the path to diagnosing some issues with the Video.js webfont in IE. — CR

Babbage: easily encode or decode data with a click

I’ve had a quick play with Babbage. It looks really clean and seems to work well. I can imagine this coming in useful if I can remember it on the odd occassion I need its help. While it’s certainly a nice little utility, I do wonder how many of these conversions can be done with simple command line tools. — CR

The Variable Tree: I Know Where You Were Last Summer: London’s public bike data is telling everyone where you’ve been

Interesting analysis of the Barclays bike data you can get from TFL. I’ve done some similar(ish) analysis with my own data but hadn’t considered that you could potentially identify people from the bulk data. — CR

Round-up of the sixth Little Schemer book club meeting

Another excellent write-up by Tom. This was the meeting where a few things all came together and it felt like me made a bit of a leap forward. I’m very much looking forward to the next meeting. — JM

Static Analysis For CSS

What with my work on method_log and the Little Schemer book club, I’ve developed an interest in static analysis, ASTs and the like. And so it was fun to read about someone doing static analysis on CSS (and JavaScript). — JM

Atom Shell

Now that GitHub have open-sourced the Atom editor, I was interested to read about Atom Shell (based on Chromium and node.js) which lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. — JM

Theseus JavaScript Debugger for Chrome and NodeJS

I hadn’t come across either the Brackets editor or the Theseus JavaScript debugger before, but I really like the idea of seeing code coverage in real-time. It feels as if it might be a nice alternative to (a) adding console.log() statements; or (b) stepping through the JS code using the debugger. — JM

Google Glass, Pi-Style

These look like a slightly more practical¹ version than the Raspberry Eye ones I pointed out a couple of weeks back. — JM

Assistant.to

I’ve definitely felt the pain of having a long email exchange in order to arrange a meeting. This browser extension claims to solve this problem and integrates with Gmail and Google Calendar. I think I might give it a try. — JM