Links from September 2008
Election 2008 Powered By Twitter
Twitter released a live look at the presidential election, and it’s pretty darn slick. I love the way it auto-updates, and even better is the way the updates are paused when you hover over a tweet. It’s unfortunate, as Andrew Smith mentioned, that it doesn’t include any third party candidates, but hopefully they’ll add them sometime in the near future.
Revision3 Beta
Yesterday, the second phase of Revision3 Beta, Revison3’s search for new shows, was released. I did pretty much all of the backend development, and it’s powered by Viddler’s API. There are some really great shows here, so definitely check it out. You can read Revision3’s announcement on their blog.
Reverie, Shot on the new Canon 5D
Reverie was shot completely on the new Canon 5D, and seriously, I am in complete awe. The quality of the video is absolutely breathtaking; I was shaking my head in amazement during most of the video. I guess I need to start saving up for one…
Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription With Mechanical Turk
Andy Baio explains how he used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to have a 36-minute MP3 transcribed while he slept for only $15.40. Really great explanations, and it’s pretty cool how easy Amazon has made it to outsource menial tasks.
Umbrella Today?
Umbrella Today? is a brilliant little weather app that just answers one question. You can even sign up to receive text message alerts when an Umbrella may be necessary. Nice!
Jason Fried: Things We've Learned At 37signals
This is a rough transcript from Jason Fried’s talk at Web 2.0 Expo, and there’s some really great stuff in here about project planning and development. I really like his first point about momentum and how it’s a good idea to break large projects into 2 week chunks to make it more manageable. Personally, I’ve definitely noticed this myself: the “newer” a project feels, the more excited you are about it.
Object Oriented PHP Memory Concerns
Ryan Campbell over at Particletree runs through some of the problems you can run into if you’re using object oriented PHP. I was pretty surprised at how quickly it becomes a memory issue, so it’s definitely a good read for anyone working on any size PHP site.
Canon 5D Mark II Details from Thomas Hawk
Thomas Hawk runs down the major features of the upcoming Canon 5D Mark II. This is a really exciting camera: not only does it have great upgrades to the already awesome 5D, but it now includes a full 1080 16:9 video mode.
iTunes 8 Released
iTunes 8 was released today, and there’s one feature that I’ve really been enjoying so far: Genius playlists. You pick a song in your library, hit the Genius button, and it creates an entire playlist of similar songs. I’ve been finding lots of songs I haven’t listened to in a long time, and it really does a great job of creating some solid playlists. The new visualizer is pretty ridiculous, as well.
jParallax
A jQuery plugin that “turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport.” As you move your mouse, the layers move, depending on how “far away” the object is. Check out the demo, it’s pretty amazing stuff.
My Photos from Las Vegas and New Media Expo
I finally got around to uploading some photos I took at New Media Expo and while walking around Las Vegas. Nothing spectacular, but some decent shots, nonetheless.
Rescue from Dispatching in Ruby on Rails
Just stumbled across this while over at RailsEnvy: it’s a great new way to handle exceptions such as RoutingError and MethodNotAllowed. Also check out the RDoc Documentation. I definitely need to implement this, as my error handling for bad routing and incorrect URLs is terrible at the moment.