onfocus

Hey neat! James Taylor has some highly produced guitar lessons he's putting on YouTube. [via scottandrew]

"As we mature as developers, finding logic errors and incomplete solutions becomes our way of life. It defines us. But our engineering strength is also our social weakness." uhoh, I'm guilty of this sometimes. [via mathowie]

A nice modal window kit for Prototype.

"Amplify's goal is to simplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified API for various data sources." Looks like a write-once way to handle client side storage.

Filed for use: "...ultimate guide to 37 download resources for hundreds of [mobile] emulators and simulators."

"...none other than Corvallis stands out as the top city in the country for innovation — after you account for its size. New York is merely average." Some theoretical physicists are looking at new ways to measure the creative output of cities.

Awesome vintage terminal emulator with a hilarious incentive to purchase. [via waxy]

And apparently the Web is for complaining. [via seanyboy]

Some auto-generated ebooks based on top Stack Overflow questions in various categories.

"As a personal archive tool, it's pretty impressive, as a shared space to find interesting bookmarks, it's problematic." I completely agree with Matt, and check out Maciej's comment after the post. It sounds like more social tools are coming to Pinboard.

I'm setting up bookmarking shop over at Pinboard. Hope to see you there!

ugh. Very disappointed that del.icio.us is closing.

Me too! I spent my money on hardware up-front, dammit. Don't nickel and dime me to death with software. (Yes, I know it's irrational.)

Fun new application by Simon Willison for finding conferences your Twitter contacts are attending. Nice design and use of Twitter oAuth.

Schell expands on his Gamepocalypse idea presented at the end of his DICE talk earlier this year. He makes dozens of predictions that all seem plausible, creepy, and somewhat fun.

"There is an error in most photography scaling algorithms." Wha? This is hard to believe.

I think we're safely out of spoiler territory now so I can post this great analysis of Toy Story 3.

Neven Mrgan has a great point: when a satire gets too close to the subject it's taking down is it still satire?

Great 50's comic art.

Frozen bananas in a food processor = ice cream? I need to try this!

Great idea, I'd use them.

Gina's timely conference tips for people like me.

API + No-Hurdle Accounts + Incentives = some krazy foursquare hacking. "...I think the combination of a poorly moderated and insecure folksonomy with incentives (e.g. badges, mayorships, free meals, etc.) is a fragile one. The greater the incentives, the greater the motivation for cheating." [via mathowie]

Looks like a simple way for a web app to send/receive SMS messages.

Not only did I post this link to delicious, I "liked" it at Google Reader, commented about it at Facebook, retweeted, dugg, and potentially verbed it in other ways that I might not be aware of. But yeah, more author tools--hear, hear!

A peek behind the curtain at Facebook with an anonymous FB developer.

"...Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind." Anil shares some memories of Brad.

"...the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software." Interesting analysis of team dynamics. [via jessamyn]

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation." Amit Singhal on how Google ranks Tweets for real-time search.

Rules for PR folks who want to work with bloggers. "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE."

"A Collection of iPhone Home Screens." I found this a while back but couldn't remember the name or how to get back to it because the keywords are saturated. My Google-fu was hot today, and I'm bookmarking for future reference.

This Java class is full of helpful functions for escaping and unescaping strings, and it can be used within ColdFusion (if you're into that).

"Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style at Home." This seems to be an IRL manifestation of that thing.

Aha! This answers a question I didn't even know I had, but I've been unconsciously wondering. I thought this "look" came from the image-collecting Tumblr crowd. But apparently it's a thing IRL.