Odds and Ends for March 1

In honor of the first unofficial day of spring, enjoy a random grab bag of both temporary distractions and legitimately useful information. It's up to you to decide which is which.

  1. Bagelturf makes a recommendation about what Bill Gates could say on stage at the All Things Digital conference on May 30. So help me, if he did this, I'd be a fan for life.

  2. If you're wondering why Wii units are in short supply, this article at Go Nintendo might help. Spoiler: it doesn't appear to be intentional short supply.

  3. The Ferret search engine looks like a great addition to Rails apps with text content. But all practicality aside, how can you top the declaration "acts_as_ferret" in code?

  4. Active Merchant is a Ruby library for doing credit cards, payments and shipping. Looks pretty slick.

  5. In this YouTube video, Super Mario Bros theme played to great effect on glass bottles. I'm serious. And it actually works.

  6. Escher's Relativity in Lego. Simply brilliant.

  7. SEOmoz has a list of fifteen CSS properties you probably never use. Some good stuff in here, particularly the "content" property, if you've never heard about it or simply forgot how it works.

  8. "Women want to know that you could protect them in a Zombie attack." How true.

  9. What could go better with an iPhone than a Nintendo phone?

  10. If you'd like to design a Swing-based UI using Interface Builder, nib4j is your ticket.

  11. This Ruby symbol article clears up a lot of the questions I had about symbols versus strings.

  12. If you want to pop up a dialog from a faceless Foundation app, CFUserNotification might do exactly what you want. I either never heard about this or forgot about it until recently. Seems like a great tool.

  13. DockArt sets the iTunes icon to the album art of the currently playing song. I've been using this for a few weeks. Pretty cool.

  14. This video is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen. The guy proposes to his girlfriend by buying airtime on her favorite TV show. If you don't get chills, you need to check your pulse.


March 1 Illustration
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Odds and Ends for March 1
Posted Mar 1, 2007 — 5 comments below




 

Rosyna — Mar 01, 07 3667

CFUserNotification is also quite sexy because it blocks all threads in the current application until you get a response (especially with CFUserNotificationDisplayAlert()). Really nice if you're doing it from a plugin (like internet plug-in) and don't know what thread you're calling from and need to prevent other threads/events from running.

El Rocco — Mar 02, 07 3669

Hey Scott,

I was about to write about bursting your bubble that spring starts around March 21st but after some research, it seems that:

Astronomically it starts on or around March 21st (vernal equinox) and ends on or around June 2oth (my birthday! - summer solstice).

Meteorologically (is this a word!?) it is counted as the whole months of March, April and May.

Wow! We learn something everyday!

;)

Simon Plater — Mar 02, 07 3670

Yay, it's spring! Unless you live on the half of the planet where it's ... autumn.

It's a big world out there, peoples.

Scott Stevenson — Mar 02, 07 3671 Scotty the Leopard

Unless you live on the half of the planet where it's ... autumn.
Which is something I'm very much aware of with my sister living in New Zealand. However, here it is spring.

Henrik N — Mar 03, 07 3672

El Rocco: I've also seen (on tv forecasts, not much luck on Google - perhaps somewhat particular to Sweden?) seasons defined as starting when the temperature has been at least/at most some specific number of degrees for some number of days running.
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