links for 2011-01-24

Touchqode brings software development tools to your smartphone. Now you can scan through, edit and fix your source code anywhere and anytime.

These books contain the top questions from a selection of the top tags on Stack Overflow. The top questions include those with a score of 10 or greater (except in the case of a high volume tag like c#). I have to limit the number of questions in each book because of the poor O(n2) performance of kindlegen.

This is a discussion of dungeon mapping by the Dragonsfoot/ENWorld poster "Melan". It was originally posted to ENWorld as "Dungeon layout, map flow and old school game design", then to a Dragonsfoot Forums thread entitled "Megadungeon Mapping". Original images were hosted at <http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/Melan/> .

RestBackup™ is a new web service that you can easily integrate with your software. Add backup & restore to your apps and let me handle the operations workload.
You can use RestBackup™ to deploy backup services for multiple customers and machines. Use the management tools to create separate backup accounts for each customer, to keep their data separate. Automatically provision backup accounts with the management API.

This is a self-contained Windows-based installer that includes the Ruby language, an execution environment, important documentation, and more.

I just realized that I have been to Apple stores in 4 different cities, yet I have NEVER been in a Microsoft store. What's up with that?

The lottery of birth is responsible for much of who we are. If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person?
IfItWereMyHome.com is your gateway to understanding life outside your home. Use our country comparison tool to compare living conditions in your own country to those of another. Start by selecting a region to compare on the map to the right, and begin your exploration.

Now, scientists are discovering that children with chronic sleep problems are at increased risk for developing a mental illness later in life.

Learning Rails for the first time should be fun, and Rails for Zombies allows you to get your feet wet without having to worry about configuration. You'll watch five videos, each followed by exercises where you'll be programming Rails in your browser.

Attaching a database places it in exactly the same state that it was in when it was detached.

This is a place for exploring aspects of implementing applications using the REST architectural style. This may include statements about existing frameworks and libraries, general discussions about the nature of the style and how it may be expressed and/or encouraged via a programming framework, etc.

The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.

elow is an alphabetical list of Lovecraft’s fiction, revisions, collaborations, and miscellaneous minor works, as well as some tales that are not extant. The dates for each of the tales are based primarily on S.T. Joshi’s “Chronology of the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft” included in Arkham House’s Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, but includes some changes based on Mr. Joshi’s ongoing research. This list is also available in both chronological order and publication order.

Restore an SQL database on a local or remote SQL server using PowerShell

On June 16 of that year I had been searching for “OAuth XRDS” and found a brand-new specification at http://openmicroblogging.org written by Evan Prodromou.
The spec had the features I was looking for: cross-site real-time subscriptions, cross-site profile updates, cross-site avatar/profile transfer. I was doing some of this stuff between my sites already with OpenID/SREG but Open Microblogging 0.1 had a terrific feature set.

Git is a powerful, sophisticated system for distributed version control. Gaining an understanding of its features opens to developers a new and liberating approach to source code management. The surest path to mastering Git is to immerse oneself in its utilities and operations, to experience it first-hand.

The Obama presidential campaign was an innovation in American politics and American design. For the first time, a candidate used art and design to bring together the American people—capturing their voices in a visual way. The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art from the historic campaign.

SlickPic is a new online photo sharing website that offers free accounts, unlimited uploads, easy navigation, drag and drip management and secure photo storage.

Think outside the water

Notforest is simple tool that strips away all the distractions and filler o a web page and leaves only the text you really want to read. 

"A study of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices."

The ultimate beginner's guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL

Brilliant typing tutor as a space invaderie game.

"Economists who had a better record at calling extreme events had a worse record in general. "The analyst with the largest number as well as the highest proportion of accurate and extreme forecasts," they wrote, "had, by far, the worst forecasting record.""

"hen you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?"

Don’t have time to watch a video right now? Watch it later! The Boxee Bookmarklet allows you to easily add online videos to your Boxee Queue.

If you want to make a nerd happy, you obsessively protect their time and their space.

Saw a priest read from a Kindle at a wedding. Welcome to the future.

"The PhD student is someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income." Lovely line from a letter in The Economist.

Tools to build your own federated social network

VivianMaier

Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It's lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

The Light Knight is a small, inconspicuous, completely self-contained traffic light changer designed specifically for your motorcycle, moped or scooter. Install a Light Knight traffic light changer in minutes and stop getting stuck at those pesky traffic lights that just will not give you your turn

Dominion Deck Builder allows you to create, share, discuss and rate Dominion games.

Bacn (pronounced "bacon") is email which has been subscribed to and is therefore not unsolicited, but is often not read by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as "email you want but not right now."[

In a nutshell, Facebook is better than email unless you’re some kind of email expert. And for email’s successor to support all the expert features of email, none of its myriad problems would be solved.