Month: August 2011

In honor of this week’s Agile 2011 conference, our titles are on sale for 40% off both paperback and ebook formats. Use the coupon code AGILEWEEK, expires 8/12/11.

Hi! I'm Jonathan Stark. You can download this picture of my Starbucks card to your phone and buy coffee at Starbucks with it. Seriously. My card gets charged, you don't.

Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war waging right now, all across the software and tech industries

I've developed this field guide to complement the OneLight workshop and DVD. It isn’t meant to be a comprehensive knowledge base on the technical aspects of how to use, modify, and control flash. All of that information is covered in length in the workshop and on the DVD. This guide has been designed to be thrown into your camera bag so that you have a cookbook of scenarios that you may find yourself in. 
While looking through this book remember that light is light. It doesn’t matter if you are shooting a ten year old Vivitar, a new Nikon, a Canon, an Alienbee, or a Profoto. 
Light. Is. Light. Don’t freak out about what kind of light you have. Freak out about what kind of light you make.

Code Kata is an attempt to bring this element of practice to software development. A kata is an exercise in karate where you repeat a form many, many times, making little improvements in each. The intent behind code kata is similar. Each is a short exercise (perhaps 30 minutes to an hour long). Some involve programming, and can be coded in many different ways. Some are open ended, and involve thinking about the issues behind programming. These are unlikely to have a single correct answer. I add a new kata every week or so. Invest some time in your craft and try them.

Your essential guide for visiting Sherlock film locations, finding set props, identifying wardrobe pieces, plus series and cast news and much more.

Anti-Social is a productivity application for Macs that turns off the social parts of the internet. When Anti-Social is running, you’re locked away from distracting social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and other sites you specify. With Anti-Social, you’ll be amazed how much you get done when you turn off your friends.

Perl is a dynamic, dynamically-typed, high-level, scripting (interpreted) language most comparable with PHP and Python. Perl's syntax owes a lot to ancient shell scripting tools, and it is famed for its overuse of confusing symbols, the majority of which are impossible to Google for. Perl's shell scripting heritage makes it great for writing glue code: scripts which link together other scripts and programs. Perl is ideally suited for processing text data and producing more text data. Perl is widespread, popular, highly portable and well-supported. Perl was designed with the philosophy "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI) (contrast with Python, where "there should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it").
Perl has horrors, but also some great redeeming features. In this respect it is like every other programming language ever created.

Today we want to share a fancy content rotator with you. It shows some image with a headline and sub-headline in each slide and allows navigating through the slides using the thumbnails that also contain a headline. Hiding the thumbnails will reveal a scrollable text container and the navigation arrows will move up so that one can navigate to the previous or next slides.

Chocolat is a new text editor for Mac OS X, that combines native Cocoa with powerful text editing tools.

So the next time you choose a leader:
1. Evaluate their input. 
2. Give newcomers time to fit in.
3. Try picking them randomly.

30% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each month
10% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each day
the max number of concurrent users of a real-time service will be 10% of the number of daily users