Things are much much much improved from before. Of particular note is how much cleaner the Oauth2 API's are.

OmniAuth recently reached version 1.0 and has a number of nice additions. In this episode we’ll take a look at a new strategy called OmniAuth Identity which allows users to create an account by supplying a user name and password instead of logging in through an external provider.

To make a long story short, Snow Leopard ships with key forwarding disabled by default and you will have to modify the file /etc/ssh_config to get it working.

Just change the lines

# Host *
# ForwardAgent no

into

Host *
ForwardAgent yes

and you are good.

Google’s Font Directory and API for web fonts could have a transformative effect on how we read the web. The only problem is, Google has made it very difficult to download all of the actual font files.

Web designers must be free to experiment with these new fonts, to sketch, comp and get to know these typefaces in browser and non-browser applications. This is why I’m providing this archive. 

Download Google’s Web Fonts
38.9 MB on disk (38,869,231 bytes)*
Updated 2011-03-15

You can use it in web pages, but until I found this, I couldn't design with it. Now I can. EPIC WIN.

I found the packaging still vaguely annoying since each ttf file was in a separate directory, so I ran this on the command line (cd to the untarballed directory first):

mkdir all; find . -iname '*.ttf' -exec cp \{\} ./all \;

Then I had all the ttf files in one directory at the root (./all) and I could drag and drop that into OS X fontbook.

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

On the face of it, it seems insane. Why would you intentionally kill parts of your site? Yet in practice, being able to handle failure consistently means you are never ever surprised.

Edit: My friend Vinny Magno writes:

Automobile assembly lines started doing the same thing (I think Ford was the first, though I might be wrong).

A single line can produce multiple models back to back. So for example, a Focus may be followed by an Explorer and then an Escape. At one point, the chassis and body are aligned and welded together. Obviously welding a Focus body to an Explorer chassis would be a problem, but the automation is so good that the defect rate was incredibly low. Since such a defect happened so infrequently, operators became complacent and failed to catch it the times that it did occur. To solve the problem, Ford purposefully upped the error rate to keep the operators sharp.

Turns out there's precedence!

I implemented my new scheme and running time went from 9 minutes to 24 SECONDS. I liked this approach so much I decided to generalize it as ActiveRecord::Base.transform. Sample usage:

# if users don't have names, give them a random one
NAMES = ['Adam', 'Ethan', 'Patrick']
User.transform(:name, :conditions => 'name is null').each do |i|
  i.name = NAMES[rand * NAMES.length]
end

Really interesting use of temp tables here.

Clickable links, should work in all browsers.	For pasting or typing, requires full IDN support.	Script	Language
http://مثال.إختبار	http://مثال.إختبار	Arabic	Arabic
http://例子.测试	http://例子.测试	Simplified Chinese	Chinese
http://例子.測試	http://例子.測試	Traditional Chinese	Chinese
http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή	http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή	Greek	Greek
http://उदाहरण.परीक्षा	http://उदाहरण.परीक्षा	Devanagari	Hindi
http://例え.テスト	http://例え.テスト	Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana	Japanese
http://실례.테스트	http://실례.테스트	Hangul	Korean
http://مثال.آزمایشی	http://مثال.آزمایشی	Perso-Arabic	Persian
http://пример.испытание	http://пример.испытание	Cyrillic	Russian
http://உதாரணம்.பரிட்சை	http://உதாரணம்.பரிட்சை	Tamil	Tamil
http://בײַשפּיל.טעסט	http://בײַשפּיל.טעסט	Hebrew	Yiddish

I had no idea. Posterous support for these bad boys coming soon.

While America threw on its eating pants and combed the Thursday circulars for deals, John Gruber spent Thanksgiving preparing to unveil his regular expression for finding URLs in arbitrary text.

\b(([\w-]+://?|www[.])[^\s()]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/)))

Pretty dense. Let’s be that guy and break it out, /x style (ignoring white space, with comments)

\b                          #start with a word boundary
(                           #
    (                           #
        [\w-]+://?                  #protocol://, second slash optional
        |                           #OR
        www[.]                      #a literal www. 
    )                           #
    [^\s()]+                  #non-whitespace, parens or angle brackets
                                #repeated any number of times
    (?:                         # (end game)
        \([\w\d]+\)                 #handles weird parenthesis in URLs (http://example.com/blah_blah_(wikipedia))
                                    #won't handle this twice foo_(bar)_(and)_again
        |                           #OR
        (                           #
            [^[:punct:]\s]              #NOT a single punctuation or white space
            |                           #OR
            /                           #trailing slash
        )                           #
    )                           #
)                           #

Amazing writeup by Alan Storm on Gruber's autolinking regex.

Update: Gruber updated this with an even more awesome regex, with breakout explanation. 

If you're a Twitter user, logged-in, and have Javascript, you'll be able to see my profile here:

• http://twitter.com/#!/RobOusbey

However, Googlebot will recognize that as a URL in the new format, and will instead request this URL:

• http://twitter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/RobOusbey

Sensibly, Twitter want to maintain backward compatibility (and not have their indexed URLs look like junk) so they 301 redirect that URL to:

• http://twitter.com/RobOusbey

(And if you're a logged-in Twitter user, that last URL will actually redirect you back to the first one.)

seomoz.org, dependable as usual.

The dreaded problem that most web developers come across is the z-index issue with flash elements. When the wmode param is not set, or is set to window, flash elements will always be on top of your DOM content. No matter what kind of z-index voodoo you attempt, your content will never break through the flash. This is because flash, when in window mode, is actually rendered on a layer above all web content.

There is a lot of chatter about this issue, and the simple solution is to specify the wmode parameter to opaque or transparent. This works when you control and deliver the flash content yourself. However, this is not the case for flash ads.

...

So, to solve all this, I wrote some javascript that will dynamically add the correct wmode parameter. I call it FlashHeed. You can get it now on the GitHub repo.

It works reliably in all major browsers, and has no dependencies, so feel free to drop it into your Prototype or jQuery dependent website.

Facebook gave a MySQL Tech Talk where they talked about many things MySQL, but one of the more subtle and interesting points was their focus on controlling the variance of request response times and not just worrying about maximizing queries per second.

But first the scalability porn. Facebook's OLTP performance numbers were as usual, quite dramatic:

• Query response times: 4ms reads, 5ms writes. 
• Rows read per second: 450M peak
• Network bytes per second: 38GB peak
• Queries per second: 13M peak
• Rows changed per second: 3.5M peak
• InnoDB disk ops per second: 5.2M peak

This looks to be a must-see tech talk for anyone on the scaling / infrastructure side of the web.

People have chimed in and talked about the Foursquare outage. The nice part about these discussions is that they’re focusing on the technical problems with the current set up and Foursquare. They’re picking it apart and looking at what is right, what went wrong, and what needs to be done differently in MongoDB to prevent problems like this in the future.

Let’s play a “what if” game. What if Foursquare wasn’t using MongoDB? What if they were using something else?

Riak? Cassandra? HBase? MySQL?

Jeremiah Peschka fills us in.

With Textmate plugins too! Nice. Sometimes you just want a simple way to validate some js. This will do nicely.

The compiler cannot know how you expect the program to behave, so you must "extend" the compiler by adding unit tests (regardless of the language you're using). If you do this, you can make sweeping changes (refactoring code or modifying design) in a rapid manner because you know that your suite of tests will back you up, and immediately fail if there's a problem — just like a compilation fails when there's a syntax problem.

But without a full set of unit tests (at the very least), you can't guarantee the correctness of a program. To claim that the strong, static type checking constraints in C++, Java, or C# will prevent you from writing broken programs is clearly an illusion (you know this from personal experience). In fact, what we need is

Strong testing, not strong typing.

So this, I assert, is an aspect of why Python works. C++ tests happen at compile time (with a few minor special cases). Some Java tests happen at compile time (syntax checking), and some happen at run time (array-bounds checking, for example). Most Python tests happen at runtime rather than at compile time, but they do happen, and that's the important thing (not when). And because I can get a Python program up and running in far less time than it takes you to write the equivalent C++/Java/C# program, I can start running the real tests sooner: unit tests, tests of my hypothesis, tests of alternate approaches, etc.

av = ActionView::Base.new(Rails::Configuration.new.view_path)
av.assigns[:foo] = "bar"
av.render "some/template/here"

Yes I know this is evil. =D

Some really practical tips here. Adam Singer is leading up this effort for using Varnish at Posterous. Definitely some cool infrastructure at work.

interrupted = false
trap("INT") { interrupted = true }
        
loop do
  # Do a lot of incredible things … ;-)

  if interrupted
    exit
  end
end

This is pretty handy for ad hoc benchmarking of pings, network issues, and other things.

Sit in a loop and just wait til I feel like I got enough data....

Super handy. I want to do this with posterous now!