Beckism.com: A better bash prompt on Mac OS X »

Some tips on making your terminal prompt look nice. Which you might do if, say, you were going to be giving a presentation and letting people watch you fumble in the terminal.

A JPEG Interview with Douglas Coupland | VICE Canada »

“design is the non-fiction version of art”

Evan's Awesome A/B Tools »

A/B testing is great, but when you’re looking at your data how do you know whether your results are statistically significant? Enter Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools, a suite of statistics calculators that will help you with your analysis. Burn, statistics textbook. Burn!!

MUTEK »

This morning we deployed a new, responsive skin for the MUTEK website. This famous Montréal festival boasts boatloads of fabulous audio and video content; our aim was to simplify the presentation, and allow the site to be used across all the different types of screens we use today: computers, tablets, phones. 

If you’re in Montréal at the end of May, see you at the festival!

I'm trying out Sublime Text, guys. Wish me luck. »

Will I go back to TextMate? Only time will tell.

Two.js »

Slick two-dimensional drawing library with scene support targeting the browser. Lots of activity in this space — won’t be long before we see a lot of applications and games that run in the browser but look nothing like a website.

I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet | The Verge »

One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.”

It’s a been a year now since I “surfed the web” or “checked my email” or “liked” anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I’ve managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I’m internet free.

And now I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed to be enlightened. I’m supposed to be more “real,” now. More perfect.

But instead it’s 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I’m watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce.

Writing Wednesdays: “In the End, We’ll Succeed” »

gingerngo:

Ben sent me an email one time about an audio book he had been listening to, about Resistance and the differences between professionals and amateurs.

I found it funny because as soon as he mentioned The War of Art, I immediately realized that we had been struck by the same bolt of lightning.

A few weeks before, and completely by chance, I had signed up for email feeds from the same author, but for his blog, “Writing Wednesdays.”

Without knowing, we were both following words of Steven Pressfield.

Anyway, here’s a new gem I have received this Wednesday:

There seemed to be two components to my friend’s principle:

1. Commitment to the ultimate object.

“In the end” meant to him the final goal. What happened along the way was purely anecdotal. There was a goal. That was where we were headed. Nothing would stop us from getting there.

2. Indifference to setbacks along the way.

My friend claimed to know exactly where he was at all times but, as I observed more than once, “If you know where we are, why do you keep checking the map?” “I’m checking the map,” he said, “so I know where we are.”

He was advancing, I began to understand, from being “slightly lost” to being “slightly lost” to being ultimately found.

“In the end we’ll succeed” is the ideal attitude for a long-term project because it helps you take incremental setbacks in stride. We progress not from success to success but from defeat to defeat. We screw up. We miscalculate. The unexpected confounds us. The trick is to remember that the sun will rise in the morning, we’ll be able to see the rocks and the handholds; we’ll climb out of the canyon. We’ll get back on track.

TmTheme Editor »

Maybe it’s just resistance, but I like to change my text editor theme. Every day. 

hood.ie »

I’ve been hacking this weekend a bit with hood.ie, a new web framework built on the foundations of node.js and couchdb.

I know, I’m not supposed to be chasing new technologies. It’s a bit of a weakness. Hoodie has captured my attention because it attacks a personal pain point in the current web/mobile development toolset.

If you have experience building web apps sometime in the last N years, you know that things are really great today because we have all these new client-side frameworks to use that help us create whizzy user experiences. But the drag is that it’s a lot of work to coordinate data between the client and the server.

I think hoodie will help us out with that, and so really allow us to think about apps just in terms of the user experience. With hood.ie, you develop your app as if it is entirely client-based. You use their API to store and retrieve data locally. Then the server component kind of just… happens.

Here’s a diagram with arrows and words that you may or may not understand: