John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Interesting

the Guardian

Untitled (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/28/after-the-sheikhs-christopher-m-davidson-review?CMP=twt_gu)

This review pairs two books on the Gulf monarchies after the Arab spring. Christopher Davidson's *After the Sheikhs* argues that the ruling families have survived by grafting modern institutions onto traditional power bases and buying loyalty with unsustainable spending, and he predicts collapse within two to five years. The reviewer thinks that timeline is too short unless oil prices crash or US energy independence arrives early, and notes that social media, Iran, and the Islamist-conspiracy card all complicate the picture. The second book, Andrew Hammond's *The Islamic Utopia*, focuses on Saudi Arabia and dismisses its supposed reform, such as the debate over women driving, as a distraction from the dynasty's unchecked power and off-budget spending.

Permalink bookspoliticseconomics

bootiemashup.com

Bootie - Best of Bootie 2012

This is the download page for "Best of Bootie 2012," an annual compilation of mashups from the Bootie club and label, with a link to a blog post on how the album was assembled. It comes in three forms: a 20-track continuous mix as a ZIP with artwork, a single 77-minute MP3, and unmixed full-length tracks that suit playlists better than a CD. The tracklist pairs 2012 pop hits (Gotye, Carly Rae Jepsen, Adele, Rihanna, Psy, One Direction) with rock and older material, made by DJs from New York to Manila, including DJs From Mars, A Plus D, Lobsterdust and The Kleptones, with the Taylor Swift vs. Weezer track as a Bootie exclusive.

Permalink audiomusic2010s

moebio.com

Smashing Magazine

Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript | Smashing Coding

A long Smashing Magazine-style guide to writing faster, leaner JavaScript by understanding what V8 does under the hood: hidden classes, monomorphic functions, how `delete`, holey/sparse/mixed-type arrays, and closures or timers that hold references defeat optimization or garbage collection. It repeatedly cautions against micro-optimizing without measuring, using a table-rendering module benchmarked across variants (DocumentFragment and event delegation helped a lot, while templating and prototypes barely mattered). The second half covers tooling for the "measure it, understand it, fix it" loop: Chrome DevTools profiling and the three-snapshot leak technique, V8 trace flags, High Resolution Time, Navigation Timing, about:tracing, and minimizing reflows, ending with the point that the DOM is the next bottleneck after the engine.

Permalink programmingperformancedevelopment

Kirby CMS

Kirby – Home

This is the marketing landing page for Kirby v5, a flat-file CMS that keeps content in plain text files and treats folders as pages, so adding images, documents or videos just means dropping them into the right folder. It pitches the system as fast, scalable and extensible through a plugin API, and able to deliver content headless to browsers, phones, watches or any other device. The page is split into audiences (developers, designers, creators, clients) and backed by a client logo wall and testimonials praising the simple Panel and the freedom to customise. It gives no detail on what actually changed in version 5, so it's useful mainly as a snapshot of Kirby's positioning.

Permalink designsoftwaredevelopment

GitHub

Laker compendium – Designing digital publications in HTML5

Laker Compendium is a tool for publishing digital magazines, catalogues, slideshows, surveys, and conference schedules as native-feeling iPhone and iPad apps. Layouts scale automatically to screen size and orientation, and it supports swipe navigation, a double-tap table of contents, slideshows, sound, YouTube video, and multi-column layouts. It requires no web server, is fully customizable, and has an experimental desktop browser mode. The page is a short feature list rather than an argument, and it gives the developer's contact details (Florian Franke) at the end.

Permalink designmobiledevelopmentios

the Guardian

Eyewitness: The Earth at night | World news | guardian.co.uk

A Guardian Eyewitness photo piece built around NASA composite images of Europe, Asia and Africa at night, taken from a new satellite and showing the glow of human activity in far greater detail than earlier views. The text is essentially just a caption crediting NASA Earth Observatory and NOAA NGDC, so its value lies in the imagery of city lights and settlement patterns rather than any argument. The saved text contains little else beyond that caption, so it's worth keeping mainly as a visual reference for what Earth looks like after dark.

Permalink photographysciencenature

the Guardian

Bootstrap Blog

Bootstrap 2.2.2 released · Twitter Bootstrap Blog

Mark Otto's announcement of Bootstrap 2.2.2 (December 2012), a bugfix release centered on CSS and documentation with a few JavaScript fixes. Highlights include retina-ready docs assets and Holder.js replacing Placehold.it, a temporary fix for dropdowns closing early on mobile, popover refactors (IE8-compatible arrows, content inserted directly into .popover-content), better nested table support, typeahead menu placement and escape-key behavior, and added HTML5 Boilerplate print styles. It also says a 2.2.3 release is planned, after which most effort will shift to Bootstrap 3.0.0, with details promised the following week.

Permalink developmentopensourcecss3framework

OS X Daily

21 Useful iTunes 11 Keyboard Shortcuts

A cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts for iTunes 11, aimed at people still adjusting to its redesigned interface. The shortcuts are grouped into general playback and navigation (play/pause, skip, volume, show or hide the sidebar and status bar, add to Up Next), specific features like the Mini Player and Equalizer, and Command+number jumps to each media library from Music through Apps, plus one for the iTunes Store home. It also notes that library shortcuts do nothing if that library is empty, so Command+6 won't work without any books.

Permalink musicsoftwareappletips

OS X Daily

9 Command Line Tricks for Mac OS X You Should Know

A roundup of nine practical Mac Terminal tricks aimed at beginners through advanced users, each with a ready-to-run example. The commands include `caffeinate` to block sleep and screen savers, `pkgutil --expand` to inspect a .pkg without installing it, `purge` to free inactive memory, `open -n` to launch extra app instances, and `softwareupdate` to patch from the command line. It also covers querying the quarantine database for a history of downloads, hiding files from Finder with `chflags`, dragging files into Terminal to print their paths, and creating password-protected zips with `zip -e`. Written around the Mountain Lion era of OS X, it's a quick reference for specific one-liners.

Permalink tipsmactoolsmacos

Human Who Codes

It’s time to start using JavaScript strict mode | NCZOnline

Nicholas Zakas argues that, with every major browser now supporting ES5 strict mode (including IE10 and Opera 12), JavaScript developers should start using it. He walks through its most visible changes, all of which turn silent failures into thrown errors: `with` is removed, accidental globals and duplicate properties or arguments are rejected, `this` is no longer coerced to the global object (which catches constructors called without `new`), `eval` gets its own scope, and writes to immutable properties fail loudly. On usage, he says never to put the `"use strict"` pragma at file level, since script concatenation can push other code into strict mode. Instead, put it inside functions or an IIFE, and test thoroughly afterward because new errors will surface.

Permalink programmingdevelopmenttips