November 11, 2009

Tech Thursday - CouchDB book, writing better docs and APIs, casting box shadows and being a CSI expert

おはようございます。from Tokyo! Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• The University of Cambridge has an archive of technical reports dating back to 1974
• Anita Borg (not part of the collective) has a nice showcase of technical women.
• There's a free guide book to CouchDB available!
• Cadmus is "a web service that filters out the noise from your stream in real time by grouping similar posts together".
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss has some good tips on writing good documentation. I do disagree with automated docs being useless though, and I think docs should go hand-in-hand with writing great code examples.
• The US National Public Radio API developers explain why writing an API is not enough to ensure data portability - in essence keeping HTML in the content is not helpful.
• Ben Casnocha found some interesting psychological points about how people use search boxes, in essence we don't lie to Google.
• SimpleText is a nice, small, open source text syncing tool which also works for the iPhone, so to say "Google Docs light".
• A nice infographic of 13 years of cnn.com stats.
• Nick Dunn shows a cross browser solution for dropshadows without images and in pure CSS although technically using IE filters is not using purely CSS :)
• The Eyewriter Project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people, who are suffering from ALS, with creative technologies. It is a low-cost way to allow a paralysed Graffiti artist to keep tagging.
• 10 ways to get the most out of a conference should help you do your preparations next time.
• It is scientifically proven that fresh eggs are harder to peel.
• In the geek but pretty corner we have a bunch of visualizations of "make your own adventure" books.
• The CSI image enhancer is a great tool to get the office to woo you.
• Node.JS is an evented I/O interface for V8 JavaScript.

You can propose links to us on Twitter (@YDN) or try bookmarking them on delicious with the tag "forydntt".

Posted at November 11, 2009 6:43 PM | Permalink

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