New York Times’ Snow Fall story has been a whopping success in attracting spotlight. It went viral immediately after publishing, and resulted in many imitations. It has also drawn some constructive criticism. I think Snow Fall is a landmark example of technical excellence of implementation, pushing the boundaries of possible on the web and of...

Note: if you are too impatient to read the whole thing, feel free to jump to the TL;DR Summary Why do we need this? As much as we love Github, its approach to managing access to repositories can sometimes be quite frustrating. The core problem is that, for some mysterious reason, Github has decided that...

HipChat is a very nice chat software by Atlassian. Hubot is an amazing XMPP chat bot that makes usage of HipChat orders of magnitude more effective and FUN. There’s a handy HipChat Hubot adapter that brings Hubot awesomeness to HipChat. HipChat Hubot project’s README provides very well-documented installation instructions for Heroku or barebones OS-X/Debian/Ubuntu (hint:...

Google Glass is probably the most polarizing tech gadget being discussed. Most people are either convinced that it is the greatest human innovation since Apollo 11 Moon landing or that it is yet another doomed Google project. #Snark: It’s not like we have any shortage of the latter. The excitement on the “next big thing”...

For programmers accustomed to conventional Object-Oriented languages, such as: Java or C++, JavaScript’s Object-Oriented implementation can often be confusing. Contrary to the popular misconception, this is not due to JavaScript’s “flawed object-orientedness”, but it is so because JavaScript is a functional language and its approach to object-orientedness is simply different. Not flawed—just different. Let’s elaborate...

TL;DR git config --global push.default tracking Full Story GitHub Pages are public webpages freely hosted and easily published through github.com. They are most commonly used to create good-looking documentation for code hosted on GitHub (case in point: http://npr.github.com/responsiveiframe/). GitHub Pages have also become a popular solution for hosting minimalistic websites and/or blogs. That includes the...

One of the easiest ways to install/upgrade PHP on Mac OS-X is using brew. In the current version, if you install PHP 5.3 or 5.4 via brew using FPM, the php-fpm launcher installs in the foreground mode, by default. That can be very inconvenient, since it means that when you launch php-fpm it holds a...

Problem: we would like to set up a new branch off of an existing branch in a remote and make sure local/remote tracking is set up properly. In this example, our remote is Github and we are trying to create a branch named “develop” off of an existing remote branch called “master”. > git clone...

Knockout.js is a beautifully implemented MVVM Javascript framework that makes creating highly dynamic, modern, Ajax-driven user-interfaces a breeze and almost completely removes the need to directly mess with HTML DOM, thus drastically decreasing the complexity of front-end code and making things typically complicated – trivial. Full introduction to Knockout.js is both way beyond this blog...

I closed my Facebook account several months ago and have since enjoyed time not spent on the social network, spending it much more productively and enjoyably elsewhere. Now, for full disclosure: being in web development I can not ignore Facebook so I still have a developer account, to keep up with the platform, but I...

Mosh is a nifty, UDP-based client-server utility that greatly improves SSH connection’s reliability and usability, especially on flaky connections or if you need to jump on/off VPN, change IPs etc. You need to install Mosh both on the client machine (Mac OS-X Lion in my case) as well as server (Debian Squeeze for the sake...

Following is a quick set of instructions to set up city-level location detection using Maxmind’s GeoIP library using Apache/PHP. There’re multiple ways to do it. Frankly the trickiest part is figuring-out the most appropriate one. I think the most efficient approach in cost/performance terms is to install C API and then let mod_geoip Apache module...

Responsive Web Design http://bit.ly/f6TPB7 is an extremely important approach/technique/movement for making web mobile-friendly. Given that web mobile traffic is exploding and there were more smart-phones sold in 2011 than PCs http://vrge.co/wqOiED the importance of the movement can not be emphasized enough. We have some significant obstacles on the path of fully optimized Responsive Web Design,...

Couple things happened today (Friday, of all days): My old blog hosting company sent a “we are shutting down” notice. Out of curiosity I clicked through and quickly found myself reading 5-year old posts. One of them was ranting about code maintenance. A friend tweeted a link to a blog post by Rohan Singh: Isn’t...

APC 3.1.9 has a nasty bug, causing a frustrating error: “PHP Fatal error: Unknown: apc_fcntl_unlock failed: in Unknown on line 0” to appear when installed with PECL on Mac OS-X (and reportedly on a variety of Linux platforms). There’s an easy fix. When you install APC through PECL it asks for a number of settings....