Weekly Link Dump #2

CSS Font stacks are one of those things that elude a lot of designers. Many stick to the basic stacks Dreamweaver auto-recommends or go even more basic by just specifying a single web-safe font.

But doing either of those things means you’re missing out on some great typography options. Font stacks can make it possible to show at least some of your visitors your site’s typography exactly the way you intend without showing everyone else a default font. Read on for more information on using and creating effective font stacks with CSS.

Today we’re back to normal blog mode, where each article stands for itself. Muppet Labs are closed and we will be continuing our journey across the Ruby universe starting with an indepth look at Ruby’s Struct class — Ruby’s Swiss army knife for structured data.

Struct can be used without any additional require statement — it’s just there. This means it comes with zero additional overhead during initial interpreter startup — one of the many advantage of using Struct. But first let’s look at the basics.

How many times did you see a method call like the following one in your Rails application: my_method :arg1, :foo => true?

What makes my_method quite special is the ability to pass an arbitrary number of parameters (:arg1, :arg2…) followed by a list of keyword/value options.

This is made possible by a really helpful method provided by ActiveSupport called extract_options!. What this core extension does is to extract the options from the given set of arguments. When no options are available, the method returns a blank Hash.

The shell is a command interpreter. More than just the insulating layer between the operating system kernel and the user, it’s also a fairly powerful programming language. A shell program, called a script, is an easy-to-use tool for building applications by “gluing together” system calls, tools, utilities, and compiled binaries. Virtually the entire repertoire of UNIX commands, utilities, and tools is available for invocation by a shell script. If that were not enough, internal shell commands, such as testing and loop constructs, lend additional power and flexibility to scripts. Shell scripts are especially well suited for administrative system tasks and other routine repetitive tasks not requiring the bells and whistles of a full-blown tightly structured programming language.

Gource is a software version control visualization tool for Git and CVS.

Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.