"This script installs a patched version of ruby 1.9.3-p125 with patches to make ruby-debug work again (#47) and boot-time performance improvements (#66 and #68), and runtime performance improvements (#83 and #84). It also includes the new backported GC from ruby-trunk." Speed boosts for Ruby 1.9.3.

"I remember when Ajax was getting popular, all the problems associated with frames rose from the grave: bookmarking, breaking the back button, etc. Now that we’re in a time of small-screen devices on low-bandwidth networks, we’re rediscovering a lot of the same issues we had when we were developing for 640 pixel wide screens with 28K or 56K modems." This is the thing.

"In re­cent re­leases, Sa­fari has been re-ar­chi­tected, with some of the work farmed out to a thing called “WebProcess”. This doesn’t seem to be work­ing out that well." Much as I was excited about Safari 5's re-architecting, I must admit: I've seen everything Tim says, and it's driving me nuts.

"We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help." Maciej on what Scaling Pinboard Fast actually looked like. Some good anecdotes in here.

"Jammit is an industrial strength asset packaging library for Rails, providing both the CSS and JavaScript concatenation and compression that you'd expect, as well as YUI Compressor and Closure Compiler compatibility, ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in JavaScript template support, and optional Data-URI / MHTML image and font embedding." Looks good.

"Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime." This is good: game as structure, the core loop as enacted by the player being what brings it to life, structures it according to its audience.

"Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin written in JavaScript. It delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them." Handy.

"All the characters fom Home Alone, the project starts on the 22nd." 22 Twitterbots, performing Home Alone, in realtime, starting Dec 22nd. Awesome. Bonkers, but awesome (and takes the concept I used in Twit 4 Dead to a new level).

"This is why arcades are still important, still relevant and still the most compelling way in which to watch and play videogames. Someone needs to take a stencil and a spray-can to every arcade cabinet they can find and write “Play me, I’m Yours” on its side, lest we forget how to perform." Simon Parkin on games as performance; awesome as ever, and exactly why I love arcades.

"‘sdfsdf ‘means, I would argue, ‘I am testing’, or even more specifically, ‘I am now testing what can be seen’. It’s another performative expression because there is no semantic distance between typing this string and doing what it says, in the same way that there is no semantic distance between saying ‘I do’ in your marriage vows and actually performing your marriage vows. Saying is doing."

Some well-worn tales here, but also some good new ones, particularly when it comes to query-profiling and all forms of caching.

"We spend a lot of time talking about games and films, but a much more useful corollary is music. The processes are spookily similar. Creators devise an experience, and commit it to code. The code then sits there, lifeless, until a performer picks it up. Then, through a complex tool which requires substantial manual dexterity to master, the performer interprets the experience the creator devised. No two people will play the code the same way. Some players will perform better than others. Some will get stuck and give up before the end."

"On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more..." Lovely.

"The current browsers, including Firefox, just can’t cut it. JavaScript isn’t fast enough (thereby limiting the UX), browsers are single threaded and they aren’t stable enough. If Google want to challenge Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) in the desktop space they needed a better platform... Google’s solution is I think much neater - build an open source browser that supports multithreading, fast JavaScript execution and stuff Google Gears into the back end so it works offline." Now that's a good explanation.

"This is an afterword to essays by young writers on first peoples’ histories. I am picking up the notion that there is no Before and After in culture. Culture is always Now, in-between, in process." God this is good.

Awesome stuff. This, really, is one of my core backgrounds: not so much being an "HTML monkey" but performing genuine front-end engineering. It's such a shame so many places don't see it as a true skill.

Yahoo expand their Exceptional Performance best practice; there are some interesting new tricks in here that might seem counterintuitive, but you can actually implement "right" if you think about it. Great that somebody (else) cares about this stuff.

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.

Oh gosh, this looks good: dynamic merging/caching of js/css files in Rails, but in production only; your development environment continues to use the original files. Lovely. Now: does it work?

"Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment". Blimey. 200 x 16GB is a LOT of cache. Still, 99% of hits go straight to cache - impressive!

As with so many other SQL challenges, if you re-phrase the question, it’s easy to select the maximum or minimum row per group without subqueries. The key is to understand what you want, and to be able to word the problem in a way that translates from En

Simon is right: nice to have all this lot in one plsace.

"Mon.itor.us is the only external website monitoring service which provides commercial grade distributed monitoring services absolutely for FREE."

Guilty of half of these (at points). They usually didn't matter - but I'll be some more in mind for the future.

Could be exactly what I need. Rails caching is tricky.

Mmn. Fragment caching. I knew I didn't want page/controller caching, was dreading this... and it all looks really rather doable. Sorted!