More links! All web stuff again, but this time mostly relevant stuff related to OA, or could be. pageres https://github.com/sindresorhus/pageres Take screenshots of websites at various resolutions from the command line. Drives PhantomJS, and would be great for adding to CI. Oboe.js http://oboejs.com/ A streaming JSON parser for JavaScript. Think SAX for JSON. Fires events about JSON nodes and content while the JSON data is still being loaded. Falls back to normal blocking parsing on older browsers which don’t support it (IE<=9)

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This is just a note to help those people looking for help on this and hopefully prevent some banging of heads into walls. To use bookmarks fully with TeamCity, you need TeamCity 8 and Mercurial 2.4 installed on the server. New installations shouldn’t have a problem, but if you’ve upgraded to TC8, then do yourself a favour and upgrade your Mercurial as well. If you have an old version of Mercurial, you may see an exception like this if you try to set your default branch to be a bookmark.

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WebCode App http://www.webcodeapp.com/ Create vector drawings and convert them to HTML+CSS or Canvas JavaScript or SVG. (Mac) Orbit Viewer http://orbits.wthr.us/ A WebGL experiment to visualize the orbits of comets and satellites. PuzzleScript http://www.puzzlescript.net/ Open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine. Neat.

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Some interesting database options for those who are into those things. FoundationDB https://foundationdb.com/ A NoSQL, distributed database with ACID transactions. For anyone interested in this space, these are some big claims. Uses layers to decouple data storage from the data model. Can have SQL, document and key/values side by side on the same cluster. Interesting stuff. Requires Linux for fully supported production server operation, but has Windows and Mac clients and servers for local development.

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A couple of platforms-in-a-box this time, with an interesting web application tossed in. Hoodie http://hood.ie/ Hoodie is a web application backend platform which provides you with a library for writing front-end only apps. Similar in some ways to Meteor, but with more built-in user management and per user data. Backed by CouchDB/node.js. Open-source. Should handle working offline without any extra work. Also of interest is this blog post about offline-first design.

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Sometimes you aren’t in a completely clean state when you want to take a branch of your repository. I’ve said before to people not to attempt it if you aren’t sure how because the risk of error is non-negligible. That said anything is possible, and I’d like to document some of the advanced cases somewhere in case it is useful to someone. There are number of possible branching strategies, and I’m not here to promote one or another, but if you create named branches in mercurial, this should be applicable.

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While this content was accurate at the time of writing, this post has since been extracted from Ghost and is now a humble markdown document processed by Hugo. I’ve been thinking about the best way to get some content online focused around the technical tidbits (and rants) that I develop over time. I even wrote my own tool to publish a mercurial repository as a static site, but I haven’t been using it.

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Some geeky Windows customization tools/tips this week. Clink https://code.google.com/p/clink/ Do you prefer the bash style of tab completion and command line support in general? Then clink might be able to help by providing that support for Windows cmd.exe ConsoleZ https://github.com/cbucher/console I’m hoping that most people are at least using Console 2 for their command line needs, but there is a fork of that project which adds some extra goodies like full screen and splitting tabs into views.

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Hopefully some useful ones this time around, productivity tools and software development articles, so a bit different that my usual fare. Editr.js http://lab.idered.pl/editr/ Like Codepen or JsFiddle, but you host it yourselves. Great for demos, samples, etc. Trello https://trello.com/colinbate/recommend (yes, I benefit if you sign up (it’s free)) From the fine folks at Fog Creek, Trello is a tool for creating boards with lists and cards. Perfect for scrum, kanban or just planning your day.

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With the penetration testers here recently, it felt appropriate to have a security themed set of links this week. Stanford JavaScript Crypto Library http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ As the name suggests a crypto library for JavaScript, with a pretty comprehensive set of tools available. Provides a way to securely store information in the browser for use within your application. Cap https://github.com/mscdex/cap A packet capturing library for node.js. Works with Windows and *nix with help from external libraries.

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