On the Interwebs, number 10

Some websites I have found interesting (in no particular order):

Video on the Web — From Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive into HTML5, a great introduction to video encoding and the new <video> element. Reading this makes me want to reencode all my videos in patent free codecs, switch to Linux and go live in a cabin in the woods. It also makes me want to develop a website that needs to use the <video> element.

Homebrew — Sort of an alternative to MacPorts for installing on Mac OS X. I’m seeing this pop up more and more lately, so I guess I should figure it out. Plus, it appears to have a similar sort of philosophy to virtualenv or rvm. Which I like. Though, these days I am doing all of my development in Ubuntu virtual machines so I probably won’t really use this.

Why I like Redis — Man! You can’t open up a feed reader these days without reading about someone using Redis. Here Simon Willison talks about what he likes about it. I’m definitely going to have to give it a try soon.

Rubular — Website for testing Ruby regular expressions. Testing regular expressions in a script is a total pain. This should make it easier!

First Step on Ruby Metaprogramming — Overview of metaprogramming (programs that manipulate themselves) in Ruby. Something I wish I knew more about.

Rails in a Nutshell — A new O’Reilly book about Rails that is currently free in draft mode. I’m planning on working my through this. It seems like every week Rails is different (they are updating it so fast!), so I could definitely use a refresher.