Via 37 Signals,

The small team size comes with a bunch of advantages: They’re self-contained, can work swiftly and quietly, don’t have the presence of conventional military troops, and are able to operate without a big infrastructure.

Big can be powerful. But even the Army realizes small can be a great way to get things done too.

Yup, sounds about right.

This just shows why Twitter really needs to have some backing money/technology wise,

I don’t use it myself a whole lot (@bpopov) and all I was trying to do is see whether or not Fusepoint’s Vancouver data center was affected by the most recent power outage… Sigh.

This is such a great utility for converting SSL certificates - SSL Converter. I also like the extra warning that pops up when conversion mode requires use of your private key,

Your private key is intended to remain on the server. While we try to make this process as secure as possible (such as by using SSL to encrypt the key when it is sent to the server), for complete security we recommend that you manually convert the certificate on your server using the OpenSSL commands below.

If you see the above, you can just scroll down and copy-paste provided examples to run on your own machine, very useful.

Here’s another component that virtually all online application will need sooner or later. Via Ajaxian comes this neat calendar implementation for MooTools.

I’m pleased to announce that we are looking for another full-time developer to join our agile team of long time Smalltalk fans. Here at DeepCove Labs our primary focus is evolving and maintaining a mature industry leading international payment processing platform that we have built from the ground up over the past 6 years.

Ideal candidate is someone who has experience with Smalltalk, SQL and last, but definitely not least, Seaside. They must be enthusiastic, motivated and as excited about using cutting edge technology to solve business problems as we are. I should point out that good self task management and time management skills are a big plus as we work as equal peers and share roles every day of the week. We are not XP fanatics, but some things are second nature to us,

• keeping things simple
• plenty of unit tests
• no code ownership
• frequent integration
• lots of refactoring
• frequent releases
• no overtime
• our customer shares the same address

Our primary requirements are as follows:

• at least five years general software development experience
• several years experience developing with dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, Lisp)
• one year recent Smalltalk experience
• experience developing applications of at least moderate complexity
• demonstrated experience working directly with users

Experience with any of the following would be a major plus:

• agile test driven development
• financial services
• SQL, specifically Microsoft SQL Server
• web application development, specifically with Seaside and moderate amounts of JavaScript
• deployment of large scale applications in managed services environment

Our office is located in the heart of Downtown Vancouver, steps away from Pacific ocean, beautiful parks, shopping and entertainment district and all major transit connections. All employees receive excellent health/dental benefits package and few other perks. We like to think we are an open, flexible and friendly place to work, so please drop me an email with your resume if you are interested.

Update (Nov 26): Few folks had pinged me to ask if telecommuting is an option and the simple answer is that for this particular position we would like someone who would be willing to relocate to Vancouver and work from our office together with the rest of the team.

Finally, a decent implementation of panels using MooTools, which means I can finish my migration from YUI+Scriptaculous to MooTools some time this year if time allows.

Ooops.

Oh my, this could be said about so many things I won’t even try to list them all. Apply where needed, so to speak.

Also, don’t forget to check out their latest over at Despair Blog.

One feature we’ve been anxiously awaiting when VisualWorks 7.5 was in development is support for Unicode ODBC.

(self connection getSession)
unicodeEncoding: #’UCS-2′;
unicode: true;
yourself.

Naturally as soon as it became available my inclination was to turn it on and over time migrate our database schema from varchar() to nvarchar() and from char() to nchar() etcetera. Sounds reasonable? I thought so myself, but it took about a month of running this small change in production to prove me wrong. Take a look at the server CPU graph below (Hint: Unicode was enabled late August and disabled late October),

Looking back, it all kind of makes sense. I suspect ODBC layer is encoding everything on the way out, so running a query against a plain old varchar() column with a Unicode parameter SQL ended up having to encode all row values on the fly, essentially resulting in endless table scans and lots of CPU wastage for most basic scenarios. Turning off Unicode or changing the offending column to n*char() fixes the problem.

What this means, however, is that you can’t conceivably go the Unicode route without converting all *char() columns to n*char() columns at the same time. You can certainly afford to have a small performance impacting window to ensure availability, but it would most certainly be unreasonable to stretch this transition period. So much for piecemeal approach, sigh.

Yahoo just announced release YSlow as a first (hopefully, of many) great extension to Firebug that analyzes your pages and points out a wide variety of ways you can improve their performance. My first few minutes playing with it proved to be a lot of fun and I look forward to using it frequently going forward. Here’s a teaser to get you started straight from the home page of our application,

There’s much more to discover, go and grab it while its hot.