The devops team over at Etsy have released some code for a project they call Loupe. It’s made up of two parts, Skyline and Oculus, and their goal is to automatically detect anomalous metrics. Monitoring is great, but kind of useless if no one is watching. Skyline does the detection and Oculus attempts to correlate an errant metric with other errant metrics. They’ve released both of these projects on GitHub (http://github.…

Lea Verou coded up some sweetness while on a plane with no in-flight entertainment. If only we were all as creative and productive, right? Check out DPI Love, a site to visit and get quick answers as to the DPI (really PPI) of the device you’re using. It’s also a quick way to calculate the PPI for any screen resolution and size. Plus, there’s a list of known devices for easy reference.…

Azure Web Sites includes a way to easily install a number of web apps such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Orchard, and DotNetNuke. By itself, that’s a great offering. But Azure has built in a way to continuously deploy updates to your web site through TFS or Git. I’m running my blog on Azure Web Sites using WordPress and GitHub publishing and this is a walk-through of how I set that up.…

Update: I’ve published the code for this post on github. Get the code here. Have you ever wanted to create a transparent tile for your app that mimics the way the built in Messaging and Mail apps work on your Windows Phone? I’m going to provide specifics on how to mimic the style and do it all on the phone. Prior to Mango, there were only a couple ways to do this and both were nasty.…