console.log

Useful to keep in mind.

Passion and fulfillment

Interesting perspective. Fulfillment is an interesting thing to contemplate. It seems that goals don't make happiness: once you achieve your goals, that's it, there is no infinite pleasure after that.

Think about it: a lot of people think they'll be happy if only they had a lot of money. What they don't realize is that they do, actually, have a lot of money, as well as many other things they take for granted, if we compare them to, say, someone in a civil war zone in Somalia. And yet, these privileged people are not necessarily happy.

The idea of dirty but fulfilling jobs demonstrates that, more importantly than aiming to make money, is the challenge of "now".

Build your own supercomputer

Using a Playstation 3. Now everyone can break MD5 hashes on the confort of their own homes.

Concurrency in pure and lazy language

A PhD dissertation by Peng Li. Interesting stuff.

Dry Routing

Clever. I'm surprised to see that it's possible to do annotations in PHP.

Asynchronous MySQL Connector

Nice.

Visual Event

This looks useful. Assuming you use JQuery, YUI or Mootools.

Web 2.0 is dead? Says who?

The list of fastest rising searches worldwide from Google Zeitgeist shows some unfamiliar searches: tuenti, nasza klasa and wer kennt wen.

Guess what: they're all social networking from different parts of the world. Clicking through some of the countries also show other social network sites being prominent: orkut in Brazil and India, facebook in several other countries.

When Linux fails

Nice and down to earth article.

Native Client

This looks very interesting. If we can bind C code to the browser, that probably means we can also run Python, Ruby and a whole plethora of other incredibly cool stuff.

WoW authentication

Damn, they beat me to it.

Give and take, baby

Well said.

e-commerce woes

For future reference.

Music plagiarism

Apparently there's a lawsuit over this.

I don't know about you, but I think expecting every artist to know about every riff from every other artist in the world is a bit ludicrous.

typeof

This is a bit overkill for my taste, but I gotta say the "isn't" construct is pretty clever.

Python 3 is out

Ooh.

Now is not the time to learn functional programming

I've been seeing tons of stuff like this lately. Here's the basic premise: I say that functional programming is the next big thing. I drop some names like Scala, Haskell and F# to sound like I know what I'm talking about. I mention concurrency. Then I proceed to show you an example of fibonacci or some other equally wiki-able piece of code. Slashdot effect ensues. Or so the story goes.

I don't buy into the functional hype for one reason: it doesn't solve any widespread problems. Look at why C got popular: assembler was hard. Java: memory management was hard. PHP: REST was hard. Maybe not hard for you, but it's hard for a lot of people.

Functional programming per se doesn't abstract away anything gory. If I have a list that two processors want to update at the same time, it's not FP that will magically make everything work, it's the implementation of a locking mechanism that will.

The reason why I think it's good to learn FP (and not necessarily *now now NOW*) is that it allows you to reorganize code into something that resembles human languages more, not because someone that never wrote (and more importantly, maintained) concurrency stuff in FP said you should learn it.

Voting kills

Statistics sometimes scare me.