Scatter - ajax without coding

Nice library. I did something similar for a client once. The idea is to have links auto-ajax and replace elements on the page when elements in the response have id's that match elements in the current page.

Apache Portable Runtime

Looks useful

Security Training Videos

A ton of videos on assembly and exploits

The watchtower of destruction

Interesting story about firefighters in Alaska back in the days when people had to pay the firefighters directly to get covered.

Sloppy

Funny. It produces a score based on how sloppy the code looks like.

On junk food and addiction

Basically, you should eat healthy.

UglifyJs

It seems to produce more stable code with less effort

Node in Windows

Using VirtualBox. I had to change the networking options to use NAT.

Web designer wish list

I like to read about the pains that current tools give people.

Haskell Platform

Pretty much everything you need to get started with Haskell.

Superstitions work

A research that suggests that lucky charms and other superstitions affect positively the chances of completing tasks.

Boost creativity

A bunch of nifty psychology tricks with links to studies.

Microsoft on the ball lately

Is it just me or is Microsoft really starting to put some muscle behind their consumer facing products?

They completely rebranded their search engine last year and now they're pushing out ads for Trueswitch for Hotmail, which lets users import contacts and emails from old emails to a new one (if, say, you get married and change your name, for example).

IE9 is also shaping up to be a serious contender in the browser wars.

Which is not to say they're not focusing on other things anymore. F# has been getting praises left and right too. They're even getting involved in open source now.

Kudos to Microsoft.

Talking to God

Heavily darwinian but interesting nonetheless.

Use the Source

It's basically hacker news, but focused on code. It might just become my new favorite site.

UX myths

With studies.

How planes fly

They taught me wrong when I was a kid!

The Exponential Function

A great explanation of the exponential function. As Einstein famously said: "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest".

scheme in haskell

A hands-on tutorial

Music notation with canvas

Really cool.

Design theory articles

This is actually interesting.

Wait-free hashtables

Note to self: play with this later.

Google new design: A/B testing fail?

You must have noticed that the Google result pages now have that left bar thingie, and if you hang around techie sites, you probably heard a number of people voice negative opinions about it. "It's redundant, it's cluttered, it's inconsistent, it's a rip-off from Bing" are some of the arguments I've seen more than once so far.

Apparently, this new SERP is the result of some A/B testing Google did, which supposedly is optimized to boost whatever metrics they are interested in boosting.

There's a problem with this idea though, imho:

How do they know they are boosting the right metrics?. For the top link on the page, one could say: the more clicks per second, the better. But what about the "more" link on the left bar? Given that a click on that is one less click on the top link, what do you optimize for? Is the local optimization contributing or detracting to the overall goal of the page?

Is it in Google's interest to make its UI look the same as Bing's?

Is it cool that users have to re-learn that now there's a block of stuff on the left and the actual search result titles are shorter (and sometimes, plain cut-off)?

Is it cool that this encourages power users to whip up home made UI-customization scripts?

How does this habit-changing move speak to the Google-loving tribe (the mouth-to-mouth advertisers)?

I wouldn't say this change was a dumb-move-that-will-kill-Google(tm) or anything drastic and stupid like that, but I'd note that in the Internet, things don't die, they just fade away slowly as an overwhelming amount of better stuff comes along. If anything, I think this change was a tiny step towards that direction.

My 2 cents.

Seven blunders of the world

Food for thought.

Buy vs Rent calculator

Nifty calculator.

Turns out I'd only ever be better off buying if the property costs less than $120k. And even then, not by much.

Alternatives to Red Black Trees

Treaps, AA-trees, ravl trees.

Maybe it's just me but I find that I use hashmaps more than sets and ordered maps. Yet I find more people talking about trees than hashing schemes. Hmm.

A zillion monkeys

C, Assembler, optimization; you know, "real" programming.

This is one of those places you stumble upon one day and go "geez where were you all my life?" :)

Popular goals

Interesting list. Many of the items fall into the "what? you don't do this already?" list for me.

HTML 5 test

Stuff that can and cannot be used

Note to self: browse around this

There seems to be some interesting stuff in this blog

Discogs

Might be useful at some point.

Black holes, white holes

Interesting theory.

Pthread API design

A nice post about good API design

One thumb up, one thumb down

So, Chrome will start to come with Flash pre-installed. On the one hand, it's nice to see at least one browser maker finally step up and iron out this pain area: let's face, the average Joe usually would prefer to to have Flash installed rather than not, even if it hogs CPU.

In the end, there's no point in using the Internet if you can't actually use it. And for a lot of people, break.com et al is the Internet.

On the other hand, it's too bad Google didn't want to create a competing player. They probably know that the swf format specs are open and they certainly have the capacity to create a ridiculously fast implementation to rival Adobe's. I'd imagine that in a playing field where the status quo is "Flash Player is slow", being the one who can say "well, Flash runs natively and is super fast in our browser" would be a very strong differentiator for Chrome.

Here's for hoping that Opera will pick up the dropped ball.

How not to do a presentation on F#

Pretty much sums up everything that I think is wrong with Lisp literature.

Time for Wall Street to pay?

"We need accountability -- as in, jail time where warranted -- for those who created the financial disaster"

Right, because, you know, it's not like jails are run with tax money or anything.

Python + Linux Live CD

Just plop the CD in.

Scott and Scurvy

A story about Robert Falcon Scott's (tragic) expedition to the South Pole.

Sunyata

Interesting essay about identity.

A few things you should be aware of if you still whine about Flash (vs HTML5)

1. HTML5 video hogs more CPU than Flash under Windows.
2. You can actually do something about the Flash Player state of affairs.
3. The SWF spec is an open specification.

coLinux

I keep forgetting the name of this project. It runs Linux without the need of a VM, i.e. about as close to a real installation as it can be.

ReactOS

Basically, an open source Windows. Interesting project to watch for.

Little known things about javascript

Here are some pretty obscure techniques you can use in Javascript.

Here's some more hacking with the tilde (bitwise not) operator. The indexOf() trick is pretty terse (but it might be a bit too cryptic for some people).

Is God a Taoist

Very insightful write-up. God's explanations pretty much sums up my belief system.

Juggling

"Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it."

found here. credit attribution might be wrong.

Gcc to Java

No idea what the point of this is, but it's definitely cool.

Snake-oil-o-meter

This is kinda cool.

Snowclones

These things have a name?

Emotional Accounting

Crap, I'm irrational.

Aquaponics

Note to self: get into this.

It's like winamp all over again

Seriously, what are the Mozilla people thinking?

Cappuccino yummyness

The Cappuccino guys are up to some really interesting stuff: apparently you can use base64 images in IE6 and 7 via MHTML, in combination with data URLs, to get some serious gzip compression goodness in every browser.

Cliches

This looks very useful