If you're a PHP programmer, chances are you've either run across PEAR or could get some excellent use out of it. PEAR is an acronym for PHP Extension and Application Repository. The creators and maintainers of PEAR encourage you to pronounce it just like the fruit with the same spelling. But you'll get more than fiber from PEAR, as you'll learn when you read the rest of this article...
A snippet from my article at codewalkers: The PEAR Package Tour: PEAR Basics.
How to Get a Lot Done - 7 Tips to Achieve More
This veers a bit from my normal posts, but was a great read. If you have goals, big or small, and feel like you aren't reaching them, give this a read. The author certainly knows what he's talking about, being a world-travelling, company-starting, web-designing entrepreneur extraordinaire.
Query String to Object via regex
This is from remy sharp's blog. This is a great example of the wonderful tidbits he doles out in helpful posts on this blog. Lots of great jQuery, regex and Javascript "magic".
Deep Profiling jQuery Apps
John Resig does it again, releasing another awesome project. This adds profiling into the callstack of a page utilizing jQuery. It goes much deeper that the profiling capabilities of firebug, and will be a great help if you have a heavy client-side app using jQuery.
Wide Finder 2
Tim Bray is running a second edition of his Wide Finder project. The basic premise is that taking advantage of the multiple processors available in modern day powerhouse boxes should be easier. He provided a fairly trivial application in ruby (72 lines to process gigs of log files for counts and top visited pages). He then ran it (in 23 hours) for a benchmark on an 8-core, 32-thread Sun T2000.
He's since given out accounts to a handful of others who had code to test on the box and provided some preliminary results. As you'll see... OCaml apparently rocks, with results coming in at under 10 minutes and less than twice the code footprint of the original. It's certainly an interesting project to follow.
MikeOS
If you like to read code, this is the OS for you. It's a simple 16-bit OS written with the goal of demonstrating the basics of OS development. I'm not much of an assembly programmer (at all), but I was able to grab the tarball and read through, and learn a few tidbits right off the bat. Oh, and it's got tetris. ;)
Jones Forth
Similar to MikeOS, Jones Forth is a wonderfully literate implementation of a FORTH compiler. You can just jump right to the source file and start learning. To quote the author:
FORTH is one of those alien languages which most working programmers regard in the same way as Haskell, LISP, and so on. Something so strange that they'd rather any thoughts of it just go away so they can get on with writing this paying code. But that's wrong and if you care at all about programming then you should at least understand all these languages, even if you will never use them.
Three Small Javascript Libraries
A good post by Oliver Steele, describing three interesting libraries that really flex a bit of javscript, beyond the everyday DOM manipulation. Fluently - which allows you to easily create "chainable methods" (ala jQuery), MOP JS - which allows for some slick metaprogramming around asynchronous calls, and Collections JS - implements some nice utilities for collections.
TaffyDB - A Javascript DB
At first, my reaction to this was ,"Why?!" But then I mulled it over a bit more. I can see quite a few uses for this, especially in this modern era of "never reload the page." I'm envisioning stateful browser apps neatly keeping their state, and transacting with the servide data store through tidy little JSON snippets. [via Joe's Blog]
Dear LazyWeb, anyone know of a good HowTo on integrating a mac mini into an entertainment center? DVR, web video, music, etc? My TV does HDMI, component, and VGA, which will I want to use?
Also, anyone been following hoosgot ? It's an interesting concept, it uses the technorati APIs and watches for the words "lazyweb" and "hoosgot". It then aggregates all the blog posts on one page for people to find an answer. (Thus my question at the start of the entry.)
It's also available to be "queried" and tracked on twitter. Just follow @hoosgot.
They've already encountered spammers, and I have no idea if people are actually answering all those questions... but it's a really neat concept.
A bit like casting your questions out onto the ocean in a bottle, and waiting to see what floats back.
MySQL Performance Blog
This is one of those sites/blogs that you find while researching one topic, and then just keep reading and reading. Tons of well written, informative and helpful entries. Great discussion in the comments and on the attached forums.
The post that first sucked me in was Why MySQL could be slow with large tables ?
Benchmarking [php] magic
A great entry that considers the cost of many of the new features in the PHP5 object model. Also situated on another great blog that's worth adding to your feed collection.
Amazon SimpleDB
A very interesting addition to their much talked about Web Service suite, SimpleDB provides a database (or directory service) in their computing cloud, along side S3, EC2 and others. With a pay-as-you-go model and some interesting features, this is the kind of environment that is sure to foster some awesome new projects.
Brady Forrest provides a great overview of the product and pricing on O'Reilly Radar.
http://www.soulsphere.org/stuffage/bsd/
For AutoBlogger, I decided to release it under the MIT (or X11 license, as it were). Reading a couple, I realized that there had to be a webapp somewhere that would stick my name and such in all the appropriate places. And there was.
It also generates BSD licenses (with or without advertising clause). Sure, it's an incredibly simple application, but I found it useful.
Copyright 2008, Chris Moyer
Subscribe