Getting organized. Brian asks Are your tests findable? If you don’t believe tests matter, skip to the next item. But if you do use tests to improve the quality of your code, you know that little things like this matter. How else can you revisit a test to fix it or improve it? And if you don’t take care of your tests, how long before they code rot? Anyway, short read, worth your time.
Time for concurrency. Raganwald says it’s time to bring back concurrency and start learning new tricks. Yes it’s hard, but so was object oriented. And it can be done if we start moving languages in that direction. Although I’m not sure exactly how this will shape up. We already do a lot of work with threads — what most people think of when they hear concurrency. And shared nothing architectures, which are actually all about sharing some resources you can easily reason about. Then there are processes, or byte size concurrency, which lets you take advantage of grids (think MapReduce). Asynchronous: we do it in the browser every single day. So maybe concurrency is already here, but maybe we do need better tools to make it easier.
I’m a bit skeptical, but if you want to experiment with higher level concurrency constructs (think pi-calculus) and Ruby, give me shout.
EarthLink fucks up. I have no other words for it. EarthLink is now redirecting misspelled domain names to their own page, instead of letting Firefox resolve it to a Google search. How do I opt-out of this nonsense?
Batteries that recharge via USB. Rad! (Via Jeremy Zawodny)
Fixing MySpace. If you ever feel like visiting MySpace but afraid the bling bling will drive you blind, eekmale has a Greasemonkey fix. I’m afraid it only works on style, not on content. (Via LifeHacker)
Dave C.
Assaf