BrokenRobot

15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language

Wired News: Straight Dope on the iPod's Birth. Note quite the same story Steve Jobs likes to tell.

MacBook Pro ExpressCard EVDO setup & review. Nice review of the Verizon Wireless EVDO card.

How Many Mongrels to Start. Great post from Zed on the mongrel-users list on how to empirically determine the number of mongrel processes you should run to get optimal performance.

CPAN: MapReduce.pm. Perl implementation of Google's MapReduce distributed processing algorithm. Seems to use SSH to execute jobs on remote machines and doesn't currently handle any time of distributed filesystem operations. Nice start, though.

Bare Bones Project Hacks. Simple one-page introduction to the entire meat of the Project Management body of knowledge.

Password Composer shell version. Shell script implementation of the awesome "master password" system for generating unique passwords for each web site for which you have an account.

JavaScript MD5. Implementations of MD4, MD5, and SHA-1 in pure JavaScript. Also, jsSHA2 for generating SHA-256.

JSMIN. The JavaScript minimizer. Takes a nicely-formatted JavaScript file and shrinks it by removing whitespace and comments. Useful for reducing overall page weight.

Caching and Precaching with memcached. Ruby code for interacting with memcached and pre-loading it to further improve performance.

Building Console Apps with SimpleConsole. Introduction to the terrific SimpleConsole Ruby library for abstracting the boring parts of console applications (like command processing, formatting output, etc.)