March 2008
21 posts
YDN Theater: MapReduce vs. SQL Talk →
Talk on Hadoop by an engineer from MailTrust - they’re using Hadoop for mail-server log processing.
Javascript gotcha - undefined vs null
I always get confused over when to use what. So for my own reference (and possibly others), here’s an explanation:
undefined is a special value whose type is also undefined
null is a special object and hence its type is object
When a variable has no value assigned to it yet, its type is undefined
When an property is not defined on an object, that property is undefined
A variable can...
James’ World » Blog Archive » Hadoop Summit... →
Quick summary of all the talks. It would be awesome to get hold of the slides from these talks. Anyone?
Gmails Quota Secrets » SlideShare →
Apparently the way GMail’s storage quota ticker works is just by performing a linear interpolation of the current system time given a pre-defined set of (timestamp, storage space) pairs.
TextMate gotcha - Freehanded editing
I just wasted around 20 mins because I enabled Freehanded editing by mistake (via the keyboard shortcut) and I didn’t know it existed. Once you enable Freehanded editing in TextMate, it will let you move the cursor inside of Tab characters (tab here can be actual tab or a soft tab). And this can be annoying because now you’re not navigating as fast as you normally do because...
YouTube APIs and Tools - Google Code →
YouTube has a Data API and a Javascript API! Since when? I didn’t know about this. Check out this demo
Interview With Ram Shriram, Founder Of Sherpalo... →
The interview happened when Ram Shriram was stuck in Bangalore traffic. So Bangalore-ish :-)
Switch to Tumblr
Over the weekend, I’ve moved my custom Django blog to Tumblr. If you’re subscribed to my blog via the FeedBurner feed, it’s all good (although Google Reader took a while before it updated itself).
I made the switch because I’m going to start writing less often (and I already do) and instead just point you to useful links that I discover much like how Simon Willison does...
2008 Lang.NET Symposium - Talks →
Video recordings of all the talks from Lang.NET 2008 are free to download.
JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events →
Everything you need to know about keyboard events in JavaScript
Unicode In Python, Completely Demystified →
Must read - Unicode is one of the most mysterious things you face when programming simply because no programming book ever does enough justice to this topic.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Google your way to a wacky... →
This month’s your-life-sucks-if-you-don’t-work-for-Google :)
DjangoTricks: Hacking Contributed Models →
Monkey patching contrib apps’ models
Unique URLs - Ajax Patterns →
IE 8 supports window.location.hash. I seriously need to use these hash-based unique URLs for circos.com. GMail has a beautiful implementation of this!
Peter's Blog - The window.onload Problem - Really... →
Fantastic blog post (read the one before this one too!) summarizing the various techniques used to shorten the time you have to wait in order to attach event handlers to DOM elements with the slowest being regular onload event.
The Local - Foreigners can't bank on Swedish ID →
Ok this doesn’t sound right. Three years back I got my ID pretty easily.
John Resig - JavaScript in Internet Explorer 8 →
Everything you need to know about JS in IE8
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit →
Everything you need to know about IE8 if you’re a web developer
Workplace Experiments - (37signals) →
OK this is seriously starting to sound even better than the Googleplex :)
This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains... →