Newspaper Club is a great product - but I'm really glad Tom's written about the technical underpinnings of the latest version of the code, because it's super impressive. They threw out InDesign and replaced it with their own renderer, written in Cocoa; they have a gorgeous, rich Javascript client that's a joy to use; and they have a development team of 2. TWO. Brilliant work, folks.

"‫قلب‬ is a simple, Scheme-like programming language that you code entirely in Arabic. It is an exploration of the impact of human culture on computer science, the role of tradition in software engineering, and the connection between natural and computer languages." Somebody asked me at Four Thought about non-English programming languages, and I had to explain there really weren't many/any. This is a nice counterpoint, though it's as much a statement as a practical tool, I guess. Still: it's a statement about the thing I explained to the audience member.

A huge, fascinating, braindump from Bret Victor, mainly on the state of how programming is being taught (especially in the "learn to code, live" idiom that's popular at the moment). A lot of it is very good; I'm not sure it applies everywhere, and I'd like to see examples not about geometry (which I think are entirely possible, given Victor's idioms). But still: it's huge, and dense, and well-reasoned, and has lots of jumping off points. Good to see someone thinking about this stuff like this.

"Sentiment analysis tool for node.js based on the AFINN-111 wordlist." Interesting; feel slike it could be ported to other platforms, too.

"Micro-frameworks are definitely the pocketknives of the JavaScript library world: short, sweet, to the point. And at 5k and under, micro-frameworks are very very portable. A micro-framework does one thing and one thing only — and does it well. No cruft, no featuritis, no feature creep, no excess anywhere. Microjs.com helps you discover the most compact-but-powerful microframeworks, and makes it easy for you to pick one that’ll work for you." Ooh, nice.

Installing Redis on Linode.

"If school programming languages that serve children best end up looking quite a bit different from conventional programming languages, maybe it’s actually the conventions that need changing." Several good points from Alex, and some good points about breaking away from equating "computational" with "procedural".

"Shim is a node.js-based browser-compatibility tool that lets you synchronize several devices/browsers and surf the same pages simultaneously on all of them." Wow.

An Impressive list of notable examples of programmatic journalism from Dan Sinker; something I must return to.

"Takes a snapshot with your Mac's built-in iSight webcam every time you git commit code, and archives a lolcat style image with it." YES.

"This library is a collection of routines for configuring the 16 bit hardware timer called Timer1 on the ATmega168/328." (Timers look hard).

"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).

More clever stuff with dedicated post types in WP3; notably, adding custom fields to custom post-type forms.

"I've been using Copy with Style command, which I took from this blog post. It copies text selection as RTF so when the code is pasted into Keynote, it looks exactly the same as it looked in TextMate, including font style, size and colors. Code can be then modified in Keynote, while the style is preserved." Useful!

Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever - and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.

"It still amazes me that with the Practical Application of Codes and Pictures, 1145 lines of gobbledegook and 554KB of compressed images can be turned into this." Making stuff is awesome.

"...at the end of the day its 0.1% compsci, 0.9% clever ideas, and 99% duct tape." I am definitely, definitely a duct-tape programmer at best. (actually: no, I'm not; what Spolsky means by that isn't what I thought he meant).

"Since I’m an OS X user, I decided to make the whole thing work on my system – Leopard 10.5.6 at the time of this writing. Here are the notes, mostly for my reference and because it might be also useful to others:" God yes; setting up cairo on my Mac proved a nightmare last year.

Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.

Generates a tiny file to do the most basic things, from the looks of it.

Ooh, this looks like a very interesting write-up of a thoughtful SXSW session. Marked as something I need to follow up on.

Custodian is the Ruby gem for accessing the Guardian Open Platform Content API that James Darling, Kalv Sandhu, and I (although my contribution was minor) built. There's a Google Code link to it, but I'd imagine the github version is where the action will be.

"...the Wii’s software stack is designed with little to no future proofing. There are basically zero provisions for any future updates; even obvious things like new storage devices or game patches. What’s worse is that this will affect the compatibility mode of any future Wii successor." Interesting analysis of what's going on inside a Wii, even if the architecture is a little limited.

"One of my enduring passions is exploring graphic design with programmatic and generative systems. While some aspects of design require the skilled hand of the designer, others can be formalized and explored by computer. For those tasks, Mathematica is an exceptional tool." Some lovely thinking around generative design.

All Kenta Cho's code on wonderfl.

A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available - particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.

Eesh. Tetris in 500 bytes of Javscript and HTML. Yes, they're obfuscated and unpleasant, but wow, etcetera.

"All the _around_ stuff, never the _it_ stuff." Which is an interesting way of putting it.

"I got this idea to stuff Javascript in a PNG image and then read it out using the getImageData() method on the canvas element." Blimey.

"Here's Román Cortés' Homer, animated to show the structure." Click the animate buttons, and be amazed. It's all just text and CSS.

"Click-draggable. Range-makeable. A better calendar." No IE6 support, but it's not half bad so far.

"Snipplr is a public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day... Did we mention it works with TextMate, too?" Looks good!

"Anything worth writing is worth re-writing. This applies to code as well as prose."

"Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them." This could be interesting!

"You need to mentally prepare yourself before starting a review by reminding yourself of the purpose of the review and the need for a critical, questioning attitude." Nice article on how to make code reviews effective.

"The date slider is a Flash visualization that Measure Map uses as one way to navigate the site. We are happy to provide a version of this date slider to the public." As used on OaklandCrime.

jCodeViewer is a jQuery plugin which allows you to turn any div, textarea or pre tag into a simple Code viewer in an inobtrusive manner.

brothercake does the CSS-redundancy malarkey but as a Firefox extension. Which is definitely more immediate/accesible than my version... but still only handles individual pages. Great to see the idea in so many formats, though.

Wonderful talk from Doug Crockford. Must download.

Just beautiful. The sonnet and haiku are my favourites so far. (Inform 7 is a natural-language programming language for writing text adventures).

Code review software from VMWare, powered by Django, works with Subversion and Perforce.

CodeHighlighter is a lightweight, unobstrusive and fully configurable script for displaying code examples highlighted in a way similar to the way many text editors highlight code. It weighs in at just under 4K.

Wow. This totally comes in at my level of competence, and works pretty much how I'd want it to. Time to futz around with some prototypes...

Always useful to know: how long loops take in different browsers Javascript interpretations.