Jon Baer

So, now we can quickly and easily turn an entire application’s state into a simple JS object that can be JSON stringified and restored or persisted in a database, or in localstorage, or sent across the wire. Also, if we have these serialization function in our base model we can selectively serialize any portion of the nested application structure.

Minimalism – the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it – requires a conscience choice.

A lightweight (< 3KB minified) utility for Backbone projects. Adds the ability to search for models with a Query API similar to MongoDB.

The stock price of a company continuously changes, going up or down depending on the collective activity of a large number of investors. Although this process seems fairly straightforward, no one fully understands how this collective trading activity finds the “correct” price of a stock. Some theoretical models have been proposed to describe how different investment strategies affect price dynamics, but challenges such as investor confidentiality and complicated data mining make it difficult to gather empirical support for these models.

In their first year of life, babies who will go on to develop autism already show different brain responses when someone looks at or away from them. Although the researchers are careful to say that the study, reported online on January 26 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, is only a first step toward earlier diagnosis, the findings do suggest that direct brain measures might help to predict the future development of autism symptoms in infants as young as six months.

Do you want a 9 KB cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable? Yeah! Do you also want the possibility to add, edit and remove items by dead simple templating?

If the user wanted to, for example, name his blog post “constructor” our program would behave incorrectly. We therefore change our code to leverage hasOwnProperty, which will allows to check whether the property has been set by us.

Node’s module system is deceptively clever. On the surface it seems like it provides just enough functionality to get by, but it can go a long way towards helping to structure an application elegantly. Node’s official documentationcovers all of the major features, yet many modules sent in for review at DailyJS don’t use these techniques where they could.

Want to freeze an object using the power of your mind? Watch the spinning objects in this video and they will suddenly appear to stop moving. However, they never actually freeze and are constantly turning at a steady rate.

Researchers at the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation de Lasers Intenses (LULI), along with colleagues at various universities, have successfully simulated the magnetic fields that form in early galaxies. Naively, there seems to be no correspondence between the experiment and the real astrophysical system. The lab set-up is very small, works on a very short time frame, and uses carbon rods and lasers; the real environment for galaxy formation is clouds of gas and dark matter, and the time-scale is hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, a magnetic field strength (along with other effects) has been observed in the lab that corresponds to that experienced by early protogalaxies.

The storage system backing Google’s search engine has to be able to serve millions of data reads and writes daily from thousands of individual processes running on thousands of servers, can almost never be down for a backup or maintenance, and has to perpetually grow to accommodate the ever-expanding number of pages added by Google’s Web-crawling robots. In total, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.

Ninja Blocks are simple but powerful open source hardware backed by an amazing web service called Ninja Cloud. Without writing a line of code, Ninja Cloud allows you to control your Ninja Blocks with simple “if this then that” style tasks.

Two interesting developments in HTML5 I’ve recently been made aware of are WebRTC (thanks to Manuel Simoni) and File API(thanks to Rich Jones). The RTC part of WebRTC stands for Real-Time Communications, but it’s basically a way to provide TCP/IP sockets for a web browser while pretending you’re not providing TCP/IP. The top-layer part consists of various video and audio codecs, but the basic gist is a way of providing a bidirectional channel for web browsers to communicate with each other. This is accomplished with NAT traversal in mind (the functionality for traversing NATs and proxies in the reference implementation is provided by the very handy looking libjingle library that seems to do most of the common NAT traversal tricks).