Jon Baer

The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as “Harmony”. It is due by the end of next year and it is going to be the most comprehensive upgrade in the history of this language.

Chrome and V8 are committed to pushing JavaScript forward and have already started implementing the new features.

There is an increasing number of libraries which are described as high performance and have benchmarks to back that claim up. Here is a selection that I am aware of.

Implement a simple Hello World application in Node.js and deploy the application to Windows Azure. You will learn the basics of working with the Windows Azure compute emulator and deploying a Node.js application to Windows Azure.

Welcome to the CoffeeScript Cookbook! CoffeeScript recipes for the community by the community.

Why is microwave faster? Electromagnetic waves travel at different speeds depending on the materials they traverse, said Gary Croke, director of product marketing for Aviat Networks, the vendor McKay selected to supply its Eclipse Packet Node radios. Optical fiber has a much higher refraction index than plain old air, thus slowing down light waves moving through it, Croke said in an e-mail interview. By sending microwaves over the air, McKay is able to cut down the round-journey of a packet by 4 milliseconds, Croke claimed.

In this episode, the guys talk with Derick Bailey (consultant and founder of watchmecode.net, where he sells JavaScript themed screen casts) about Backbone.js, which is a popular JavaScript framework.

In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting.

Ice is a track changes implementation, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web. The following are demos of Ice in action.

Command-line interfaces (CLIs) are an often overlooked, but extremely important part of every developers workflow. Think about how different your day-to-day life would be if git functioned differently? Or (gasp) incorrectly or inconsistently? At Nodejitsu, we know CLI applications. The CLI for our public platform jitsu is designed to be quick to get started, highly portable and above all: consistent and robust. With these principals in mind we took extra care designing Flatiron to be adaptable to our production-quality needs.

How’d you like to be deemed unworthy of a job based upon a scan of your GitHub updates? That’s what proposed in a newly-published IBM patent application for Automated Analysis of Code Developer’s Profile, which proposes weeding out developer candidates for certain roles based on things like the amount of changes one typically makes with each commit, how frequently and regularly one makes commits, what hours of the day one makes commits, the percentage of commits with conflicts that one resolves, and the ‘depth’ of one’s commit comments (‘shallow’, ‘mid-range’ or ‘deep’).

The Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is a software implementation on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) that enables a network-attached file server to run directly in the cloud. That, in turn, allows enterprises to move all applications that can use NAS storage into the cloud without any modifications, according to Trainer.

The animations — which are part Minute Physics, part The Dot and the Line, part60-Second Adventures in Thought — are released under a Creative Commons license and cover the basics of logic and the scientific method, as well as specificpsychological pitfalls like confirmation bias and Gambler’s Fallacy.

It could be that we are on the verge of a great deluge of cognitive enhancement. Or it’s possible that new brain-enhancing drugs and technologies will be nothing compared to how we’ve transformed our minds in the past. If it seems that making ourselves “artificially” smarter is somehow inhuman, it may be that similar activities are actually what made us human.