Tuesday, 3rd June 2008
Facebook Open Platform. Facebook have open-sourced (under a modified MPL, does it still fit the OSI definition?) the code for the Facebook Platform, including their implementations of FBML, FQL and FBJS. This is no small release; the tarball weighs in at 40MB and includes libfbml, which depends on Firefox 2.0.0.4 for its HTML parser!
App Engine Fan: Efficient Global Counters. Implementing efficient counters in Google App Engine, using shards and/or memcached.
SquirrelFish. WebKit’s JavaScript engine was no slouch, but that hasn’t stopped them from replacing it with a brand new “register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention”. It runs 1.6x faster and has the Best Logo Ever.
The orphaned baby heron that had to be taught how to fly. Hooray for “Dude” the Heron. The Mail on Sunday have the best photos...
Bird taught to fly by a MAN. ... but the Sun have video.
The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains. I’ve been really enjoying Andy Baio’s series of out-of-print documentaries on technology and the internet, so a few weeks ago I got in touch with him to tip him off about the existence of “The Dream Machine”, a series on the history of computers from 1992 that had a huge effect on my then 11-year-old self. Thanks to Twitter, Jesse Legg and Andy’s awesome foraging skills he’s dug up the US version (same series, different name) and is posting it online. I really can’t recommend it enough!