map - filter - reduce in Javascript using prototype.js

I wrote little tutorial on functional programming techniques using javascript and prototype.

view demo

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On jul 17. last.fm released new version of their interface to general audience.
It looks like there are moving from music oriented service to social network kinda service.

Comments(shoutbox), Recent activity list (new?) and friends are now almost main feature of the site. Sure, charts are still there, but now it shows only 15 entries by default in top artists and top tracks section.

Also, ajax tabs are charts are really useful (prototype ftw!),and I like that they did not go wild with ajax features and that kept thing nice and minimalistic.

Only thing i hated from on first sight is the player, damn what is with that brushed metal texture?
It looks like some ancient photoshop tutorial from 5-6 years ago
Old player was like 10 times better. :/

Don't get me wrong, design it self is pretty good, and i even like the but there is an obvious intention to make last.fm more social, and i don't know is that good thing or bad, i always have doubts in radical changes like this one.
For one you will always get a ton of angry users (scroll down) when you make this kind of changes. Also i think they should include dark theme like in old version, i didn't use it but i know many people that did.

But anyway, there is nothing else that we can do, but to (try to) enjoy the brand new last.fm

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Here is an interesting find : Busby SEO Challenge.

Friend of mine is participating in challenge where you are competing with other participants on who will score no.1 position on Google for "Busby SEO Challenge" phrase, and award is quite nice too - $5000

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Getfirebug.com is currently unavailable from Europe.
It seams that FF3 is not compatible with latest stable version of firebug (1.0) but you must use some of the beta versions.

At least, it seams that firebug has a lot of users, ant that certainly is a good thing.

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There is a lot of buzz around Erlang these days, and there is a reason to it - Erlang has native solutions for most common problem of todays large web apps:

-Erlang is distributed
-Thus, Erlang is easy to scale
-Erlang comes with built in mnesia database, which can also be distributed
(and it even comes with transaction support)

Erlang is process based language, and programmers from the world of sequential languages must change they mind set rapidly in order to fully understand and take advantage of Erlang.

On the other hand, Erlang is fairly simple language with just a few built in functions an it could take you just a few days to get a grip on it.

and if you dont trust me, you should probably trust guys at Google. Here is one of the topics form this years Google's scalability conference in Seattle:

Scalable Wikipedia with Erlang by Thorsten Schuett, Zuse Institute Berlin

Abstract:

Global online services at Amazon, eBay, Myspace, YouTube, or Google serve millions of customers with tens of thousands of servers located throughout the world. At this scale, components fail continuously and it is difficult to maintain a consistent state while hiding failures from the application.

Peer-to-peer protocols provide availability by replicating services among peers, but they are mostly limited to write-once/read-many data sharing. To extend them beyond the typical file sharing, the support of fast transactions on distributed hash tables (DHTs) is an important yet missing feature.

We will present a distributed key/value store based on a DHT that supports consistent writes. Our system comprises three layers:

* a DHT layer for scalable, reliable access to replicated data,
* a transaction layer to ensure data consistency in the face of concurrent write operations,
* an application layer with an extremely high access rate.

For the application layer, we selected a distributed, scalable Wiki with full transaction support. We will show that our Wiki outperforms the public Wikipedia in terms of served page requests per second and we will discuss how the development of the distributed code benefited from the use of Erlang.

Also Apache built their new document based database called Couch DB on top of Erlang, and Facebook implemented their online chat system in Erlang, so if you think about it, there must be something good about that language.
So why not learn it?

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Is there a better way to start a week?
:)

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