When i transferred to my new job in November, my job was to develop web services and applications using Ajax and other RIA technologies, but all development was done using
Mac computers. Coming from the PC world it was little strange experence in first couple of days and then i get used to it, altrough i still sometimes try to save document using ctrl+s.

Mytop require perl to work, and Mac OS X 10.5.5 comes with the perl already installed, but you will probably need DBD::mysql module to run mytop.

Also, standard XAMPP install dir is not in PATH, so you should add it to /etc/paths
here is how my /etc/paths file looks now:

/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/bin/


Now we can start install procedure:

1)Create a mysql directory in /usr/local:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/mysql

2)Create symlinks to the mysql

sudo ln -s /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/lib/mysql/ lib

For the next step you should have xampp developer package
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-macosx.html

sudo ln -s /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/include include

sudo ln -s /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

3) Now install DBD::mysql module (if you don't have one)

perl -MCPAN -e 'install DBD::mysql'

4) Now extract and install mytop


tar -zxvf mytop-.tar.gz
cd mytop-
perl Makefile.PL
make
sudo make install


and that's it..

you should be able to run mytop now.

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

view demo

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

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

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

-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?

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

But I do think that in this world where I've got a PS3 at home that performs live texture-mapping rendering in 3D, on the fly, why we can't get a browser that can render rounded corners on a box in 2008. You know, we should all have jet packs here! A rounded corner box or multiple background images shouldn't be rocket science.

Rest of the article here..

Result is quite interesting, and it shows true power of Javascript. I suppose it would take lot more trouble to do something similar in flash, and if even if it could be done, this method gives you lot more control.
(For example you can add specific onmouse effects/events on some table cells )

So, here it is, 55 linse of javascript, no framework used:

Demo:
http://dragan.yourtree.org/projects/javascript-intro/

UPDATE

and now something even more crazy than our last example:
really nice mouse effect in just 18 lines.
(using prototype though )

Demo:
http://dragan.yourtree.org/projects/js-mouse-grid/

I'm starting to wonder, is it possible to make, lets say 400x400 "display" made from 1x1 table cells and make an javascript demo, like they did in the 90's...
You know, plasmas, rotating cubes, etc..

now, someone stole our entire copy

us:

DevPulse is web development and consulting agency based in Belgrade specialized to offer you highly professional web solutions and consulting services on building your Internet identity and your web applications.
Over last few years we had successfully worked with with clients in our country and abroad and gain serious amount of experience in managing medium to large web applications, interface design, rich Internet applications (RIA) and Ajax, search engine optimization (SEO) and building custom CMS solutions.

We can also offer you services in visual identity building (graphic and logo design) and Internet marketing

http://devpulse.net/

them:

Hyper Max is web development and consulting agency specialized to offer you highly professional web solutions and consulting services on building your Internet identity and your web applications.

Over last few years we had successfully worked with clients in our country and abroad and gain serious amount of experience in managing medium to large web applications, interface design, rich Internet applications (RIA) and PHP, Asp. net, search engine optimization (SEO), building custom CMS solutions and open source customizations .

We can also offer you services in visual identity...

http://www.hypermaxsolutions.com

come on guys, is it really that hard to sit down and write couple lines of original text?