“groovy mother...”

A smidgen of Google’s secret sauce — a lighter-weight-than-XML data interchange format, with heavily optimized cross-language serialization routines. Just the thing for shuttling and persisting data.

Or “Why you need to understand operating system fundamentals if you want to ship end-user software”

Good thoughts from Les Orchard — Your webapps don’t have to do all your work the second a user clicks the button on a form. Queue up tasks and respond quickly, and everyone wins.

“Can’t think of a good class name? Try this” Also handy for filling in status reports. “This week, I optimized the WritableCommandVector.”

I’m giving Mac programming a go over the festive break — This seems to be a good (cheap) e-book to get me started with Objective C.

Mega-wicked-simple “getting started with Cocoa” tutorial.

Control AppleScript from Python. The prospect of using Python to hack on my iTunes library is massively exciting!

JUnit test tester. Works by changing your code and making sure your unit tests break! Wonder if there’s a Python version…

Good article on where Joel sees web development going — some kind of higher-level language that compiles down to Javascript, HTML, and whatever else runs in browsers. I think there needs to be “Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.” t-shirts.

Tool for syncing source control over multiple systems — seems ideal for those times that “corporate” insist on a standard version control package that everyone hates, and you want to use SVN/git/whatever.

Graphical programming “language”/environment. Designed as a tool to let kids learn programing.

“Programming the LOL way.” I CAN HAS TURING COMPLEET?

Tribute to billg’s programming triumph.

Simple easy-to-get-started programming tutorial, based upon Ruby and Mozilla. Written by “Why the Lucky Stiff”. The “Hackety Manifesto” is worth reading.

“A Schroedinbug is a bug that manifests itself apparently only after the software is used in an unusual way or seemingly at the point in time that a programmer reading the source code notices that the program should never have worked in the first place, at which point the program stops working entirely until the mysteriously now non-functioning code is repaired.” I’ve coded a few of these in my time.

Some good thoughts on how to manage code quality in a product development world. “Probably the most effective thing we did was institute per-engineer bug limits: if any engineer’s bug count passes 20, they have to stop working on features and fix bugs instead. The basic idea is that we keep the bug count low as we go so that we can send out usable versions to alpha testers earlier in the cycle and we don’t have the bugalanch at the end.”

“What was your contribution to the team?” “Light both ends of fuse one and one end of fuse two. When fuse one burns out, light the other end of fuse two.”

Wow, Record/Replay sounds useful. Similar to the Java Omniscient Debugger, but capturing the whole machine state. Looks like VMWare are doing a good job of differentiating their free and pay-for versions.

Best Daily WTF in a while. “Take a good, hard look at your first revision and just say to yourself, ‘gloves.’”

Open-source C search engine. I still prefer Lucene, but PyLucene is notoriously flakey under mod_python, so I’m using XapWrap to power the groovymother search.