A longish, interesting writeup of a Steve Yegge presentation on server-side Javascript. It’s called Rhino, and is hosted in the JVM (which I don’t think is as bad as it sounds). Yegge comments on the stigmas around the JVM and Javascript itself. He asks the crowd about Javascript:

Who here thinks JavaScript is kind of icky? Come on, come on, be honest. Yeah, there we go, a couple of people. Yeah.

And then jokes about Java:

You need to write unit tests, and unfortunately in Java it’s very painful. I’m speaking into the mic now, so that everybody can hear. Unit testing in Java is painful!

What I like most about the talk is that he’s an open thinker about languages in general, and is willing to look at their respective strengths and weaknesses. It’s a mindset I can respect, where merit is based on good sense.

Here are a pair of tech talks on mobile Safari web development (part 1, part 2, and PDF notes). A choice quote:

Probably the tastiest morsel of information I got from the Apple iPhone Tech Talk was hearing Mark Malone explain that Apple developed all of the iPhone native applications, such as the Stocks, Clock, and Weather apps, using Canvas. It makes sense now when one understands that Apple developed Canvas as part of their Mac OS X Dashboard SDK for creating widgets. Who knew?

The entire set of available Google TechTalks are available on Google Video, as is an RSS feed of the newest talks.