Why programmers should play Go. A good argument for stretching your thinker in weird and wonderful ways. I’ve played my share of Go over the years, and while I can’t claim to be good at it, I can say that it has changed how I think. The important thing to remember, though, is that the stretching isn’t just a result of learning the game, it’s also the result of thinking about the game, and reflecting on the patterns of play and tactics.

HOWTO run Firefox2 in Ubuntu 8.04. If you’re already running Firefox3, the Firefox-2 symlink will not start the right version of Firefox until you shut down FF3. Now I can test sites in FF2 again without booting my 2k VM.

A great introduction to reverse engineering Win32 applications, including a tutorial on hacking the built in Mine Sweeper game.

A great A List Apart article on the often misunderstood topic of Javascript member binding. Javascript is one of those powerful languages that is treated like a Basic-ish Java. It’s not. It’s more like a Perl-ish Lisp.

A good example of storyboarding as used in movie production, using a Coen Brother’s flick as an example. Storyboarding applies to user interface design too, beating out notations like UML in terms of utility.

Subversion 1.5 was released this week. Added in this release: less suck!

PHP + Firebug == FirePHP. A simple API for logging to the Firebug console directly from PHP. Sound like fun?

Here’s a scriptlet for displaying Google reader articles on your blog. It’s an excellent example of how to craft a small chunk of Javascript: it’s cleanly encapsulated object and unobtrusive. The only thing that could improve it would be a dash of Prototype | jQuery | Moo | Dojo.

Want to hone your mad C coding skills? Try your hand at the Underhanded C Contest. It poses two challenges: to solve a semi-interesting programming problem, while hiding something devious in the resulting code. Sound fun?

The New York Times reports that Palm plans to sell 2 million Centros in 2008. That’s 1/5th the number of projected iPhone sales (and 1/10th of the analyst’s expectations of 20+ million by 2009). I smell a spanking in the works.¹

1. Dear Palm, the end is near. ↩