Prosperity without growth

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and author of the book “Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet”. In 2010, he held a talk on the topic of that book. This blog post summarizes it.

Google Drive – online storage

One day ago, Google presented Google Drive, online storage for files. This blog post summarizes what it is.

Declaring module exports (Node.js, AMD)

Modules are mostly the same in Node.js and AMD [1]: A sequence of statements that assign internal values to variables and exported values to an object. This blog post shows several patterns for doing the latter. It also explains how ECMAScript.next handles exports.

Four rules for living your life

Adrian Tan held the graduation speech “Life And How To Survive It” for the class of 2008 at Nanyang Technological University (in Singapore). In it, he states four rules for living one’s life:

How numbers are encoded in JavaScript

All numbers in JavaScript are floating point. This blog post explains how those floating point numbers are represented internally in 64 bit binary. Special consideration will be given to integers, so that, after reading this post, you will understand what happens in the following interaction:

    > 9007199254740992 + 1
    9007199254740992

    > 9007199254740992 + 2
    9007199254740994

Node.js: expanding shortened URLs

This blog post explains how one can use Node.js to expand a URL that has been shortened by a service such as t.co (built into Twitter) and bit.ly. We’ll look at a simple implementation and at an advanced implementation that uses promises.

Offer files for download in HTML5: a[download]

The new attribute download for <a> tags allows one to offer a file for download – instead of displaying it in the browser.

Firefox: “click to play” for plugin content

Quoting “Opting-in to plugins in Firefox” by Jared Wein:

ECMAScript.next: arrow functions and method definitions

In JavaScript, one aspect of creating a function inside a method is difficult to get right: handling the special variable this. ECMAScript.next will make things easy by introducing two constructs: arrow functions and method definitions. This blog posts explains what they are and how they help.

Sturgeon’s Law

Sturgeon’s Law confirms my own suspicions:

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Discrimination – four recent tech community controversies

Recently, four controversies have swept the tech online scene: They were about perceived discriminations against women, people who prefer not to drink, and homosexuals. This blog posts describes the controversies and mentions the most interesting commentaries on them. It concludes with thoughts on how we might learn from them.

Handing variables to eval

Problem: You have an object that assigns values to names and want to use those names in an expression that is to be evaluated by eval. The classic solution is to use the with statement. But that statement is deprecated [1], starting with ECMAScript 5 strict mode [2]. This blog post describes an alternative implementation technique.

Canada eliminates one-cent coins

Canada will eliminate its penny. The reason is cost: Each penny costs 1.6 cents to make. Quoting “Canada's penny withdrawal: All you need to know” on CBC News:

News via 2ality: March 2012

This monthly columns collects news on 2ality-related topics and links to posts where those topics were previously covered. It also lists blog posts that have been updated (so that you don’t have to follow on Twitter or Google+ to find out about them).