[SpikeTuesday] 7 years of Google, JavaScript Eclipse plugin, Open Source trials, flatulence that lights up rooms

Continuing in the tradition of reporting birthdays, the worlds best known search engine is 7 years old today.  According to the child development chart, Google's speech should now be "more social, less egocentric".  Pfffft.  From here on in though we should be expecting "perform multiple classification tasks, order objects in a logical sequence", which would be a great start since the Google Directory never really took off too well.

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/we-wanted-something-special-for-our.html

Joe Walker reports in his blog of the best ever JavaScript editor so far.  JSEclipse, as you can probably tell, is an Eclipse plugin that allows you to develop JavaScript in much the same way you do Java, complete context sensitive lookup and advanced editing facilities.  It has always amazed how little development support there has been for JavaScript and I am happy to see new tools especially with the advent of AJAX making everyone go ooh-and-ahh over what can be done in the humble browser.

• http://getahead.ltd.uk/blog/joe/2005/09/27/1127804875944.html

Jono Bacon writes an interesting editorial over at O'Reilly regarding the naivety of his early days of contributing to open source.  He talks about how he attempt to coral developers by posting a job description of suitable candidates that would be ideal to contribute to the project.  Completely misreading the situation and not understanding the culture he soon had a rude awakening to how the open source culture operates.  I applaud his honesty and openness as he talks about he has come to terms with how the

• http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/7904

Finally a great story from the BBC Science and Nature section that explains how cow dung Nepalese is really turning around the local community.  "It is calculated that gas generated from cattle dung in rural Nepal has lit around 140,000 kitchens, saving 400,000 tonnes of firewood, 800,000 litres of kerosene and preventing 600,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases from escaping into the atmosphere."  Now what is a little unclear is just how many cows it took to produce this, or was it just one very windy cow!  At any rate, next time you feel the need to let-one-go, just think of how much energy you've just wasted and how many light builds you could have lit.

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4271820.stm

tags: javascript  google  eclipse  open source  flatulence  

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