Last month Interesting Stuff (March 2011)

Last month was a rather convulse one, the tragedy in Japan with the Tsunami and the ensuing Nuclear problems and the civil war in Libya have kept people busy jumping from one news source to another. On my side I was rather busy with several things, some of which I'll share here:

• I've been striving to make my JavaScript code easier to read and maintain, and a bit more elegant, these are to key references:
  JavaScript Guidelines and Code Conventions from the almighty Crockford
  
  this one from Google was new to me, and makes a rather interesting reading.
  


• At this moment, from all the goodies that html5 brings to us, the one I'm more interested in is the Canvas element (I'm mainly interested in playing with images: breaking them in pieces, applying effects), so I've started to play around with it a bit, and these are two rather good references for a beginner:
  
  Dive into html5
  
  Opera Dev
  


• Years ago I used to follow with great interest all the advances in the development of the JavaScript language (mainly all the Python inspired new features that Mozilla kept adding with each new version of their JavaScript engine). However, in the last years, with the development of so powerful libraries-frameworks and the advent of html5 most people attention seemed to move towards the libraries thing and forget a bit how the language itself could evolve. On my side, my fear to see JavaScript turned into a conventional (class based) language (ECMAScript 4) made me lose interest on the future of the language. So, to my surprise, I've found out that the just released Firefox 4 and IE 9 both already support JavaScript 1.8.5 (aka ECMAScript 5, that has nothing to do with the plans in ECMAScript 4, that have been abandoned :-).
  You can read about future versions here, and get an overview of the new features available in the MDN. One of the goodies that sure will be fun to play with is the Proxy API
  



• In the C# world, I found an interesting question about introspecting Dynamic Objects



• Out of the Programming world, I watched a pretty interesting interview with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek (the setting is excellent) and watched a rather good action film (Running Scared/La prueba del crimen)



• This is a good reference to try to understand a bit of what's going on in Japan's infamous nuclear reactors