Reading:
Books in the age of the iPad is a very well thought out (and very well designed) article on how books and print media might evolve to be useful in a generation when lightweight, connected digital displays will become ubiquitous. It’s an old topic, but the article is definitely worth reading.
Media:
Reddit.com interviews Peter Norvig who as some of you might know, is something of a hero. He’s a prominent AI researcher, Lisp hacker and the author of a must-read essay titled Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years.
Software:
nginx is a relatively new, but rising member of the server world. It’s a lightweight, high performance server that currently holds about 7% of the market and is being used by sites like WordPress.com and Hulu. It’s also what I plan to put on my server once I get around to putting Arch Linux on it.
I’ve written a bunch about nginx and it’s a bit quirky, but it’s a terribly nifty thing. There are some things that it makes more complicated than Apache, but on the whole, it’s a great thing. Having said that, I think we should be clear: the main benefit to nginx is that it has a small and predictable RAM footprint. Apache uses a lot of RAM by comparison, and can be a bit beastly. It’s good though, and in most cases the ease of use of Apache is preferable to the angst over nginx.
Having said that there are a number of async/event-based web servers: Cherokee and Hoytech’s Antiweb are both *about* as efficient as nginx (and designed in the same way) but offer additional niceties.