For live practice problems check out http://codingbat.com/ There's book-learning of programming, but then you also really need practice, and that's what codingbat is about. Disclaimer: my site, but hey, it's free.

Great coding resources on the web...

http://codingbat.com/ -- free little online coding puzzles, just click and go (python and java)

http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ -- a complete basic python class, complete with pretty neat coding problems ready to go

http://nifty.stanford.edu/ -- tons of fun, medium sized coding projects

Disclaimer -- I had a part in creating all of these.

As I a little project I've built out the site http://javabat.com/ ... it's about having lots of little online problems for code practice. arc Big architectural ideas are important, but javabat just helps you build the basic but critical loop/logic/array/string skills. There's also a big section on recursion.

Hey OpenOffiice.org -- good job! What's weird is .. why is there so much bile and complaining about this complex piece of software that largely solves a whole class of important problems and is free. Point out deficiencies sure, but the comments here dwell a lot more on these oddball more-than-256-columns cases for a tool which works fine for a million common little cases. Here's my theory -- the teenager wants to be bitchy to their parents to appear independent. But the parents provide the food and roof over the head .. so how to live there and still feel independent? Be even more bitchy! Open office is just the same -- the linux kernel and many other initiatives to promote an open and competitive software environment would be far behind where they are without the unglamorous work of OO.o helping solve common document problems in an open way. OpenOffice.org has flaws, but it is extremely valuable.

Oops -- wishful typo, as the linked article above says, the penalty is about 60%, not 30%. That was as of theora1.1a, and now 1.1.1 is out, so I should re-test with that.

I did my best attempt at an unbiased comparison which shows Theora to have about a 30% disadvantage, although it uses a slightly older version of Theora: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~nick/theora-soccer/

Check out http://javabat.com/ for coding practice (the *teaching* of the material is still a problem, but JavaBat is great for practicing)

Check out the free online coding practice code at http://javabat.com/ such as this cute problem: http://www.javabat.com/prob/p183562 (shameless self promotion)

Wow, Slashdot has a bit of a focus problem when DRM comes up .. EPub -- you know, the standard discussed in the article -- has DRM! Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB The amount that DRM sucks is dwarfed by the tremendous, earth-killing suck that is proprietary/closed formats. That's what the article says and that's why you should should avoid all things Kindle.

Hmm, I tried the above suggestion, but actually got worse results. Theoraenc produces much larger files (essentially not hitting the bitrate), so you have to keep that in mind. I suspect I have to do something additional to get theoraenc to use the most recent libtheora on my machine. Anyway, it seems unlikely that theoraenc is going to get much better results than ffmpeg2theora if they are calling the same underlying library. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine some flag or other that would optimize the encoding better. My preference is to use ffmpeg2theora for the web examples, since it is the most commonly referenced tool on the web for normal people to do Theora encoding. If there is some way of getting higher quality encodings ... well it seems like ffmpeg2theora is going to support it.

Hey Monty -- when Thusnelda has made its next step up -- Adaptive Quant and what have you -- I'd be happy to do a followup article + I'm interested to get tips to make sure I'm using the right flags. My instinct is that high output quality and minimizing bandwidth are the most important things, and encoding CPU use is less so, but I should at least be clear that the low-cpu niche is one some care about.