That sounds like pretty much every sportsing description ever!

I thought the movie was an accurate view of the book, as can be seen here: http://lotrproject.com/blog/20...

How many nits could a nit picker pick, if a nit picker could pick nits?

There are lots of languages that run on the JVM. At my current work, we regularly use Scala and Groovy alongside our existing Java codebase.

Tim Bray wrote about this situation years ago: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace (and I think I heard the "sharecropping" term used from earlier, too). Essentially, when developers work on a platform owned by someone else, you are fully at their mercy.

I originally read that as "America is a set of subhumanity", which seemed a bit harsh.

When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page?

Thursday. I was off sick yesterday.

"Oh, I want this box to highlight red when this happens!" a user might say.

Custom Events are your friend, and a sound basis for designing any complicated user-interface or series of interactions: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/event/custom-event.html So your problem above boils down to:

YAHOO.util.Event.on(thisBox, thisHappened, updateBox)

• thisBox being a DOM reference to your table cell
• thisHappened being the custom event you've defined as "this happens"
• updateBox being the function or method that probably just adds a class name to the table cell, letting the CSS apply the necessary style changes

Another good writeup of custom events is: http://nefariousdesigns.co.uk/archive/2007/07/ajaxevent-using-yui-custom-events-with-ajax/

Having some sort of online presence is a great way to control (or at least influence) the image about you online. There's a heap of stuff on google about personal brand management. This one looked like it had a lot of relevant points regarding why you should consider this to be important: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/04/building_personal_brand.html

http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http://labs.toolness.com/parchment/infocom/hitchhik.z5

Then there's Digg; Digg's pages are such a load on the visitor's CPU that I have to click "script not responding, continue?" three times on a page with 800 or so comments with Firefox and a dual-core 2 GHz CPU just to get the page to completely render.

Sounds like Digg is attaching events to every show/hide link instead of using event delegation and using only one event listener. Browsers can't really handle hundreds of attached event listeners, it is a known performance issue.

Now using event delegation instead of attaching hundreds of events should definitely be in a set of web development best practices.