I was messing around with Javascript and created a simple Javascript cache, similar to the cache in ASP.NET (with stuff like expirations, priorities and callbacks).  Javascript has features such as “objects as associative arrays” and “functions as data” that made this a fun exercise.  And check it out: Ajaxian posted about it this morning! 

C# vs. Java.  Perl vs. PHP.  Ruby vs. the World.  If you’re a programmer, you’ve no doubt endured a few of these arguments.  Scott Hanselman has written what I think is the be-all-end-all post on programming languages and religious wars.  I love the way he ends it; very inspirational!

Like Scott, I made a New Years Resolution to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  While I may never have a practical use for it, when you consider that its a web framework built around the current “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, it has many lessons to offer all web developers.  As Mikey says: “It never hurts to know something“

The latest album from The National, Boxer, comes out today.  Fake Empire is already one of my favorite singles of the year.

Alligator, The National’s previous album, was a small but critically acclaimed release that snowballed into something big.  The National’s September 2005 show wasn’t even sold out until Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah were added as the openers.  CYHSY were just coming off a 9.0 rating from Pitchfork; the concert sold out the day after they were announced as openers.  This lead to an indie rock soccer showdown between the two bands (all in good fun).

Earlier this month, The National opened for the Arcade Fire, another band who’s rise can partially be credited to the Pitchfork Effect.  But the National have the last laugh.  Boxer received an 8.6 and Best New Music recommendation on Pitchfork, and they sold out 5 nights at Bowery Ballroom at the end of the month!  But you can still see them at a free South Street Seaport show on August 17th.

Today is a big day for new releases.  In addition to The National, I’m excited about new albums from Parts & Labor, Voxtrot and White Rabbits. 

Adult Swim released a FREE MP3 mix of songs from artists like TV On The Radio and Les Savy Fav.  They even built a flash player for your site; its running up there at the top of my site (Thanks to Xanga Themes!)

Insound recently released their own MP3 mix (it used to be free, now it comes with orders over $25), while Soul Sides releases volume 2 of their successful mix series on Tuesday.  Blogger Catbirdseat is methodical about releasing a monthly mix/podcast highlighting the best new stuff.

There are a ton of sites out there trying to build the best music recommendation systems, but mixes like these are still my favorite.  Music recommendation sites can be overwhelming, and they are only as good as your current tastes.  These mixes hit that right balance between stuff I like and new stuff I never would have discovered; the key is putting your faith in a blog/site you like.  I’m glad to see more and more sites trying stuff like this; its like taking the best of the music blogs and condensing it into manageable pieces.

(hmmm, the general theme of my life seems to be making manageable pieces out of the sea of information we are drowning in).

EDIT: Ok, I’ve never been a big fan of auto-play music on a site, and its been annoying me all day.  I just got rid of the flash player.  The songs are still worth the download though!

I don’t know about you, but I feel inundated with information these days: RSS, news sites, email, even Xanga sites!  I needed a way to queue up articles I didn’t have the time to read but wanted to revisit later.  So I wrote Readeroo, a Firefox plugin that does just that (the name comes from “Reader” and “Queue”).  Think of it as a Netflix queue for the web!  You can learn more and install it here:

• http://www.monsur.com/projects/readeroo/

If you try it out, I’d love to hear what you think!

So for those of you who saw Spiderman 3 over the weekend: supposing you can’t appeal to his emotion, how exactly do you beat Sandman?  I imagine an ending sort of like Terminator 2…

I’m just amazed at how far web applications have come over the last few years.  Javascript provides a solid programming foundation upon which CSS and the DOM can create rich user interfaces, and its all happening inside the web browser.

We’re coming close to the point where entire applications could live within the browser,  were it not for the need to save and retrieve user information.  This requires a server backend built with anything from Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET AJAX.  Each new web application needs to consider the backend, which can be a huge time and cost sink for a personal developer.

For anyone building robust web apps, this concern isn’t going to disappear.  But I’m excited about a few new products can drive down development time by exposing data to javascript:

• Yahoo Pipes – Yahoo Pipes was released a few weeks ago to tremendous buzz, and seems to be growing steadily ever since.  Pipes offers a graphical programming language for manipulating RSS feeds.  Consider our Xanga Themes Forum as an example.  Each individual forum publishes its own RSS feed.  Using Yahoo Pipes, I was able to retrieve all the feeds, merge them into a single feed, sort by date, and then publish it as a widget on the Xanga Themes Site.  Yahoo Pipes offers many powerful options for manipulating feeds, including sorting, content analysis, and translation.
• Google AJAX Feed API – The buzz around Google’s feed API isn’t so strong, but I’m really excited about this technology because is super easy to retrieve any RSS feed using Javascript.  The interface is simple: grab an rss feed as a javascript object and manipulate it.  But through that simplicity you could build an RSS reader completely in javascript.  Though Pipes is more powerful, the Feed API will get a lot of developers up and running faster, simply because it requires no configuration.
• Microsoft’s Astoria – Microsoft made a ton of announcements at the MIX conference this week.  One of these was Astoria, which presents data in a variety of formats for web clients.  Astoria uses simple HTTP GET, PUT, POST and DELETE requests to perform database operations over the web.  Imagine the power: using javascript you can not only retrieve data, but also create, update and delete it!  Unlike the solutions above, Astoria will require some setup from the developer, but it will be an order of magnitude less that what must be done now.  I’ll be curious to see what kind of security precautions Astoria has for requests across the internet.

Unlike Astoria, Pipes and the Feed API can only read data.  Although Yahoo and Google don’t offer a true database experience for Javascript, this doesn’t make them any less useful, since almost all web apps these days expose RSS feeds.

The mashup of the past depended on providers like Xanga to expose RSS feeds which the developer would be responsible for managing.  These technologies make development even easier by removing that last step, and I think they can encourage a new generation of mashups that aren’t tethered to the backend.

For the last few years I’ve seen this brass and drum group performing in the subway stations and in Union Square.  They wield a commanding presence: all drums and horns blaring out strong hip-hop beats.  Well yesterday I finally got up the nerve to buy their CD, and it does not disappoint!  They are a 7-piece band from Chicago called the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble; check out their website, or watch the video for War.  I look forward to running into them some more over the summer.