There are loads of job boards out there, but how many of them are actually built for web developers and designers? And How many of them are acutally popular? Here is a list of the top job boards for web developers and designers.

Where encryption starts getting really interesting, in my opinion, is block ciphers. Block ciphers are a general category of ciphers that are sort of a combination of substitution and transposition ciphers, and sort of something entirely different. They're really fascinating things, but they're pretty complicated.

Microsoft is boosting integration of functional programming with its Visual Studio 2008 software development platform. Improved integration is featured in a September Community Technology Preview of the F# language for the .Net platform. F# has been positioned as a language based on concepts of functional programming, in which computation is treated as the evaluation of mathematical functions. It also supports object-oriented programming.

We, as people, all make mistakes. We, as game developers, make mistakes as well. Some of these mistakes are trivial and don’t bring upon us too much consequences. However, there are a few that we need to avoid with as much effort as possible, lest they turn our games into disasters.

I wouldn't normally think a library is LtU material, but since this one lives at the intersection of embedded DSLs, process calculi, and a spotlight language, I think it fits: Communicating Scala Objects, Bernard Sufrin, Communicating Process Architectures 2008.

Networks can model all sorts of situations including physical networks as well as non-physical situations. Learn how to use network algorithms to test connectivity, build inexpensive connections, assign work, and split networks as inexpensively as possible.

A few months ago I was interviewed for a master thesis on Polyglot Programming by Hans-Christian Fjeldberg. This is now finished and available online.

About ten years after the Java Grande effort, this paper aims at providing a snapshot of the current status of Java for High Performance Computing. Multi-core chips are becoming mainstream, offering many ways for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to take advantage of such systems for critical tasks such as Just-In-Time compilation or Garbage Collection. We first perform some micro benchmarks for various JVMs, showing the overall good performance for basic arithmetic operations. Then we study a Java implementation of the Nas Parallel Benchmarks, using the ProActive middleware for distribution. Comparing this implementation with a Fortran/MPI one, we show that they have similar performance on computation intensive benchmarks, but still have scalability issues when performing intensive communications. Using experiments on clusters and multi-core machines, we show that the performance varies greatly, depending on the Java Virtual Machine used (version and vendor) and the kind of computation performed.

Despite the intimidating material, there are real architectural and design issues that these discussions present that should be in the mind of anyone dealing with large datacenters that scale globally or even nationally. The approach of GIGA+ file storage, maidsafe’s new computer architecture, and NetWorkSpaces for the R language was uniform: off-loading responsibility for management of data (meta or otherwise) to all vertices in the deployment graph instead of a central repository.