The Golden Compass is coming!

Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass is going to be in theaters soon, and already the Catholic League and other mouthbreathing organs of Christianity are frothing. Pullman's novel, which has as one of its principles the notion that eating from the tree of knowledge was the start of something good (a sentiment with which I heartily agree), has them panty-waisted morons claiming that civilization will die a horrible death if too many impressionable young hearts go see it.

To which Mark Morford writes:

If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit.

Mark Morford, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways!

Another massively important geek tool

Along with Pound and Merb, I found another very important geek toy this weekend: Juggernaut. Juggernaut is going to absolutely change the way the web works, and it's going to do it frigteningly fast. Because Juggernaut destroys the one major complaint we developers have about the web: it's statelessness.

Juggernaut creates a little javascript applet (not java, javascript) on the browser with a permanent TCP/IP connection to the server. Through this connection, it is possible for the server to send events to the client without being polled.

If you have no idea how important that is, don't worry about it. To those of us for whom time-critical events are just that, critical, it makes all the difference. Now, instead of constantly harassing the server and being out-of-date within seconds of the poll, you get real-time data from the server when the server thinks it's significant. It pulls the web into the 20th century: no more busy-waiting, no more collate-without-effect.

Now if only I had something that had a use for it.