I'm all a-squee, #1: jQuery 1.5 has Promises and Futures!

Squee #1: The jQuery team has released jQuery 1.5. The list of proposed fixes for 1.5 was fairly minor: handling lists of attribute internally, the addition of require() for CommonJS compatibility, and so forth. The big fix was supposed to be the extensibility of jQuery into non-HTML realms like XML, XUL, and SVG.

So imagine my utter astonishment when I saw that 1.5 has Futures and Promises. Futures and Promises are a programming pattern for dealing with multi-core, multi-process, event-driven, asynchronous programming problems. You can now say things like "When operations A, B, and C are done, then do D," and more importantly, "If you get to D before A, B, and C are done, do E until A, B, C are done, then do D." This makes fetching data from multiple sources, showing the user something useful as the data comes in, currying the display as partial data is delivered to the application, all amazingly easy. I've been using the Futures.js library, which has a hinkey library, and upset that I can't use the Microsoft Ajax Control Library because of its license. For the jQuery people to just settle the issue by giving us a jQuery-ready Futures and Promises is a huge freakin' deal.

I'm all a-squee #2: Lillicious releases Girl's Ride, Chapter Three.

Squee #2: Girl's Ride Chapter Three has been released by Lillicious. (You'll have to go to the listing page and download the individual ZIP files by hand.)

This is absolutely the cutest, sweetest, most likeable girl-girl manga I've read in a long time. The characters are wonderful and innocent, they're not presented automatically as wank material, it's very much a look-see into a pair of characters who would obviously not invite your otaku eyes into their bedroom and you should feel privileged to be allowed this much. Unless you have issues with homosexuality, this series is (so far) safe for adolescents and lunchtime reading at the office.

The art, too, is especially lovely: the artist has clearly studied western styles, and is reviving a lot of old-school manga hand-drawn cross-hatching and organic toning that's fallen out of favor, or at least the patience of mangaka, in the age of Photoshop. Highly recommended.

Bring me the bones of a Sleestak!

One of the classic creationist canards is the old, "Until someone brings me a fossil of type Y, I have no reason to believe in the transition of X to Z. Where is the Y fossil?" The half-man, half-monkey, or as Congressman Jack King (R-GA) recently demanded, half man, half fish, and half-newt all rolled into one.

Well, if you go to the Biblical view, you'll see that, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent was a very odd thing. It talked, for one thing. For another, after the Fall God curses it to "crawl on your belly and eat the dust," implying that it had limbs of some kind. It probably looked like a Sleestak from Land of the Lost.

Therefore, I have a challenge for Representative Jack King: Until you bring me the fossilized skeleton of a Sleestak, I have no reason to believe the Book of Genesis to be true.

Au Revoir To All That...

I've made the announcement privately, but it's time to show it publicly: I've handed in my two-week notice at IndieFlix.

In the past year, I've helped push forward a lot of the state of the art in web APIs, mastered the intricacies of the Amazon AWS, Authorize.net and Constant Contact APIs, as well as more obscure ones from small PressOD CD distribution centers in the Americas and Europe. I've written graphics processing code (including the canonical "re-encode all of these films, stat!") using Python Boto, EC2 and S3, and developed time-restricted secure up/download from AWS for my employer. I've developed new and nifty ways of converting HTML documents to PDFs. I've written Ajax code for safe access to our movie streaming library, written two microsites with film access (indieflix.com/festivalsonline and mohai.indieflix.com), ported their blog to Wordpress, written two-way Twitter handlers, full-text search, and our Facebook application. My languages of choices have always been Python, Javascript, Bash, and C, but I still do C++, Ruby, and Perl as needed.

My new job will be at a company called Spiral, where I'll be writing mostly ECMA-quality javascript for a genetics engineering company. We'll be pushing the envelope of what's possible for a small team doing pure RIA/REST with a strong separation-of-concerns front-end. There's a little Django involved, I'll be writing their authentication and billing server as well, but for the most part it'll be a massive metric ton of front-end development. With the latest & greatest version of jQuery and its deferreds feature, it should be fun. (I'm also running the tests in Ruby, on a server written in Java.)

And the commute will be way easier.