November at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2009 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

"As part of our ongoing series of quarantine-themed interviews, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I spoke to Van Luik about the technical nature of nuclear waste storage and what it means, on the level of geological engineering, to quarantine a hazardous material for more than one million years. "

He was the production designer on Pixar's WALL-E.

Amazing photographs of abandoned mental institutions

How Robert Scoble uses Twitter lists. (Hint: he like. He like a lot.)

Simon Willison on Node.js, a toolkit for creating event driven JavaScript servers.

Notes from last week's JavaScript conference

More astonishing photos fro inside the Large Hadron Collider

Interesting Beatles mashup with a crazy "back story"

I don't usually bother with "beard competition" videos, because I've *surely* seen them all, right? Wrong.

Hour-long video of Cabel Sasser of Panic presenting on the origins of Coda, a web development suite for Mac, and on design and developing applications in general. It's very, very funny.

Also, here's the Keynote file that goes with it: http://www.cabel.name/2008/04/coda-confidential.html

Official release of FREE dynaTrace AJAX Edition

JavaScript functions have a locally-scoped variable "arguments" which acts rather like an Array without actually being one — you can use the Array methods length on the arguments array, it is indexable and iterable, but it's not a true Array. Instead, it's an object with Array-like properties.

This means, amongst other things, that you can't use the standard Array method "join" to join each item of the array into a string, with an optionally declared separator.

Luckily, as detailed at the link above, you can use the "call" method to apply an empty array's "splice" method to the argument's array.:

var args = [].splice.call( arguments,0 );
var myString = args.join( );

Splice, in this instance, returns an array starting at the zero index, i.e. the whole of the array. Bingo, you now have all your arguments items in a true Array!

"With reviews of every disco record worth knowing about, weekly reports from New York’s club scene, classic magazine articles and 800 contemporary club charts, this is the definitive chronicle of disco."

"By the time the Yankees rushed the field to celebrate their 27th World Series victory, Robert Caplin had photographed the action — 12,000 times. The result is a romantic and captivating time-lapse presentation."

"Fed up of BORING TEA in the morning? Would you rather have EXCITING PEAS?"

"dynaTrace provides some information that I've never seen before – in any tool on any browser."

"Work asked me to contribute a piece of art for our reception. I decided to hack an old replica painting from Spitalfields Market, London (an old flea market on Thursdays). I built a motor using one of those kits you can get from good electronic stores, painted acrylic on canvas and cut out a spinning beach ball of death glued to mounting board."

"Darren from LinkMachineGo, an old school blogger, guessed Belle de Jour's identity soon after her blog started. How?"

Good thinking around user login and registration