Lifestreams [1] were created in 1996 to correct some of the shortcomings of document management when used for personal information management. Even today, document management is still the dominant way of information management, both conceptually and as a user interface metaphor. Some of the shortcomings are:

With the web’s popularity, it is common for web browsers to have many open tabs at the same time. Processor load can significantly increase in such a case. Google Chrome has implemented several measures to help with that:

Updates:

• [2013-08-08] New blog post: “The flag /g of JavaScript’s regular expressions”
• [2013-08-07] Explained how test() and match() work when the flag g is set.

This post gives an overview of the JavaScript API for regular expressions. It does not, however, go into details about regular expression syntax, so you should already be familiar with it.

HTML5 includes tags for figures and figure captions. This post explains how to use them in modern browsers.

Update 2012-10-22: Note that this feature is still actively being worked on and in flux.

Judging by a tweet by David Herman, he is excited about something (he is shouting!) and so should we be:

MODULES FOR ECMASCRIPT, Y'ALL. MODULES FOR ECMASCRIPT. THAT IS ALL. [@littlecalculist]

This means: ECMAScript Harmony (or ECMAScript.next [1]), as it is currently being planned, will have modules. This post gives you a first look, summarizing the material at [2].

This post presents a brief history of how Brendan Eich created JavaScript and what influenced its design decisions.

If you are new to the Mac, everything can feel a bit off. This post tries to help. And might even teach you something new if you are already familiar with the Mac. I am also mentioning some advanced things which should be interesting for programmers and people coming from Linux.

The JavaScript server environment node.js has an intriguing approach to coding: Do other things while waiting for results from, say, a database. But don’t use threads to juggle those things, use continuations. This is similar to what client-side JavaScript code (such as Ajax calls) already looks like. Not having to create threads saves a lot of overhead when loads are high. Multi-core and multi-processor systems can still be supported, by scheduling one “instance” of node.js per core/processor.

The only problem with node.js code: You get one nested function expression for each outside request you make.

If a storage device is connected to a Mac via USB or Firewire, you can eject it so that it disappears from your Mac. This post explains how to remount it, without unplugging it and then plugging it back in. This is mainly of interest if you use an external (non-SSD) hard drive with Time Machine: After a backup, if you don’t want it to make any noise, you can eject it and it spins down. Then the problem is how to remount it for the next backup.

Update 2012-08-14: Rewrote most of the post, added Sect. 4 explaining typeof and instanceof.

This blog post explains that JavaScript has two main kinds of values: primitive values and objects. There are several things one needs to be aware of when working with them.