EntropySwitch

Yep, it’s another Flash experiments site. Entropy take a bit more on the funside of ActionScripting and Algorithms and believe me, the results are great. Some of the experiments are visualy appealing while others require a bit of knowledge to understand their beauty. Still, all of them are fun to interact with and are worth the time spend on the site.

•  EntropySwitch Flash Experiments

Coding Guide

Every software developer tries to write his code the nicest way he can. All the books and great minds of programming tell you so. But what if you don’t want to have clean and maintainable code? What if you just want to make the life of the guy who debugs or codes updates for your project a living hell? Well, don’t worry, cause here you can find the ultimate guide to writing unmaintainable code and believe me, naming your variables Fred and Barney is just scraching the surface.

• Guide to writting unmaintainable code 

Levitated Experimental Flash

Ever wondered at the possibilities of ActionScript? Here’s a chance to marvel again. Levitated features some crazy flash experiments. Some of them are: legged creatures, mycelium model, fractals and others. The experiments can be sorted by complexity or category and are accompanied by comments and explanations.

• Levitated Flash Experiments

unCONTROL

Like Math? How about algorithms? Even if you don’t you shoud check this site out. The algorithmic art, featured on the site, is created by following a set of visual and logical instructions. The results are not only amazing but also interactive, meaning that you get to modify certain parameters of the generating algorithms by using your mouse leading to some awesome effects. The posibilities are virtualy infinite as each interaction will generate a unique visual response. A must see.

• unCONTROL experiments 

Windows-like DB Administration tool

Ever since the birth of AJAX, web development and web applications reached a turning point. Various frameworks and APIs allow the creation of desktop-like applications for the Web. One of these is TurboDbAdmin. Althou it is still in a early phase of development, the database administration tool looks just like a Windows application and behave the same. It has it all: treeview representation of database and tables, data view, schema view, exporting tools and query window. It even has theme support and 2 themes. Web developers, you might want to check this one out.

• TurboDBAdmin Demo
• TurboAJAX Website

FJAX

Fjax is the lightweight, cross-browser, rapid-development methodology for Ajax-style web 2.0 development that puts a Flash engine under the hood (not in the presentation layer – read on) to handle realtime XML/HTML content updating.

Fjax enables web 2.0 development, with true, asynchronous (x)HTML content updating without page refreshes. The trick is, it does it with less than 65 lines of code and works in most browsers. It can process multiple streams of data simultaneously, and has an incredibly small footprint (4K!).

Fjax is a simple technique that hacks through all of the complicated code often associated with this type of development by encapsulating the XML handling into a tiny Flash engine that stays behind the scenes and just shuttles data between the server and the browser window. Working in Fjax is simple, and developers can customize and extend the technique with little effort by writing their own Flash engine to suit their needs.

• FJAX homepage

PHP5 Benchmark

Byster.net blog, "Web Related Talks", features a PHP5 benchmark. The tests were run on PHP 5.0.5 and show quite interesting results. The most segnificant results are the one from the regular expression test, where preg_match() proved to be 4.7 times faster then eregi(). Also, file_get_contents() function, which is not so commonly used, in favor of file(), seems to be 2.26 times faster then file().
Click here to view all the detailed test results.
Other tests (for Apache & mySQL), as well as a comparision with PHP 4 are also available on the blog.

When UML Modelling goes wrong.

Interesting article regarding the problems of UML Modelling by Boeing Company Engineer Alex E. Bell.

A potentially deadly illness, clinically referred to as UML (Unified Modeling Language) fever, is plaguing many software-engineering efforts today. This fever has many different strains that vary in levels of lethality and contagion. A number of these strains are symptomatically related, however. Rigorous laboratory analysis has revealed that each is unique in origin and makeup.

Click here to read the full article.