A Collection of Goods

In lieu of substantive posting, here are some miscellaneous links that I’ve found interesting or appalling.

• According to this local ABC affiliate¹, IT is the most stressful of careers. I’m somewhat suspicious of the methodologies, but I comment here simply because, well, duh. Technologists are often managed by people who have no experience with, appreciation for, or understanding of technology. Stressful? You bet.
• For linguists or Tolkien fans, there’s a pretty comprehensive collection of Tolkien’s invented languages².
• pyxy-gallery is a database-less(?) image gallery pased on PHP and AJAX. What I especially like is the drop-in Lightbox support, though I’d like to see it support v2 instead of v1. Might be worth checking out.
• Firefox v2.0 Alpha 2 (Bon Echo) has a short review over at MozillaLinks. Some of the UI improvements seem like excellent ideas, and some might take some getting used to. Specifically, I am thinking here of the decision to add a “Close” button to each tab (a la Opera), which makes good HI sense, but will be difficult to get used to. Also, it looks as though the close button only appears on the active tab.
• Digit Life benchmarks 6 dual-core processors with a huge test suite. There are five Pentiums and only one Athlon, but the Athlon (FX-60) mops the floor with the competition. Of course, the Pentiums are all using DDR2, which currently has some pretty severe performance penalties. It’ll be interesting to see how the playing field evens out with the upcoming new socket from AMD.

1. If you click the link, be warned that the site looks to have been designed by a severely retarded child[↩]
2. Again, though, with the site-by-a-retarded-child thing[↩]