Finds of the week.

For the third time these are the top things that caught my interest on the internet this week:

gdocs2md - A script to convert a Google Drive Document to the markdown format: https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md

This is quite useful if you have to collaborate on a document with non-techies but then you want to store your documents in plaintext with the wonderful markdown formatting.

10 very good reasons to stop using JavaScript: http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2013/07/10-very-good-reasons-to-stop-using-javascript/

Basically… I agree with this almost completely. A lot of sites today go overboard with JavaScript which makes them awful if you, like me, use NotScripts.

Anatomy of a pseudorandom number generator - visualising Cryptocat's buggy PRNG: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/07/09/anatomy-of-a-pseudorandom-number-generator-visualising-cryptocats-buggy-prng/

Really interesting piece on how things were erroneously implemented in CryptoCat. Also a bit of a scary reminder of how you can overlook errors that seem really obvious in hindsight.

As an additional note this could have been found really quickly using tools that test random number generators, which is a reminder to always use all the tools that you can to ensure the quality of your code.

Kore is a fast webserver that facilitates creating dynamic websites in the C programming language: https://kore.io/

This is from the "Oh, that's cool, but probably pretty useless"-file. In theory compiled C should be about as fast as a webpage can get, but this would be pretty much coming full circle as (so far as I remember) Perl was invented to not have to write web CGI scripts in C as that was quite slow and potentially very insecure as things like doing good, secure string parsing in C is something only a select few can do reliably.

Guacamole - HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop: http://guac-dev.org/

This is the most incredible example of what can be done with web technology today. It is pretty amazing in comparison to having to use Java for Logmein.

Probably the most futuristic thing I've seen so far on the web.

There were actually a lot of interesting things this week, so adding on some more ones without comments:

Why mobile web apps are slow: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/

Shit for making websites: http://shitformakingwebsites.com/

Library order in static linking: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/07/09/library-order-in-static-linking/

Raspberry Pi Microwave: http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-microwave/

Paper ROM: http://hackaday.com/2013/07/11/paper-rom/

Nonblocking Algorithms and Scalable Multicore Programming: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2492433

As usual these things are taken from my archive of Twitter posts from this week, so if you want to see these things live as I post them follow me over there.