Greetings Developers,
On the Road to PDX
 Over here at O'Reilly HQ, we're getting ready for next week's OSCON event. Also preparing, editor Andy Oram lists his top five tips for staying healthy while at a conference.
What is your best tip for not getting sick after spending four or more days with several thousand of your closest friends? We'd love to know and are glad to gift a free O'Reilly ebook to those who take the time to respond. Write code-ne...@oreilly.com and help us all stay healthy.
The Code team on behalf of
Edd Dumbill and Sarah Novotny
Chairs, OSCON
PS: Not going to OSCON? Watch most of it live from Portland.
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Open Dialog
What The Open Source Community Is Talking About
Speaking Objectively
 C++ has suffered a blow, knocked off its long-standing No. 4 position on the top programming language charts. What's moving up the charts with a bullet? iOS-friendly Objective-C.
Good News, Bad News
The Good: Google is releasing a new collaborative IDE tool called Collide as open source. The Bad: That probably means that any hope of a Google-hosted collaborative development tool is dead.
A Sorted Tale
If you're old-school enough, you can remember the endless days of debating the best sorting algorithms to use. Now, a snazzy web page lets you see visually how they stack up to each other. As you might expect, the more efficient they are, the less easily you can understand them visually.
Decline and Fall
 A new Vanity Fair article by Kurt Eichenwald tries to explain why Microsoft has tumbled from its formerly lofty heights. Much of the matter seems to lie with Microsoft's corporate culture, which, according to Eichenwald, began to value internal visibility over productivity or innovation.
Pop! The Weekly Quiz
He Who Steals My Microcomputer, Steals TRS-80
DIY, Circa 1980
 Dig out your soldering iron. When the original TRS-80 came out, many hardware hackers soldered an additional chip into the motherboard to get something extra. What did they get?
Think you've got it? Write code-ne...@oreilly.com with your answer. The first correct respondent will get to choose a free O'Reilly ebook of his or her choice.
We are delighted to report that Code readers have terrible, terrible taste in movies, because a bunch of you recognized 'Hackers' as the movie with the reference to Aho and Ullman's 'Dragon Book.' Mike Hitchcock was the first to show his poor cinematic choices.
tail -f /dev/newsletter
All Good Things Must End
You've Always Wondered
 XKCD is, of course, the official comic strip of mega-geekitude. When cartoonist Randall Murnroe isn't being absurd, he often brings to light interesting facts or looks at science and mathematics from interesting angles.
Now he's branching out from the usual comic strip format with a new subsite, what-if.xkcd.com. This new site takes an in-depth look at an interesting (if occasionally frivolous) hypothetical question.
For example, what would happen if a pitcher was somehow able to deal a fastball traveling at 90% of c? The TL;DR of the matter is, you'd better watch it on TV.
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