Chris Granger recently published an article on a side project he had been working on; an IDE called Light Table. Some of the nice features he demonstrates in the video below are:

• As a program gets written you see it compile live on the right, providing a kind of real-time debugging. You could see what a webpage will look like as you code it.
• Moveable code blocks; instead of having multiple tabs/windows open for each file you are working with, you can have just the functions your working with on the screen.
• When you click on a function or class name you see it's docs and params on the right.
• Documentation finder with unique features like lookup by namespace.

The article created quite a stir on places like Hacker News. Because of which Chris published a follow-up article (HN), where he noted:

• It will be open source.
• Light Table is built on top of the CodeMirror editor so those interested in contributing should help out CodeMirror.
• It will support support plugins.
• Developers like myself who use VIM would be able to use VIM's keybindings (Emacs too, etc).

Since so many people expressed interest in the project, he has decided to dedicate more of his time to getting Light Table off the ground and there is now a kickstarter for Light Table.

One of my only issues with ever popular LESS.app is that it's not available on Windows or Linux; I often switch between linux and mac environments so I was glad to see SimpLESS does just that, a less compiler for all 3 big operating systems.

SimpLESS will watch files for when you save them and compile your LESS files on the fly to css. It supports @import parsing, minificaiton, and will display syntax errors if you have an error in your syntax.

jQuery UI Bootstrap offers a clean implementation of the Twitter Bootstrap design as a jQuery UI theme that can be applied to widgets . It also includes a 'cleaned up' version of Bootstrap which can be used alongside this particular theme without needing to worry about styles colliding.

Kevin Rose interviews Ryan Carson, founder of the recently opened Treehouse. You may have heard of Carson's web design company Carsonified from some of their previous projects including starting the Future of Web Apps conference and the Think Vitamin blog and podcast. Carson talks about his personal history and starting his company. He goes over the concept behind Treehouse which turns learning programming into a game where you level up and receive badges for completing. Carson also talks about an interesting concept for career planning for your employees.

Neo4j is an open source graph database, storing data in the nodes and relationships of a graph.

An intuitive graph-oriented model for data representation. A disk-based, native storage manager completely optimized for storing graph structures for maximum performance and scalability. Neo4j can handle graphs of several billion nodes/relationships/properties on a single machine and can be sharded to scale out across multiple machines. A powerful traversal framework for high-speed traversals in the node space. Can be deployed as a full server or a very slim database with a small footprint (~750k jar). A simple and convenient object-oriented API.

Unlike twitter's FlockDB, neo4j can handle multiple levels of hierarchy. However where FlockDB is better is it's low latency, high throughput and inherent distributed nature.

A simple, no-frills, robust jQuery plugin for creating beautiful slideshows for your featured content.

Basic jQuery Slider has been developed to be as simple and lightweight as possible. Only the essential functionality has been included combined with clean semantic mark-up. This means instead of removing features and bending a slider plugin to suit your needs, you can use this slider and as a base and extend it to be as feature rich, or as simple, as you need.

Slides can contain any valid HTML markup. Slide and fade animations. Supported in all major browsers. Easy to theme. Supports keyboard navigation. Super lightweight, at 4.6kb minified.

Two Decades of Excellence: Vim Turns 20! http://t.co/F4bxHDyu #programming ~ 20 years, and still widely used, and with an active community

"Notificon is a javascript class for providing client-side favicon notifications. Instead of requiring a number of favicons be created and served up to the client, you can specify a label and a favicon (default being the current favicon) and it will generate a favicon notification."

The boilerplate includes the following libraries: ASIHTTPRequest, JSONKit, SVProgressHUD and few others.

It also includes helper classes for: - HTTP requests and an image cache (both in-memory and disk-based). - UITableViews and UITableViewCells: fast scrolling, async images, pull-down-to-refresh, swipeable cells. Maps and locations: directions between two points, autocomplete a location, etc.

Note: Some of the libraries here may become obsolete once iOS 5 is released, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2996785

Makes it easy to visualise and construct custom HTTP requests to test with any RESTful web service. Syntax highlighting, custom headers and construct POST or Put body via raw input.

Looking for something to give a simple lightbox effect (maybe just a login prompt), but don't really want to include something like jQueryUI for just it's dialog effect? This little function is less than 1 KB.

Show a stream of your online activity with jQuery. Great if you want to toss your lifestream into a sidebar on your website. Very simple stream with a icon of the service you posted to and a link to the post. Over 25 social networks supported so far and growing.

Pretty epic #programming question, and pretty epic answer http://t.co/LaVWUld (via @AlienWebguy)

"This is a quick video outlining how you can create Sparks in CodeIgniter using Git. I take my Template library as an example and upgrade it from v1.7.0 to v1.8.0, finishing in a bit of a ramble about how Sparks can help fix some of the problems in the CodeIgniter community. Sparks are pretty damn awesome, check the video out and have a play with them when you're done."

Sorting algorithms through folk dance http://bit.ly/eADWOc (via @thecaligarmo) #geeky #programming

"Velruse is a set of authentication routines that provide a unified way to have a website user authenticate to a variety of different identity providers and/or a variety of different authentication schemes.

It is similar in some ways to RPXnow with the exception of being open-source, locally installable, and easily pluggable for custom identity providers and authentication schemes.

You can run Velruse as a stand-alone service for use with your websites regardless of the language they're written in. While Velruse itself is written in Python, since it can interact with your website purely via HTTP POST's."

"Phonegap is a HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores."

A Christmas Tree with a Heap of Presents http://xkcd.com/835 ~ Love it, +1 to everyone who gets this xkcd :) #programming

The guys over at FuelCMS have documented a method of integrating CodeIgniter and Wordpress into the same website. By doing so you can call the $CI super object from within your Wordpress theme files.

The initial problem we had with using Wordpress was wanting to incorporate CodeIgniter functionality into our Wordpress theme files. For example, we often have a header and footer that we include in many of our CodeIgniter view files. That same header and footer also needed to be included in the Wordpress theme. Our answer was to create a Wordpress include file that executes the CodeIgniter bootstrap within Wordpress.

#Dalhousie university CS Dean on "What language should we teach as a first #programming language?" http://bit.ly/cPSaaB