I’ve been spending a lot of time recently tinkering with different constructs and methodologies in Javascript, and one of the most fascinating things I’ve come across is Spencer Tipping‘s use of continuation-passing style.

It’s ok if you aren’t familiar with CPS, but I think anyone hoping to make the cognitive leap to functional programming should study it. As a bare miniumum, you need to know that a continuation is:

[a reification of] an instance of a computational process at a given point in the process’s execution

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Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation at the new Boulder Hadoopers Group about testing Hadoop jobs with MRUnit. You will have to know what Hadoop is and how to read Groovy code to fully understand it. I am including the important notes on the slides as well.
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I generally try to avoid using images or Javascript when I can accomplish good presentation with CSS. In this case, I wanted to apply CSS shapes to make a clever speech bubble.

The problem with obtuse triangles and CSS

Obtuse triangles are slightly more complicated, since you can only create acute and right triangles with the CSS shapes method linked above. Therefore I created two triangles: a positive (black) right triangle, and then a negative (white) triangle to emulate an obtuse triangle.
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