Why I prefer JQuery to prototype/script.aculo.us?

Because it's more pipe friendly, more powerful to traverse the DOM tree and last but not least more maintainable.

1. pipe friendly: Like unix pipe, you could select amazing complicated elements using chains of filters like this: $("a").addClass("test").show().html("foo");
   
2. powerful DOM traversal: Still use for(var i=0;i to loop through your list and do something to the parent elements? That's so quaint compared to this $("div#nav span").parents("p").attrs({'font-weight':'bold'}). Image what could be done by combining this with "chinas of filters"!!
   
3. maintainable:I was totally blowed away when I first saw jquery's selector syntax. Simple it is, but it allows we use the same CSS/XPath selector syntax in javascript. Combine this with "DOM traversing" parents, prev, sibling and "Filters" like lt(5), eq(0), gt(4), contains and you could do magic with only one line of code. Yet more readable. CodeEye also mentions a couple of very nicely constructed, highly readable selector here and a very nice, neat FAQ page built using jquery at here.
   

Yes, do everything with one line of code and make the code more readable. This is the magic of jquery.

Jeff Hawkings, the author of On Intelligence and founder of Palm,
founded this new company called "Numenta". To quote Slashdot [1]:
"Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain
capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other
tasks currently best undertaken by humans. "

Yesterday they released the first version of their free development
platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants
to download it. [3] Even better, Numenta offers a three week, one
hour webcast for FREE. [2]. Go and register it if you are interested.

I've been dreaming of applying his theory into use for a long time,
but just don't have the time/money to build something. Now the time
has come. :-)

Alex

1. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/06/220213
2. http://www.numenta.com/htm-jumpstart-subscribe.php
3. http://www.numenta.com/for-developers/software.php

How to ignore .svn directories in grep?

This has bothered me for a while. A google search shows two popular implementations to work around this: using grep's --exclude parameter or use find to filter out the hidden directories. I chose the --exclude parameter approach since it is pretty neat and easy to integrate into my own bash environment by defining an alias.

Here is the alias definition in my ~/.bash_profile

alias g="egrep --exclude=\*.svn\* -r -n "