Living: New Urbanism, a movement to make communities built on the human-scale, has warned that suburban sprawl is a health hazard. [Plastic]

The story of one man and a mountain. By Bill Ruthven, honorary secretary of the Mount Everest Foundation. [Guardian Unlimited]

The record for the fastest ascent falls for the second time in three days and a black climber reaches the summit. [BBC News]

"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer." [Quotes of the Day]

Some Radio UserLand hackers are becoming discouraged by the sheer weight of the program's UserTalk code and the bugs, quirks, and complexities it contains. Mark Paschal, who offers help frequently on the customer support discussion board, says that it is "as jury-rigged a Rube Goldberg device as ever." Jeremy Bowers believes it need a "serious housecleaning."

For those who haven't looked around Radio's object database yet, the program runs atop one of the most intricate, fascinating, and strange codebases you will ever find in a development platform. I'm digging into it deeply for Radio UserLand Kick Start, and I keep discovering ingenious things that can be used to bootstrap an elaborate new program, Web site, Web service, or software library; customize a feature of Radio; or reinvent the program completely (just as it was once an MP3 playlist manager that became a weblog publishing tool). As I told someone this weekend, the book could be 100 chapters long instead of 20 and I wouldn't run out of things to write about.

I'm not at a point where I can judge Radio's fitness for large-scale development, since my own needs are met by simple scripts, drivers, and callbacks. However, if most of their beefs are related to specific UserTalk verbs rather than the kernel, they can be avoided (for example, Dave Winer doesn't use xml.getAddressList()).

One thing I think there's a huge need for, in the spirit of the "We make shitty software ... with bugs!"slogan, is a bug database where Radio and Frontier developers can submit bugs and vote on the ones they'd most like to see fixed. [Workbench]

With lists for 100 Bests, of a LOT of things, you can be sure of finding your personal favorite to delve into and splurge. Interesting resource.

(ankurjain) [Lockergnome Bytes]