Interesting Things 29/1/10

Here's another crop of links that caught our eye recently. We're changing focus a little this time, pulling out some more technical posts.

In praise of Git's index

Aristotle Pagaltzis has a good writeup of the benefits of Git's index (via Ryan Tomayko). This is one of those things that isn't immediately obvious, but quickly becomes invaluable.

Alternatives to inheritance

Curtis "Ovid" Poe has written quite a lot about alternatives to inheritance for code reuse in Perl. His latest post examines the options for using Roles without Moose for his new project at the BBC.

Live SPARQL end-point for BBC Programmes

Yves Raimond announced an experimental SPARQL end-point for BBC programme data, including a description of how the service was created. It's a great addition to the variety of linked data provided by BBC Programmes. See also this case study on the use of semantic web technologies at the BBC.

New Browser Security Features

The Chromium Blog had a good post about new security features in Chromium, but also in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera. It's nice to see browser vendors centering around standards to solve these problems.