Zimbabwe inflation: -1.1 percent

May 29 around 1 pm mountain time

While Hanke has stopped keeping track, Reuters Africa reports:

Zimbabwe’s consumer inflation stood at -1.1 percent month-on-month in April compared to -3.0 in March, the Central Statistical Office [in Harare] said on Friday. The CSO did not release a yearly figure.

Zimbabwe has allowed the use of multiple foreign currencies to stem hyperinflation that destroyed the value of the Zimbabwe dollar.

Expedia drops booking fees permanently

May 28 around 3 pm mountain time

The Wall Street Journal:

Expedia.com said Wednesday it will stop charging fees when customers book airline tickets over the Internet, upping the ante in the competition among online travel agencies.

The company, a unit of Expedia Inc., stopped charging booking fees in March under a promotion that was scheduled to end May 31. The latest move makes the no-fee policy permanent.

Rival online agencies Orbitz.com, a unit of Orbitz Worldwide Inc., and Sabre Holdings Corp.’s Travelocity.com also had eliminated booking fees on a promotional basis. The companies declined to comment on possible next steps. “Orbitz intends to remain a competitive place to book online,” a spokesman said. A Travelocity spokesman said: “We’re continuing to waive booking fees through this month.”

Is it worth it?

May 26 around 12 pm mountain time

The NY Times DealBook:

Facebook, the fast-growing social network, has found a deep-pocketed friend in Russia.

Digital Sky Technologies, an Internet investment company based in Moscow, said Tuesday it has invested $200 million in Facebook in exchange for a 1.96 percent stake in the company, and would eventually offer to buy at least $100 million in Facebook’s common stock. Facebook said the deal values the entire company — which Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, founded in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 — at $10 billion.

Ten billion dollars. Jiminy.

jQuery vs. MooTools

May 20 around 10 pm mountain time

Aaron Newton comparing two very popular JavaScript frameworks:

jQuery focuses on expressiveness, quick and easy coding, and the DOM while MooTools focuses on extension, inheritance, legibility, reuse, and maintainability. If you put those two things on opposite sides of a scale, the jQuery side translates into something with which it’s easy to get started and see quick results but (in my experience) can turn into code that’s harder to reuse and maintain (but really that’s up to you; it’s not jQuery’s problem, per se), while the MooTools side takes longer to learn and requires you to write more code upfront before you see results, but afterwards is more reusable and more maintainable.

For me, I decided on jQuery a while back and we’ve opted to do the same at Wall St. We’ll see if jQuery stands up to the maintainability test over time, but for now, I contend, the library is giving way to faster and better development.

“Snatch Wars”

May 19 around 8 pm mountain time

Perhaps the best video on YouTube, “Snatch Wars”, or Snatch combined with Star Wars, is an instant classic!

Meet Brick Vader, London’s Lord of the Sith. The world of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and Star Wars collide on the Eastend of the Death Star. Goody gumdrops!

Work disclaimer: if you don’t know who Bricktop is, don’t watch this at work with your volume on high.