A really frightening amount of stuff is going on at 10stripe, and I wanted to share a little bit of information here.

Firstly, the Map of Semiconductor Fabs is in the shop for an update, with more fabs. That will be this Tuesday's update if all goes as intended.

In the spirit of the recent wireless technologies comparison, we have a few more visually-oriented updates coming up. More on that later.

But what really drove me to write this post was The Big Processor Guide, which as I've mentioned previously is going through a massive expansion. I also mentioned previously that there was a surprise in store related to that Guide; I'm afraid that will remain a surprise (but not for too much longer, I promise). I have a slightly smaller announcement to make first.

Currently, the Big Processor Guide exists as a series of flat HTML files (with a little PHP thrown in). But as it has grown, and continues to grow, it has become evident that this arrangement needs to change. To that end, we are currently working to transition the Guide to running from a database backend. This will help accomodate its burgeoning size better, and also help the Big Surprise work out better. But you might be more interested in what it will mean in the short term. One of the nice side-effects of a database back-end is that we will be able to provide new tools to help you drill down to just the things you are interested in, and more easily compare different chips. If you've ever used Newegg's Advanced Search and Power Search (try them here if you're not familiar), you'll have a good idea of what we intend to provide.

For the curious, the database system will be powered by the CakePHP framework. After looking at several possible frameworks (because developing everything from the ground up would have been far too much work), we settled on CakePHP because it is a surprisingly easy framework to get started with. In fact, what sealed the deal was an example of creating a simple bookmark manager with CakePHP scaffolding that took about a minute to follow. Nifty stuff.

I want to emphasize again that this is not the Big Surprise, just a small announcement to keep you up to speed on what we are working on.

Tuesday's update will be a Quick Guide on the PCI-Express 2.0 spec. PCIe 2.0 equipment is just starting to come on the market, and after reading a series of confused forum posts I realized that the implications of this new(-ish) spec are not generally understood. So we'll try to do something about that. The text was all written over the course of the last few hours, and it will get some extra polish over the long weekend.

We're working on another Directory as well, this one for the Opera web browser. If anyone happens to have any suggestions, we'd love to hear from you in the Comments.

The TLD locator is now "done enough", which is to say that it is ready for publication despite one outstanding bug. We will be working to fix or work around this bug over the next few days.

The Bookshelf ads are randomly displaying an ugly animated ad for Amazon.com (not a product, just Amazon generically). We have contacted Amazon about fixing this.

10stripe will be changing webhosts later this month. Expect to see several more announcements about this. There may be a mild service interruption due to DNS propagation, but we will work to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Intel has officially announced a slew of new products, so the Big Processor Guide will be updated sometime this week.

This is just a minor update. The TLD map (showing the countries that ccTLDs are affiliated with) has come together faster than expected. So rather than launching with partial functionality and then being patched up, it will be launching fully-functional. It will be launching on Tuesday (Jan 8) as originally planned.

There is one bug that will be fixed before release, and one more-ornery bug that will probably have to be fixed post-launch. Both are Javascript-related, which is no real surprise.

Also, I have to say that it's a neat little tool. Not that I'm especially unbiased.

Coming Attractions is a new 10blog feature to provide a look at content that we will be publishing soon. Expect to see it once a month or so.

Here are some of the things rising to the top of the stack:

1. An article explaining, in grisly detail, why dialup modems top out at 56 kbps. This will probably go live without images on Tuesday (New Year's Day), with illustrations to follow shortly thereafter. If things go better than planned, it may launch with all illustrations in place.

2. A map showing the life of a PIC microcontroller. This is considered complete, but of minor importance, so expect it to go live before long.

3. A map showing the countries that various country top-level domains (ccTLDs) belong to. This is only getting started now, but should be ready fairly soon. We will be launching a simple version as soon as possible, with a more powerful version (using a touch of Javascript magic) to follow.

This is only a sampling of the things currently percolating to the top. I wanted to share these specific items for two reasons. Firstly, they are all very near publishing, which of course is the point of these "coming attractions" posts (otherwise we would just publish a link to the massive "in development" list).

Secondly, they demonstrate some trends. The first trend is a gentle shift toward a "publish early, publish often" mentality, with more "not quite done" content being made public. The second trend is more mundane: we are trying (trying!) to start publishing something approximately every Tuesday, with occasional items on Thursdays and minor items (like the recent DRM-Free Music Directory update) whenever they come up.