An ice age ahead?

I find this piece of science news quite ironic. It's like the Universe is showing us its middle finger to remind us how small and insignificant we are.

Surprising results from 3 projects researching the Sun point to a big drop in the solar activity for the next few decades. This may (or may not) trigger a global ice age for most of the century or at least could slow down the mess of a global warming we are causing to the planet.
Not that it's going to solve much of our problems anyway. We'll still need lots of clean air, fresh water and food and who knows how much of the Earth's already struggling flora and fauna can survive a potential freeze. Plus we'll have to burn lots of coal and oil to keep those 7 billion and growing bodies warm.
On the bright side the polar bears may be safe (for a while).

Monitoring the execution of asynchronous JavaScript callbacks

In JavaScript sometimes it's useful to know if an asynchronous callback function was called, how many times and if it completed or failed. Of course you could implement it by changing some state in the outside scope, but this means adding code to the function and it won't work for existing 3rd party code.
I've written a small jQuery extension, jquery.monitor.js, (there is no actual jQuery dependency in the implementation by the way) which creates a wrapper around the callback function that keeps the latest call status and history in a property called monitor.

Example:

var m = $.monitor(mycall);//wrap the callback, m.monitor.status is 'unused'
$.getJSON("my.json", m()); //calling m() prepares a callback and sets m.monitor.status to 'queued'
$.getJSON("another.json", m());

When the callback starts, m.monitor.status will be set to 'called' and when it completes it will become 'completed' or 'failed' if it raised an exception.

In addition there are 4 counters for the history of each state: monitor.queued, monitor.called, monitor.completed and monitor.failed (in the example above m.monitor.queued and m.monitor.called will be 2 and the sum of m.monitor.completed and m.monitor.failed will be equal to 2).
To check if all queued calls have completed use the m.isPending method (for this to work the result from calling m() should not be reused for consecutive callbacks!!!) and to reset the monitor use the m.clearMonitor method.