Kevin’s Blog

UPDATE: git blame does this!

One day, you find yourself happily hacking away at some code you checked out from one of your collaborative coding projects and BAM!, you hit a gnarly bit of one-line wizardry that completely blows your mind. While it may read like English and be as concise as an abridged Cliff Notes, the functionality you need to modify is crystallized somewhere between the continuations and inline DSL definitions.

Who wrote this?

The solution to this would be what I call Code Scent (as opposed to Code Smell). With Code Scent, you’d be able to see code history on a line-by-line or better granularity. Imagine, if you will, selecting a menu option and getting a highlighting scheme that told you who touched which piece of code most recently:

Things to look for in my next laptop:

• Intel SSD
• full size keyboard
• Nvidia integrated graphics
• Decently high-res LED-lit screen
• Good antenna placement
• Nehalem generation mobile CPU
• Under $1000

ETA: Mid 2009.

(But, if my laptop broke today, I would get a Lenovo X200s, assuming there’s some discount code out there.)

10/31, left side fell off.

11/4, eye exam + new glasses ordered. (eyesight actually improved!)

11/9, right side fell off.

Replacement ETA 11/14 Ahh…

Microsoft released their Mesh Preview a while back (ok, maybe I’ve been living under a rock or something). It’s basically DropBox with extras, including the kitchen sink.

I think the sleeping giant is waking up. All the right products seem to be coming down the pipeline: Cross-platform “Cloud” functionality, Windows 7, the new XBox 360 online interface… to name a few. With Win7 and Live Mesh they’re well positioned to take advantage of the rising popularity of Netbooks.

Sure, Live Mesh doesn’t have byte diffing and an RCS just quite yet, but I don’t see those being a DropBox exclusive for much longer.

One problem people have with Firefox is that sometimes its extensions run amok and gobble up tons of memory or freeze the browser with resource hogging tasks.

Well, ponder this: Currently, Chrome monitors its processes, including individual tabs and plugins.

It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to project this kind of analysis into the world of extensions. Advanced extension users could spot sources of slowdown in the browser, and Google could provide supplemental tools to help extension developers drill down into nether regions of their extensions to enhance speed and memory usage. As an added bonus, extensions could be tracked individually, allowing the developers to receive live aggregated feedback on their extensions’ performance in the wild.

Imagine — Google Analytics for your Chrome Extensions!

Other hopeful features for Extensions:

• Updates are installed without forcing a browser reboot.
• If individual extensions malfunction, they don’t bring the browser down.
• Extensions are as easy to write as web apps. (CSS/HTML/JS)