techno.blog("Dion")

A long time ago, I was leaked the codebase of a popular id software game, both before optimization, and after.

When you ended up seeing was:

• prototype: mainly C/C++, with some assembler
• production: assembler all over. all over.

• They also used a special malloc. I remember at the time thinking: “they freaking rewrote malloc?”. In fact the special version came from a Finnish group of uber-hackers, and even that was customized for certain corner cases when it made sense.

  This all came to light when I read tcmalloc success which discusses Domas Mituzas of MySQL using tcmalloc (an open source Google perftool) to debug some nasty memory leaks.

  Nice. I hope I don’t never have to use it ;)

I vaguely remember hearing that AdSense was going to be shelling out video ads, but forgot about this until I saw my first in the wild today:

What is funny about this is that the play button really is compelling. I clicked on it. I never ever click on ads. I have no idea if I will ever click on one again, but it was interesting to catch myself hitting play.

I have been using Gmail on my blackberry side by side the default mail app to see what I like and do not like.

The bulk of what I would like to see are just more quick keys. One thing the Blackberry gets right is that there are a ton of short cut keys to learn, and power users live and breath with them.

Gmail on the web does a good job as the vi of email clients, letting you move around and cause events using keys. The mobile version has many of the same shortcuts but doesn’t seem to have:

• j and k to move up and down in the thread view (different to n and p in a conversation). I don’t want to be forced to mousewheel.
• space to page down (instead it opens the email, which o is already there for)
• t and b: these go to the top and bottom of email content, but what about in the thread view? I want to at least be able to go to the top (bottom is harder with the endless paging)
• m: Mark all as read. I often want to just mark my current emails as read rather than going through each marking them. It doesn’t even let me mark them one by one easily, instead I hit o and esc to read it and go back
• auto download email: one of the nice things about the BB is that the email is there waiting for you. it grabs it all the time. I want a setting to tell gmail to do the same please.
• space in a message: page me down

These are definitely nitpicks, and there are more for gmail in general (filters seem very limited, and you can’t even use a character like ‘[' to filter on? This is a pain when you want to lazily "any subject with [xxxx] is probably a mailing list so label it as ‘List’”) but they would make this user happy.

NOTE: short cuts are particularly useful for mobile users that have qwerty keyboards (BB, Treo, etc). Not as useful for T9 folks.

I am glad to see GPS support has been added to Google Maps for Mobile.

I have been using Google Maps on my phone for directions, and have been very happy with it. The only issues have been:

• No preloading: You walk through the directions by hitting next (3). Since the network is still slow, it takes awhile to load the map fragments, so if you have a bunch of small, quick directions you can get behind. This means that my human pattern is too: get directions, go through them all letting each step load the full image panes into the cache. I wish I could tell it to preload the entire route
• Know where I am: This has now been solved. Now there is no need to flip back and forth, and instead a more gradual experience will kick in which will be a lot easier to understand

It is nice to see Google Code Search, something that I am sure I will find useful. It also good to see more vertical searches.

I did a few searches, and quickly saw that it is also useful to see people using open code that you write without permission, or correctly licensed :)

So many sites look like utter crud on my Blackberry.

How have I not seen the Google Wireless Transcoder, which can take a site and strip it down to hopefully be readable.

It isn’t perfect, as people can do a lot of bad HTML coding, but it does a much better job than my Blackberry does itself for many sites out there.

I would imagine it would be a great feeling if the project you worked on at Google made it to the select list of apps that show up on the google.com page (currently: Images, Video, News, Maps).

Froogle got kicked off of this list, to give way to Video (yay YouTube?).

I hadn’t realised that if you click on more you get a small inline div popup showing you books, froogle, and groups.

I know google likes to keep things minimal, but do we really need these steps?

Couldn’t you fit those three projects in on the page somewhere? Would it be SO bad to Effect.Appear a nicer grouping when I first ask for more? How about letting me change this grouping at /ig ? Or watching what I happen to use and changing it to reflect my preferences?

I have been working with a company that recently got added to Google News, which is great.

I assumed that Google would do a fantastic job and grokking the news from the site.

I was unfortunately wrong.

In time, we started to see our content appear in Google News, but the headlines were all screwed up. Elements in a rightbar on the site would show up as a headline for an article. It all seemed very random too. Very strange indeed.

We contacted the Google News team, assuming that content providers could use some kind of microformat to help the Google document parser.

We would be very willing to say:

<h1 class=”googlenews-headline header”>Headline</h1>

<h1 rel=”headline”>Headline</h1>

No such thing existed. They thought that one of the problems was that the headline had a link within it (as it acts as a permalink to itself). They assume that a headline can not also be a list, so they ignore it.

As we go back and forward on this, I then think. Wait a minute. Why are they bothering screenscraping our HTML when we have RSS feeds for everything?

Surely it would be simpler to grok our feed than scrape our HTML? *sigh*

Google Maps has innovated a little after their initial release (hybrid maps, local, etc) but I have been hoping for more.

One thing that I miss from the Yahoo! side is that I can’t tell Google where I live, or other important addresses.

If I type in:

123 Main St

I want Google Maps to assume that I mean in my location, and not make me type in the city and state every time.

Is that too much to ask?

Browsers go a good job on remembering my locations, so it isn’t too bad when I have to get driving directions from home as I can type the first few keys and hunt for my address, but I want more.

Time for GreaseMonkey.

Google now allows you to add tags to sites in your search history.

Hopefully they will:

• Let you do this tagging directly from search results
• Publish RSS feeds of your info
• Publish RSS feeds of tags
• Share your info
• Rate + Tag
• Search within my tagged data
• Search within my blogs

I would love to do one click on a search result to say “i dig it”, and have it popup a line where I can put tag names and a short desc.

Then they have access to rating such as: “the user clicked on this after the search of Foo”, “The user activelly said he dug it and tagged it”.

This should all happen inline via Ajax of cos ;)