mrclay.rg

The Quickening of Facebook

If you’ve used Facebook in Opera and Firefox, you might have noticed that Facebook is several magnitudes faster in FF, but this has nothing to do with FF’s speed. For FF and IE users, Facebook uses a client-side architecture called “Quickening” that basically makes a few popular pages into full AJAX applications that stay loaded

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Miško Hevery Programming Talks

Miško Hevery gave several presentations at Google last year that are worth checking out, I think even if you’re familiar with Dependency Injections and unit testing. They cover the ways that global state can sneak into applications, how undeclared dependencies make classes harder to test and reuse, and how DI in general eases a lot

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Physics engine in Sketchup

I knew Sketchup was a great modeling tool, but apparently it’s also scriptable via a Ruby API and embedded web browser. At Google’s IO conference, Scott Lininger showed off some of this awesomeness. 20 min into the video below we see Scott capturing keystroke events within the browser instance and using them to control a

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Google TechTalk: OLPC

Another brilliant Google TechTalk, this one on the massive tech challenges of the One Laptop Per Child project. The revolutionary hardware design was hard enough, but the software goals are incredibly ambitious, particularly in the areas of security and long-term user data persistence within a very small space. Right now the permanent data store is

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Human cycles not wasted

Luis von Ahn creates simple games that have people solve problems that computers can’t (Google video). Every time you play a game of Taboo, the hinter generates associations between words and the guesser, by guessing the correct word, is verifying the quality of those associations. By isolating players via the web and collecting their responses,

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