Roy's musings

Off late I started using gist to embed source code in my blog entries. I was thinking about the consequences of doing this (or any form of embedding text using an external site). I realized the following: First and foremost the search engines don't get to index the page based on the key words in the embedded source code. For e.g. consider an embedded gist that demonstrates ServerSocket. Unless I mention about ServerSocket in my blog somewhere, the serarch engine will not associate the blog entry with the ServerSocket as that word appears only in the embedded source code. When peopele search for a specific key word in the embedded source code, they will be taken directly to the gist page, instead of the blog entry. This is bad because the user will not get the context and explanation around the source code. To understand the depth of the problem, please search for  alias-to-jumphosts-alist in Google. You will find that the gist is shown first and then the blog entry. Even in...

You might find this survey to be interesting. In summary, more and more new code is written in PHP. But more and more new projects are being initiated in Ruby and Python. One trend is very strong: Perl is witnessing a steep fall in new lines of code, active developers and new projects.

I tried it and its really good. Though there is no noticeable difference apart from look and feel, the Firefox site boasts a lot of things. I think one of the coolest features that are added to this edition is spell check on text input boxes. I am not sure if there is any other browser that provides this feature, at least none of the browsers that I use provides this feature. There is another feature called "Caret Browsing" in Firefox (I think its around there for sometime). Its really useful when you wish to move around or copy and paste from a web site that offers more textual content. You have to press F7 when you are in a web page to enable caret browsing. You can use your mouse to move here and there and select contents. It will really be helpful for Unix people who are more used to using key boards to move around. I would suggest you to refer to the key board short cuts page in the help section of Firefox browser. There are better ways to move around across tabs, select...