Neil's News

Who Gadget

5 July 2007

Do you use iGoogle? Do you use Moo Canada? If you answered yes to more than one of the above questions, then add the new "Who's on Moo Canada" gadget to your iGoogle page. Customizable, Ajaxy, Web 2.0 and buzzword compliant!

[Disclaimer: this was a personal project, it is not a Google product. So if use of this gadget results in loss of data, loss of revenue or loss of loved ones, sue me, not my employer.]

In other news, the Diff, Match and Patch library has been upgraded with the word boundary hugging transpositions described last week. I've also added an optimization which produces higher-quality diffs on short strings without any additional performance hit. The normal strategy is to attack a diff from both ends and meet at the middle. This normally halves the time, but with a reduction of quality in the resulting diff. However, this double-ended approach incurs a certain overhead for setting up, tracking and merging the two paths. Short diffs are actually just as fast when run in single-path mode. The practical result is that fuzzy patch operations (which rely on 32 character diffs for locating the precise edit points) are now more accurate. It is good when you can have your cake and eat it.

Update: I've been doing a fair number of interviews at Google for engineering candidates. If you saw this morning's xkcd and felt an irresistible urge to solve it, then send in your resume.

Ooh, Chris Allen sent me a better algorithm.

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