Ins and Outs of Inputs

I had this in my "almost-finished-near-ready-to-publish" folder for some time already. Past week was again a little crazy in my personal life, so no real time to finish this small piece until now... :)

Do you frequently switch between two computers not connected with local network? If so, I guess you wanted to share data between them at least once before. It used to be a hassle. Now it's easy. Dropbox started public open beta-testing of their service few weeks ago. If you haven't heard of Dropbox here is my little intro. Dropbox is essentially centralized version tracking accessible from anywhere without need to configure anything. You copy files you want to share with other machines to your Dropbox directory and they are automatically uploaded to Dropbox server. If another machine on the other end of the world is running with same Dropbox account, it is automatically synced. If it sounds confusing, I encourage you to read the introduction tour on their website. Free account enables you to use 2GB storage and unlimited bandwith, so it's not that bad. Most of all, it "just works(tm)". And you can later upgrade to Pro versio with 50GB space for $9.99/month or $99.99/year. I am not sure about availability outside US, but I guess that's not gonna be a problem.

You can synchronize files between Windows, MacOS X and Linux machines.There are still a few rough edges, but I guess that's why it's beta :)..It would be really nice if the protocol for communication with Dropbox server was made public, but I guess I am asking for too much. At least the Nautilus interface in Linux is GPLed and there are already alternative "clients" for  retrieving status of your Dropbox account.

Good thing is that you can also share files with the rest of the world. Just like you would with for example Rapidshare account. The difference? No limits on file sizes (so far, as far as I know). I just wonder how will they fight sharing of illegal data.

With services like this privacy is always a concern. You give up certain amount of privacy by uploading your files to 3rd party server. So whatever you do, be sure to encrypt your private files. Happy sharing.

If someone actually read my previous posts (heh), (s)he may have noticed that I quite often link to www.codinghorror.com. It is Jeff Atwood's blog, and I usually find it very exciting to read. His style of writing and ability to convey complex messages in a simple way is my holy grail. And if he is not able to do it himself, he links to other authors A LOT. Instead of repeating same thing that has been said over and over again he just links to proper post made by some other fellow programmer/software engineer. Avoiding duplicity is really one of basic goals of programming. Instead of repeating same code 20 times, just write a function and call it 20 times.

But that is just low-level stuff. Jeff, Joel Spolsky and few others, embarked on an adventure to get rid of duplicity in minds of programmers. Programming is so inherently complex that no one really knows solution to every problem. And don't get me started on optimal solutions. What did you do when you found solution to some programming challenge, or some tricky workaround for problem that was bugging you for weeks? If you have a blog, you could go and post your solution there. Maybe someone would notice. Maybe not. So what did Jeff & Co. do? They created and launched ww.stackowerflow.com. Quoting from about page:

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that's free.

Google released its own Web browser called Chrome few weeks ago and whole web was buzzing with excitement since then. They did it Google style. Everything is neat, clean and simple. And quite a few features are also unique. Google engineers obviously put a lot of thought into scratching their itches with web applications. Javascript engine is fast and whole browser is created around the idea that web is just a place for applications. One of the most touted things about Chrome were its security features. You can read whole account of basic Chrome features on its project page.

In Chrome each tab runs as a separate process communicating with main window through standard IPC. This means that if there is fatal error in handling of some page (malicious or otherwise), other tabs should be unaffected and your half-written witty response to that jerk on the forum will not be lost. Chrome also has other security enhancements, that should make it more secure. I said should. Within few days of Chrome release several security vulnerabilities surfaced, ranging from simply annoying DOS to plain dangerous remote code execution.

What caught my attention was bug that enabled downloading files to user's desktop without user confirmation. It was caused by Googlers using older version of Webkit open source rendering engine in Chrome. Integrating "foreign" software with your application can be tricky, especially if you have to ensure that everything will be working smoothly after the upgrade. In that respect, it is sometimes OK to use older versions of libraries. As long as you fix at least security bugs. People write buggy software. Google engineers included. I am just surprised that they don't have any process that would prevent distribution of software with known security vulnerabilities to the public.

And that is the main problem. Chrome is beta software. Because of this, bugs are to be expected. But Google went public with Chrome in the worst possible way. They included link to Chrome download page on their home page, making hundreds of thousands of people their beta testers. People who have no idea what "beta testing" actually means. They just know that Google has some cool new stuff. So let's try it right? Wrong. Most of us expect our browser to be safe for e-banking, porn and kids (not necessarily in that order). Unfortunately Chrome is not that kind of browser. Yet. I am pretty sure it is gonna be great browser in the future though. But right now Google should put big red sign saying "DANGEROUS" in the middle of Chrome download page.

Until Chrome becomes polished enough for Google to stop calling it "beta", it has no place on desktops of common computer users. Even oh-so-evil Microsoft doesn't show download link for IE8 beta on their main page to promote it. Mentioned issues aside, Chrome really sports few good ideas that other browsers could use as well. Try it out, and you will like it. Then go back to your old browser for the time being.