Today the tech community (at least all of my friends) are abuzz with news of Google’s new Code Search mechanism. Now, this is just cool. From this day forward when I’m struggling with some poorly documented, hard to use, or even private API, I should be able to just type it into Google code search and see how other people have managed to use it.

But that’s only the useful angle – not enough to really create buzz on the net. The two things people are having fun with today are exploring the answers to these questions:

1. What does code search know about me?
2. What private information does code search know about others?

The first is the natural extension of the ego search that many of us commit on a regular basis (or have RSS subscriptions set up to to do for us). It’s fun to read about yourself, especially when somebody else is doing the writing. For instance, I learned of several new “thanks to Daniel Jalkut” type comments in source code and readme files. Neat! I like that.

The second is more problematic. Google grabbed a bunch of the world’s “source code” … basically anything it could find with a suitable file extension, and made it easily searchable. What’s wrong with this? A lot of files with source-code extensions actually contain sensitive information, but have been left mistakenly world-readable on some web server. For instance, John Gruber points out the rather stunning example of WordPress database configuration files, including the database login and password information. He directs our attention towards Jason Kottke who has assembled several other interesting phenomena. I personally am amused by the search “This file contains proprietary and confidential information.”

Now, the quite reasonable reaction we’re likely to hear from Google is, “This was already public information, we’re just indexing it.”

True! But let’s not dismiss the power of indexing. Google is too big to “just index” anything. They’re the search engine of record. Too big to blunder with technology that endangers the innocent. I imagine that with 8000 employees, at least several hundred of them are smart coders who have been beta testing this service for several weeks or months. The chances of them not noticing these funny holes seems infinitely unlikely, considering that among my friends they were the first things we observed.

So what should they do? Stand in the way of progress to protect the innocent? I’m sure dealing with problems like this will become less onerous as time goes on and people become more sophisticated about protecting their own privacy, but until that happens, Google has special responsibilities. When they substantially advance the state of information retrieval on a world-wide basis, they should think about how they can soften the negative blows of those advances.

It’s hard to say what Google should have done, but even a well-publicized warning might have helped. For those who have been compromised, I imagine their view of Google would be a lot higher if the buzz last week had been on the forthcoming advancement and what it meant for everybody’s privacy.

Podcasting totally, I mean totally works for me. It’s gotten to where I almost never use my iPod for music. I play music through my home stereo speakers, but when I’m on the train, at the gym, or walking somewhere, I listen to podcasts.

I’ve noticed that people either totally get or totally don’t get podcasts and their allure. Let me summarize for those on the verge of joining the revolution: if you spend any part of your day in a boring place, podcasts will make that time more interesting. I look forward to running on a freaking treadmill, partly because it makes me feel good, but mostly because I know that I’ll get time to catch up on my ‘casts! No matter what your interests, there is some podcast of value out there that will speak to you.

The hardest part about being a podcast listener is building a trustable arsenal of content. The ratings services of iTunes or Odeo can be helpful, but unfortunately a lot of people also like crappy podcasts.

So I’m doing my part by sharing the ones that make me happy. I’ve updated the “Some Podcasts I Like” sidebar section to accurately reflect what I’m listening to do these days. Some of the stuff that was in there before had gone stale, and I’ve added some new items to my subscription list. I decided I’d give a little more information on each of them here.

• Buzz Out Loud is a great daily news roundup for technophiles. Molly, Veronica and Tom discuss the day’s news in a slightly irreverent manner. What makes this podcast great is the high production quality and consistent pace. A good lightweight show to stay on top of technogossip.
• Cocoa Radio features one-on-one interviews with Mac developers. It’s been pretty slow to release new episodes this year, but when they do come out, they’re usually worth hearing. The content is not very technical, so if you’re just a curious Mac-ophile, it’s worth checking out.
• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders is a series of speeches and interviews from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. I really like “speeches by smart people,” and they manage to hook quite a few of them into participating in this series.
• FLOSS Weekly is a two-on-one (kinky!) interview format focusing on Free, Libre and Open Source Software. Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte interview leading members of the open source community about their software, legal issues, and occasional tales of drunken debauchery.
• Inside the Net is the second of my TWiT addictions, this time featuring Amber MacArthur and Leo interviewing notorious or merely interesting personalities “from the web.”
• MacBreak Weekly. I just discovered this, even though I’m a total TWiT junky. MacBreak is a video podcast and well, I don’t do video. So I must have glossed over the existence of this Mac-focused audio news roundtable. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders is a regular, along with Leo, Alex Lindsay, and Scott Bourne. This is basically like TWiT (see description below), but all Mac focused. Good stuff!
• Nerd TV has been dormant for a while, but is apparently on the verge of a “new season” rechristened as Supernerds. I said I don’t do video, but Robert X. Cringely’s excellent interview series is thankfully also available as a plain mp3 podcast.
• TED Talks. I have to admit I was skeptical about the TED conference. Hearing the way people talked about it, I assumed it was just a big, elite, members-only mutual-back-patting society. And maybe it is, but they have some killer speeches. This podcast contains absolutely mind-altering stimuli in the form of capsule (20 minutes or so) lectures by leaders from the academic and technical worlds.
• This Week in Tech. The granddaddy of all tech podcasts. I used to listen to Leo Laporte on the radio when I was a kid, growing up in the bay area. I never could have imagined I would be listening to him 15 years later on several of my favorite podcasts. TWiT is the canonical tech news roundup, featuring a rotating cast of regulars and special guests. Leo really knows his stuff, and has a pro-Mac bias. My only complaint is his current dumb fixation on calling the shows “Netcasts.” Speak our language, Leo! Don’t go changing waterfalls.
• Venture Voice is also fairly slow to update, but features great interviews with an entrepreneurial angle. Host Greg Galant does a good job of playing the passive instigator, calmly asking questions that bring out the interesting stories his guests have to tell.

Well! If you’re new to podcasting, that ought to be enough to get you started. And from that list, you can probably gauge pretty well what my tastes are. Given that, is there something you just know I’m missing? Please comment if you have other quality shows to share.

I just installed 10.4.8, after asking all of my friends within shouting or typing distance whether “it was safe,” or not. No objections, so I pulled the trigger and rebooted. When I logged in again I was confused to find a black rectangle surrounding my cursor. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it:

This damned thing follows me everywhere. And if I wasn’t a damned smart fella, I’d probably be stuck with it or on the phone with Apple, trying to figure it out. But I recognized it from somewhere, and was pretty sure it had something to do with accessibility. What was that I read on Daring Fireball about the new zoom feature? Oh yeah, that’s cool, the scroll wheel can zoom in on the screen if you hold down the control key. Nifty, but I guess it means that zoom is technically “on” even if zoom isn’t technically “on”:

Umm. Oops. All of our preferences are not in agreement. But at least my handy dandy “zoom preview” rectangle is permanently attached to the cursor! I might zoom … at any moment, and I certainly want to know what it is I’m going to zoom!

Apparently if you ever turned zoom on, and decided to enable that preview rectangle feature, it will now be visible all the time. I can’t help but wonder if this “scroll wheel zoom” feature somehow snuck into 10.4.8 accidentally. This is just dumb.

So … if you googled your way here after installing 10.4.8, and want to lose the damn rectangle. Let me review:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to Universal Access pane.
3. Switch to the “Seeing” tab.
4. Click the “Options” button for the Zoom section.
5. Turn off the “Show preview rectangle” checkbox.

Here’s hoping the rest of the release got more testing than this.

Since FlexTime 1.0 came out, there has been a persistent rumbling from Growl fans, who wished FlexTime would integrate more cleanly with it. Inspired by these users’ requests, I installed and became a little more familiar with its features. The good news is, FlexTime 1.0.5 supports Growl cleanly and automatically:

That’s it. The simplest possible solution I could come up with. If Growl is not installed or not running, then FlexTime reverts to using its own, less-featureful text display windows.

FlexTime 1.0.5 also includes a couple other changes, important but not as splashy:

• Fixes a bug that caused “At Finish” cues to sometimes be skipped
• Warn before closing a routine window or quitting while running

The bad news is now that I’ve seen some of the features of Growl, I can imagine a million other ways that Growl users might like to see enhanced integration supported. Ideas that spring to mind include:

• Customizable notification names, so behavior can be controlled separately for different cue displays. Right now all notifications from FlexTime are called “FlexTime Show Text Cue”.
• Growl notifications at special times. For instance, a Growl notification might be sent when FlexTime routines start or stop. This would give a lot of power to users who wanted to add some “macro behavior” to FlexTime.

If you’ve got other ideas for how Growl support in FlexTime should evolve, please share them! In the mean time, I hope you enjoy this modest step in the right direction.