Ipad thoughts

A quick bunch of fresh thoughts on Ipad (I had no experience with Iphone):

• That the machine you'd like to take with you to the toilet or to the kitchen. Laptops are just too big.
• Yes, one doesn't know where to tap/click. I didn't know where to tap to buy app on Appstore!
• I'm missing the back button very much. Maybe that will go away when multitasking comes in.
• The back button in Safari is very far away (top left corner, the furthest possible place for right-handed). It's also way too small.
• It's hard to open and close tabs in Safari.
• Jailbreaking firmware 3.2 works of the box. It's easier than navigating through Appstore.
• Fingerprints on a glass or just dirty glass doesn't make any difference. That's cool.
• The "home" physical button is sometimes in weird places - when you rotate Ipad in the wrong direction, which happens pretty often.
• Obviously, for most things Ipad is useless without access to Wifi.
• It is heavy.
• It looks like Safari isn't swapped out/killed. You want multitasking - just open a new web page and leave it in the background.
• Iphone apps are useless, they have too small screen. 2x zoom mode helps, but not a lot.
• Wifi reception is pretty weak (as compared to other devices).
• Numbers (spreadsheet from Apple) is brilliant.

Memory matters - even in Erlang

I played with pretty interesting bug, or maybe a feature, in Erlang VM. Read more on LShift blog.

Search in the versioned world

Whatever you are using: a blog, a portal, a forum or microblogging service, search works on current set of documents.

If I remove my last blog post, I expect a search to omit it in the search results. Search ought to include only the most recent state of documents.

But what if you can navigate through the history of document? What should appear in the search? We are used to see only the most recent version of document. For example in wikipedia search doesn't show documents that included searched phrase in the past.

This problem can appear also in other contexts. Consider using a VCS. I created some content, or code. I removed it as it looked unneeded. Some time later I realized that I need this content back. What can I do to recover it? Currently I have to manually review diffs in GIT/Mercurial/or whatever VCS. Shouldn't be a button somewhere: "search in history"?

So, how do we expect a search to work on versioned content? Is that feature useful at all?