Chrome on Noetic Nought

Recurse Center, 2014-08-08

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 20:56:22 -0400

I spent the morning doing some white-boarding interview practice with a Jorge and Brian.
I spent the rest of the day, playing with PyPy and working through a tutorial that teaches us to write a BF interpreter.
I spent the Saturday revamping my Emacs config. The main issue with my config was having a “package” list, of all the packages that the configuration uses, in case we are trying to duplicate it elsewhere. I noticed that this gets out of sync, because I install packages by hand and never update this list. I wrote up some code, that keeps this list in sync with all the packages I have installed. I configured el-get to play well with my config, and am pretty happy with my setup, though I still have to add some matching/searching features with helm/ido/whatever else.
I spent the Sunday writing a patch to xtab to be able to limit the number of tabs in Chromium by the memory it uses.

GitHub Cue: Recommendations for GitHub Repos

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0530

If you aren’t already aware of it, I’m one of those people who goes around saying, “GitHub is my Facebook”. I spend quite a lot of time on GitHub, browsing the work of various people, looking at loads of interesting stuff that people built. I keep jumping between people pages and projects using the Watchers/Watching & Followers/Following pages. This way, I do come across interesting people and projects, but the SNR is too low. I wanted a better way to be able to see stuff, that I find interesting. That’s how the idea for this Chromium app – GitHub Cue – was born.

@baali and I hacked on this, during the last few days and got it working. It works as follows, (from the README) —

Scrapes all the descriptions of the repositories being watched by the user.
Key terms are extracted from this description text using the Yahoo Term Extractor.
A list of languages is obtained, based on the languages of the repositories, the user if watching.
GitHub searches are performed for a combination of 3 randomly chosen languages and 5 random key terms.
10 random repositories out of all these, are shown.

This is a very simplistic algorithm, but works decently for my purposes. Ideally, I would’ve liked to use a Collaborative Filtering algorithm, but I found the data to be too sparse, and the amount of computation to be too much to be done on the fly. I wasn’t really interested in pre-computing stuff and putting it onto my server. I settled down to the next best thing I could think of.

I would appreciate any further ideas and suggestions. Thanks!

GetHub: Chrome Notifications for Github updates

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0530

Over the last two days, I hacked up my first Chrome extension. I’ve been using Chrome only for the past couple of weeks or so and I begin to like it, though some of the extensions aren’t as mature as I would’ve liked.

The original idea was floated by my friend, Madhu, and Lee helped me quite a bit, while I was working on it.

What does it do?

It is a simple extension, that shows pop-ups, whenever there is an update in your GitHub “Wall” (yes, this is a Facebook world) or News Feed as they call it.

After installation, you will need to save your username and token for the extension to work.

Where to get it?

Presently, you will need to get it from GitHub.

I might add it to the Chrome Web Store, once I see more people using it. I couldn’t justify, to myself, paying the initial one-time verification fee that Google asks for.

UPDATE: [2011-03-04 Fri] Added GetHub to the store

Comments and Feedback

Feel free to write to me at punchagan+gethub@jeemail.com
Or file issues at GitHub.

Happy GitHubbing!