Thin & Light

Requirements to try out things described below:

• Firefox
• Firebug (extension for Firefox)

Super large numbers as LatLng’s

Open this page from Google’s example. In firebug’s console, execute the following code:

map.setCenter(new GLatLng(1e100, 1e100));

Setting super large numbers as latitude and longitude like this always makes my Firefox 2.0.0.11 in Windows XP hang.

I don’t know why Google didn’t restrict the range of the numbers, and what computation it did to consume so much CPU time. It should ignore such numbers after a simple judgment.

Strings as zoom parameters

In the same page, execute this piece of code:

var zoom = '16';
map.setZoom(zoom);

As you see, nothing happens. Google must be ignoring the parameter when expression typeof(zoom) == ‘number’ is false. In my situation, I got the value of variable zoom from the url, and didn’t noticed it was the type mismatch which prevented the code to work, since I’m used to JavaScript’s dynamic type conversion feature:

a = 2 * '3'; // a = 6

It will be converted to number when needed. Of course, it’s good to perform strict type checking. But it’ll be better if the API threw an exception instead of being silent.

I’m a fan of Google Reader. Although FeedDemon went free recently and it offers synchronization with NewsGator which is great attraction for many people, I still couldn’t drop Google Reader.

However the panel above the subscription list takes up too much space for my humble screen resolution of 1024×768. As Google rolled out the much complained “Friends’ shared items” feature, it became an urgent task for me to hide the annoying but never used panel. It took up 1/3 of the vertical space on the left sidebar!

No, not just hiding. Sometimes I need to clear the number of unread friends’ shared items. So it should be a “toggler” like the sidebar (or nav-bar as called by Google) toggler natively built in Google Reader. Like this:

Before hiding, with mouse hovering on the toggler:

When the panel is hidden:

You can still open it at any time. Basically, it works in the same way as the native sidebar toggler.

This is done by writing a user script for Greasemonkey, so you must have Greasemonkey installed to use it.

Get it now.