If you spend twice as long building your debugging framework as you do actually developing, you still come out ahead – you get all that time back as soon as you catch just a few errors. It feels like a big investment, but it’s always worth it, for both the time savings and the annoyance-curbing. Verbosity, verbosity, verbosity, then fix it.

I just published my first ever browser extension, called Plurk Notifier, for Google Chrome. It checks Plurk (akin to Twitter) for any unread messages and displays their count in the top bar. It was fun to wade back into JavaScript so deeply and work so closely with the browser.

This week is the first ever Computer Science Education Week. Some of the statistics on the official site are sobering (”The percent of high schools with rigorous computer science courses fell from 40% to 27% from 2005-2009″), while others are exciting: “Computer software engineer jobs expected to grow 45% over the next five to seven years.” Just think, for every two software engineers you find today, there will soon be a third. An incredible amount of growth.

Computer science offers students avenues of self-expression, improved reasoning skills, and the ability to look at the bigger picture while not discounting the details. These opportunities alone are too good to pass up; it is essential that we work on increasing exposure to computer science and decreasing the surrounding stigmas, from elementary school onwards.

I’ve been using Chrome considerably more over the past few weeks, and with the addition of [developer-only build] extensions, Firefox may gather more dust than I expected. I just tweaked the Google Reader Checker extension to fix a weakness it has: when you visit the Google Reader site, the new-items badge notification does not update to reflect the fact that you’ve probably now read the new feed items; instead, it waits until the checking time interval expires before checking again. This was easy to fix: just one line of code put in the proper place, and now when I click the badge to read the new feeds, it erases the new-items count.

As far as why my loyalty is shifting from Firefox to Chrome, the simple fact is that Chrome gives a snappier (and thus, better) experience: opening and closing tabs is instantaneous, scrolling pages is more tightly tied to the physical action of spinning the middle mouse button, and various websites with heavy JavaScript just respond faster. If I could get the Omnibar to work exactly like the Awesomebar does in Firefox, there would likely be no going back (though, of course, Firebug wins for any web development needs!).

I just noticed a [presumably fairly new] feature of the new CNN design: a given article can use part of a comment from a reader as a pullquote on the article itself. Pretty cool, since it raises the bar on the amount of recognition one can get from leaving thoughtful input on an article.  It also gives pieces more of a taste of for-the-people-by-the-people, more of a conversation, rather than being a static, stale document delivered on a gold platter. I’m not sure what qualification system is used to decide what quote is used; in the referenced article it is just pulled from the first page of the comments, or “soundoff,” section. This also could provide for a great amount of content dynamism without altering the article’s copy itself.

Word of the Day:  extensional definition, noun. Defines the meaning of a concept or term by listing the whole set or part of the set of objects to which the concept or term applies.