YouTube has just added a great new feature: video annotations. Video annotations are little text boxes, word bubbles, and spotlights you can add to your videos.

These little information nuggets have some serious potential to make the now common place web video experience a little more engaging. Regrettably, the first wave of annotated videos will likely be comprised of wise-guy comments overlaying groin injury videos.

To see this cool new feature in action click here.

Over the years the web and related technologies have evolved fairly rapidly. However, one technology seams hopelessly stuck in 1990: email. Email really hasn’t changed much since it’s inception. Sometimes I wish more features existed than the basic recipient, subject, message paradigm has to offer.

Here is my wish list:

1) Multiple Bodies - it would be nice to be able to send a message to a group, but have some text only be visible to specific people. Right now this requires sending two separate messages, even if only a small difference in text is needed.

2) This Email Has Changed - when you call a phone number that has changed a pleasant voice notifies you of the new number. I would like the equivalent for email. This could be very handy when retiring an old address.

3) Enhanced Security - there are a few tools that enhance the security of your messages, but since they are not built into the protocol few users use them. I would like to be able to send messages that can’t be forwarded, viewed after a certain date, or require a password to open. Email could be used for so much more if it was a secure means of communication.

Email is truly the killer app of the Internet, but in the age of advanced software and hardware it sure is showing its age.

I spent a good hour or so yesterday battling a particularly nasty bug. Well, it wasn’t really a bug, just a curiosity that took me on a wild goose chase through several hundred lines of source code. I found a comment in my source from a couple months ago that said “trivial” and nothing more, between an if block and an else block. I thought it meant that the following code (the else block) was trivial, and seriously wondered why, since the code in the else block was actually not trivial at all.

Well, it finally dawned on me–I put “trivial” in the source code to force subversion to recognize a new version of the file I was working on. Trivial meant that the commit was trivial, not the code. Very very frustrating. Read the rest of this entry »