April 2005
April 5, 2005
Google Maps: UK. The satellite photos cover the whole world—up to a certain zoom level.
Google Maps—The White House. I love how the roofs of the nearby buildings are blacked out. Must be where they keep the SAMs.
Channel 4 Broadband. Watch Channel 4 content online for a fiver a month. Sadly, it’s RealPlayer.
April 6, 2005
More Nifty Corners. Now with wider browser support and mild anti-aliasing.
My childhood, seen by Google Maps. Very clever use of Flickr notes and Google Maps.
Multi-threaded JavaScript (with Rhino). Good tutorial on using Rhino to do cool things with JavaScript.
Customizing Opera. Tips from one of Opera’s developers.
Interview: 43Folders’ Merlin Mann. LifeHacker talks to a Life Hacker.
Slashdot interview with Mark Shuttleworth. Some great answers on Ubuntu.
Now, Really, As Bigoted As You Think. Kansas passed the gay marriage amendment.
April 8, 2005
Geekcheat vi reference mug (via) I want one!
Anabasis: Userscript.org. Jeremy wants feedback on his plans for a userscript directory site.
A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road. Martin Belam continues his streak of fascinating posts about the BBC.
Enter the hedgehog
The Ubuntu community have released Hoary Hedgehog, otherwise known as Ubuntu 5.04. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, it’s an excellent Linux distribution based on Debian with a strong focus on desktop usability. Unlike most Linux distros, Ubuntu comes with just one desktop manager (Gnome) and one obvious default application for each of the essentials: Firefox for browsing, OpenOffice for office work, Evolution for mail.
[... 209 words]See the sights with Google Maps. MetaFilter thread with links to interesting satellite photos on Google Maps.
Ubuntu 5.04 Release Notes (via) What’s new in Hoary.
April 10, 2005
Flickr without the Flash
One of my favourite panels at SxSW this year was the Flash vs. HTML Game Show, in which a team of HTML/JavaScript gurus took on a team of Flash gurus showing off pre-prepared solutions to tasks set for the panel. One of the challenges was to come up with enhancements to Flickr using the team’s assigned technology.
[... 353 words]April 11, 2005
Greasemonkey etiquette
In Meme tracking with Greasemonkey, Jon Udell introduces a userscript which grabs the number of references from del.icio.us and bloglines and appends that information to the top of every page you visit. To be fair on Jon, the version he has released defaults to only doing this for pages on Infoworld.com but modifying it to run on every web page is trivial.
[... 252 words]April 12, 2005
Colorization Using Optimization. Holy cow, this is impressive.
Ruby on Rails and FastCGI: Scaling using processes instead of threads. Relates to the shared-nothing architecture.
April 13, 2005
Why Greasemonkey is good for publishers (via) Free usability tips and bug fixing—your users know more than you do.
Benefits (Ftrain.com) (via) This is why the NHS, for all its flaws, is a very very good idea.
Continuations for Curmudgeons. They aren’t as scary as you may have been lead to believe.
Safari WebDevAdditions (via) I haven’t tried these yet, but they look useful.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I’m pretty much thinking what Chris Applegate is thinking.
Howto Generate PDFs in Rails. Use HTMLDoc, PdfWriter or Ruby FPDF.
zestyping: In the time-wasting hacks department... Ping’s iChat buddy icon now features a sparkline, and rotates over the course of the day.
Smart vs. Dumb Templates. Ian argues for smart template languages, because layout isn’t as simple as you think.
April 14, 2005
Lawrence, Kansas: Convergence Capital USA (via) NPR report on my former place of work.