Monday, 25th January 2010
Help pick the best photos, but watch out, it’s addictive! My favourite WildlifeNearYou feature yet—our new tool asks you to pick the best from two photos, then uses the results to rank all of the photos for each species. It’s surprisingly addictive—we had over 5,000 votes in the first two hours, peaking at 4 or 5 votes a second. The feature seems to be staying nice and speedy thanks to Redis under the hood. Photos in the top three for any given species display a medal on their photo page.
If you’re ever debugging a problem and you see the number 42-mumble-mumble-mumble-7295 you’ve run out of 32-bit storage. If you see 2-mumble-mumble-mumble-647 (2147483647) you’ve run out of signed 32-bit storage. 167-mumble-mumble-15 (16777215) you’ve run out of 24-bits and 65-mumble-mumble-35 (65535) you’ve run out of 16-bits of integers.
Fixing the Google Account problem. 3,000+ words explaining how to open a Google Doc invitation sent to an e-mail address that isn’t associated with your Google account. Worth reading just to get an idea for the enormous complexity involved in running a large scale identity system and designing an interface for managing aliases and multiple profiles. Google haven’t got it right yet—has anyone else?
The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data.
OSM the default map in Haiti. A search and rescue team member in Haiti sends word that digital maps constructed by the OpenStreetMap community are spreading by word of mouth and being loaded on to GPS units on the ground.