Google Maps

This isn’t exactly hot off the presses, but Google has launched Google Maps, which seems pretty nifty, so far. There are a few things I can think of that could use improvement, but it is just a beta, after all.

Improvements I’d like to see:

  • When listing several locations, it would be nice if you could snap to just one particular one, and elminate the others.
  • When doing a “local search”, it will change your zoom level, even when you are searching “the map area below”. That’s not doing what I asked, because you’re changing the map area.
  • The “link this page” link doesn’t always save the current state of the map if you’ve been tinkering (center location, zoom level).
  • It would be nice to have an easy way to access the latitude and longnitude for points on the map (though I understand that this isn’t of interest to everyone).

On the other hand, the interactive “grab and drag” nature of the maps is great, and the directions with detailed turns are awesome!

Has anybody else spotted any other areas of improvement? Other than obvious ones, like personal settings, that they’re sure to add at some point.

Google’s sense of humor

A few minutes ago, I was checking the status of my Google AdSense account. I have a friend who I think could benefit from that program as well, so I used the “refer a friend” link to zap him a note. After my message was sent, I received the following choices:

Your email is on its way to your friend

What would you like to do next?

        Share
the word about AdSense with another friend
        Go to the
AdSense home page
        Win the Powerball lottery, buy a 155 foot tri-deck yacht and retire to Palau

Okay, ignoring the horrid non-semantic HTML, which I’ve cleaned up a little to avoid breaking my page’s validation, I love that last option. But why isn’t it clickable, dammit! I want that yacht!

Server update

Earlier today, I upgraded the webserver on this box to the latest versions of Apache, PHP, mod_ssl, and a few other things. I still need to go back and do some tweaking, since the a lot of configuration file paths were different from my previous compiles. Currently, I’ve got a hodgepodge of symbolic links and config file hacks acting as a bandaid. If you notice anything misbehaving, please let me know.

Happy birthday to me

Lexar Media 512 MB JumpDrive Secure USB 2.0 (JDS512-432)

Lexar 512MB JumpDrive

Hit

Peter Gabriel, Hit/Miss

Yesterday was my birthday. The whole family went out to dinner at The Bitter End for some seafood. I had the “Sesame Crusted Salmon”, which was good, but not as flavorful as I had expected. But they did give me some of their banana bread pudding, which was quite tasty. This was our second time there, it’s definitely one of our favorite local restaurants.

After dinner, we went home and I opened my gifts, which were all quite cool:

  • A Lexar 512MB JumpDrive
  • Army of Darkness comics, “Ashes to Ashes“, issues 1 – 4
  • Peter Gabriel, Hit/Miss (2-CD best-of)
  • P.O.D., Brown
  • A long-sleeve T-shirt with an embroidered yellowjacket (and Jamie got a matching shirt 🙂 )

WordPress 1.5 in beta

The next version of WordPress (version 1.5) has moved from “alpha” to “beta” testing mode. Basically, the core features are in place, and the developers are in bug-fix mode. There are lots of exciting new features and improvements in this release, which I’ve been using here. The most notable new features are probably “pages” and the new theme system.

Pages allow you to manage stand-alone web pages. Examples on this site are my “about“, “donate“, and “weight goal” pages. Combined with the Run PHP Plugin, this brings WordPress another step closer to evolving from “blogging” software into a full CMS (Content Management System).

The new theme system busts the web design out from the core WP code. This means that you can radically modify your web design without editing the default WP files, which makes upgrades even more painless than ever. It also allows the site admin to easily switch back and forth between different site designs. My current design (such as it is), is implemented as a theme (named “rockem-sockem”).

For some more insights into the development, see Nuclear Moose’s interview with Matt and Ryan.

Meme Roundup

There have been several new memes lately that I have thoughts on, but I just haven’t had the time to comment on them here. I still don’t have time to discuss them in as much depth as I’d like, but here’s a quick summary:

  • RSS 1.1:

    I have mixed feelings on this. It fixes one of my biggest complaints about RSS 1.0, which was the requirement for the rdf:Seq list, which seemed redundant with the content elements. But it still doesn’t address the biggest problem that all RSS flavors have: it doesn’t specify how to handle HTML content.

  • Universal Subscription Mechanism:

    It took me a few minutes to understand what problem this is addressing. Basically, the idea is that we want a more user-friendly experience when people click on RSS feeds in their web browsers. The problem is that if you set up an application to handle certain MIME types under Windows, the application only gets the content, not the URL that the content came from. So, there’s not an easy way to add a feed to your RSS aggregator application by simply clicking the feed’s link. But by adding a self-link to your feed, as suggested by USM, we get a standard way for a feed to specify a canonical URL for itself, thus allowing applications to handle the URL as needed.

    Just to offer other viewpoints on this, I’ll also point you to RevJim’s ideas on Feed Playlists.

  • rel=”nofollow”:

    Excellent. Google (and other search engines say they’ll be on-board, as well) provides us a simple way to link to things without suggesting that the link is an endorsement. Which means that we can suck the Googlejuice out of links from comment spammers. There’s still lots fo discussion going on about the implications, both pro and con. But for folks who actively manage their blogs, the general consensus is that this is a good thing. Eric Meyer has some good thoughts on the subject.

  • Technorati Tags:

    After all the work we put into the heirarchical categories for WordPress, the hot new thing is tags. I have to admit, the freeform nature of tags has me hooked. Between del.icio.us and Flickr, there was already a lot of good taggy metadata synergy going on. Technorati’s support for tags has finally pushed me over the edge, and I’m going to be implementing a tags system here, using a tags4wp plugin created by Kellan, and improved by Sam Angove. c.f. A more scholarly paper on folksonomies, by Adam Mathes.

More when I have time!

Improved Thunderbird OPML

I’ve updated the OPML import/export patch for Mozilla Thunderbird that I mentioned before. The new patch comes from Robert Sayre, and improves both the import and export of OPML files. Full details are on the Thunderbird Bugzilla tracker.

I have updated the patched, downloadable version of newsblog.jar for your hacking pleasure.

In case all of the above was gobbledygook to you, here are some definitions:

OPML
Outline Processor Markup Language. This is a file format often used by feed aggregators to exchange information about subscription lists.
Feed
Many web sites, both blogs and traditional news outlets, provide articles in a special format known as a ‘feed’. The most common feed format is RSS, but another, more recent, contender is Atom. A feed may contain the full text of all articles from a site, or in some cases, just summaries. By checking the feed periodically for updates, one can easily find out when new content is available in an automated fashion, typically by using a feed aggregator.
Feed Aggregator
Software designed to read feeds on a regular basis, and alert users to site updates. There are many variations on aggregators. Some are stand-alone applications, others are add-ons for existing applications, and some are web-based services. Using an aggregator is an effective way to monitor a large number of web sites and filter down to the very latest information quickly and efficiently.
Mozilla Thunderbird
The stand-alone email application from the Mozilla project. Recent versions of Thunderbird added the ability to read site feeds, however the user interface is still lacking several key features, such as the ability to mass-import (or export) subscription lists from an OPML file. The patch mentioned above adds this ability.
RSS
Really Simple Syndication, or alternately, Rich Site Summaries. There are several different versions of RSS, but the most common are RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, which are quiet different in their details. RSS 2.0 is a simpler XML format, while RSS 1.0 is an RDF format. Due to the confusion of “competing” versions of RSS, a segment of the blogging community invented a new format called Atom, which has been gaining in popularity.
Atom
The Atom specification came about as an effort to solve several problems in the various versions of RSS. In addition to the syndication format, it is also used as the core of a publishing API (similarly, RSS 2.0 was used as the core of the metaWeblog API. However, Atom is much more thoroughly thought-out). I won’t bore you with the details here. If you’re really interested, you can just Google up some links and spend a few hours catching up on the history.

Basically, if you want to keep up with the latest news from a large number of web sites, you use a news aggregator. You “subscribe” to a site’s news feed by adding it to the list of feeds in your aggregator. That software will then let you know which sites have updated, and which ones have not. When you see an update, you can either read it directly in the aggregator, or click a link to view the actual site in your web browser.

An aggregator will most often present you a summary of updates and headlines. You can quickly peruse this summary to determine which articles look interesting enough to read in more detail, and which ones you might want to just ignore. This is usually much quicker than clicking through to every site that you want to keep track of in your web browser, only to see that most of them haven’t updated since the last time you looked.

Challenges

Writing perl unit tests which need to simulate a web browser with cookie support connecting to a server from multiple network interfaces is challenging. Why would I need to do that? Well, when you work for a company whose business is providing controlled internet access to hotels, these sorts of things come up.

I’m not asking for help — I already know how to approach the problem. I’m just stating a fact. You know, in case anybody was curious about what I’m working on these days.

Hello, World!

Peppermint ver 0.2

Peppermint ver 0.2

World, meet Peppermint.

“Peppermint” is the working title for our new baby. This is in keeping with the food theme, since Jamie’s working title was “Puddin’” and Mary’s was “Pumpkin”. We don’t know the gender yet, as Susan is only about 13 weeks along. The doctor said that everything looks fine so far for both mother and baby.

We’ve also got “The Peppermint Show”, video of the ultrasound, where we get to see cute things like waving hands and kicking feet. Susan’s dad converted it to an mpeg video for us last night, but it’s 96MB, so I’m not uploading that at the moment.