I bashed Google Maps before for suggesting ludicrous trips across the Bay of Sidney in order to cross a street, but this is way more funny than annoying.
Archive for March, 2007
The Two Percent Company’s Rants: “So there’s a lesson to be learned here (a lesson that we’re sure Master Yanagiryuken didn’t learn, as he’s no doubt still busy deluding himself and reassuring his fans that his Kiai just had an ‘off day’). In simplistic Zen/Dao/fortune-cookie terms, this lesson might best be phrased as: ‘Bullshit tested is bullshit confirmed.’ Maybe — some day — more people will learn this lesson, and think more carefully about the absurd claims they’re willing to unequivocally offer. Or maybe they’ll just have to get their faces kicked in on a voluntary basis…and then hand over a $5000 bullshitting fine.”
You just have to admire the old fool. He put his wallet (and his face) where his mouth was. I wish all the other peddlers of bullshit would be similarly confident in their “powers”. That would be fun.
Technorati Tags: Yanagiryuken.
Following the lead of Jeremy and Leo, here are my latest geo-tagged photos on Google maps. Not a lot of exotic destinations of late, as you can see.
Now it would be nice if there were a parameter that allowed you to show more than the latest 20 or so pictures. Or show a map for a specific set. There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell Flickr to generate a feed for a set, though it is possible to generate a feed for a tag. So here’s the map of all my photos tagged “umbria”, which is only a subset of all the pictures taken on a recent trip to Umbria.
In the end, using the Yahoo-supplied map on Flickr itself gives more complete results, though probably less amenable to cool mash-ups.
Regarding the recent brouhaha over RedHat®’s cease and desist letters against people and companies offering JBoss® and Hibernate® training, here’s my two (Euro) cents:
- RedHat® is perfectly in its rights to ask that people use their trademarks in the proper way, so as not to dilute it. IANAL, but should I ever offer Hibernate® services, I’ll be careful to do it under the moniker of “Support (or training) for the Hibernate® Object Relational Mapping Software” or somesuch, just to be safe.
- Lawyers, as usual, are a bunch of wankers. First they send out threatening letters asking that companies do not use the Hibernate® and JBoss® names at all, then they backtrack and change their stance, hoping those who received the C&D letter will never read Bill’s blog.
- Gavin King is at best disingenuous when he writes that “Apache owns and defends their trademarks”. If Apache defended its trademarks with the same ferocity as RedHat, you’d expect ASF lawyers sending out C&D letters to Covalent for putting on their website an announcement for “Apache, Tomcat, Geronimo & Axis Free Web Seminars”, just to name an example.
Having said that RedHat®, as a company that needs to make a profit, after all, can behave as any other “evil” corporation, if it pleases them, let me add the following: I might be an idealist, but I believe Open Source companies should act differently. Otherwise all this talk of community is just lame and hollow.
Google Data APIs (Beta) Developer’s Guide: “The Google data APIs (’GData’ for short) provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web.
GData uses either of two standard XML-based syndication formats: Atom or RSS. It also has a feed-publishing system that consists of the Atom publishing protocol plus some extensions (using Atom’s standard extension model) for handling queries.
Each of the following Google services provides a Google data API:
- Google Apps Provisioning
- Google Base
- Blogger
- Google Calendar
- Google Code Search
- Google Notebook
- Google Spreadsheets
- Picasa Web Albums”
As DeWitt Clinton wrote on the atom-protocol mailing list:
What never ceases to amaze me is that APP was applicable in so many cases. A true testament to the power of the protocol.
It’s indeed noteworthy the amount of buy-in and mindshare the Atom Publishing Protocol has gained in such a short time. And it hasn’t even reached RFC status yet.
I don’t know what to make of GodTube. Looks like a serious site, but there are some videos there which are so stupid you can’t help but wonder whether it’s all a parody or not. Take poor Charley and his creationist babble: it takes a comic genius to reach such heights of idiocy. And what about that man and his banana as the atheist’s nightmare? Hilarious.
Admittedly, the PC vs. Mac spoof ads are well done and can make you smile a little, but would someone please explain what’s this distinction between a “Christian” and a “Christ follower”? I never heard of it before.
I also tried to have a look at IslamTube. Unfortunately the site is so slow that I wasn’t able to watch even a single video. Judging from the descriptions, they aren’t funny at all, rather quite grim. I can only imagine the level of idiocy is about the same as GodTube.
I just installed the Krugle plug-in for Eclipse (beta) and I have to say that it is quite good. Now when I’m working in Eclipse and using some Open Source library, I can look up its code and load it in the editor, without switching to the browser.
TO be honest, I would like to always have a Maven or Ivy repository complete with sources and javadocs for all the libraries I’m using, but that is often not the case, so I welcome Krugle plug-in.
What a show was yesterday night’s total Moon eclipse! The air was as clear as a crisp winter night can be, so I headed out of town with a friend, we mounted our tripods in the countryside and spent a couple hours shooting at the moon with our cameras.
Thanks to my long zoom, I could fill a decent portion of the frame with the moon and got some nice shots. Unfortunately, as the umbra of the Earth started covering more and more of the Moon, which was getting more and more dark and reddish in color, two factors contributed to make the pictures of the totality phase less then appealing.
The first problem is that my camera is very bad when it comes to focusing in low light conditions. Fortunately, I had manual focus on and set it when the moon was still bright enough, so I could have still saved most of them, but in the dark I didn’t realize that humidity was condensing on the lens as the night grew colder. I wasn’t aware of this until this morning, when I saw this particular picture.
Anyway, I put the best pictures in this set on Flickr, but I had really hoped for some nice “red moon” images. Maybe I’ll have better luck next time. The next lunar eclipse, on August 28, is going to be total as well. The only problem is that the best place to see it will be French Polynesia. Should I start booking a trip to Tahiti for my next summer vacations? 
So Mr. Scoble didn’t like Joost:
I installed it. It took over my entire screen. I couldn’t figure out how to get out. Or get back to Google Reader and Outlook and my other apps.
Well, I’m lying. I know how to get back to other apps. Alt-Tab.
Or Ctrl-Alt-Delete, which pulls up task manager and I can kill that process.
I did that and promptly deleted it.
What a rude app. I don’t care how cool it is. You don’t take over my desktop if you want me to use you.
Well, fair enough. I guess if he ever gets a Mac, he’ll delete FrontRow and the DVD player. Hint: different is not always worse.
Meanwhile, it’s possible to read the Scobleizer’s feed in Joost, as evidenced by Eric Rice here.
And I still have a bunch of Joost invites left. Just promise to blog about it (even negatively as Scoble does) and I’ll send you one.
DM’s Esoteric Programming Languages - Intelligent Design Sort:
Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design.
Algorithm Description
The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it’s in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it’s clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it’s safe to assume that it’s already optimally Sorted in some way that transcends our naïve mortal understanding of “ascending order”. Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted.
(Via Marc.)
Here’s a tip for speeding up Mail.app, in case it appears sluggish. Here’s how I did it on my MacBook Pro:
MaBi:~/Library/Mail ugocei$ ls -l Envelope Index -rw-r--r-- 1 ugocei ugocei 84746240 Mar 2 17:08 Envelope Index MaBi:~/Library/Mail ugocei$ cp Envelope Index Envelope Index.bak MaBi:~/Library/Mail ugocei$ sqlite3 Envelope Index SQLite version 3.1.3 Enter ".help" for instructions sqlite> vacuum subjects; MaBi:~/Library/Mail ugocei$ ls -l Envelope Index* -rw-r--r-- 1 ugocei ugocei 75509760 Mar 2 17:11 Envelope Index -rw-r--r-- 1 ugocei ugocei 84746240 Mar 2 17:09 Envelope Index.bak
Notice that the index didn’t shrink by much. Other people have reported much larger reductions, but starting from a smaller initial size.
I am also not sure Mail.app’s performance is much better now. It wasn’t particularly bad to start with, if not occasionally and when opening very large messages. I’ll have to use it for a while before I am able to tell the difference, if there’s any.
