Yep, it’s live: Google Maps UK. Same features as the US version but without the creepy satellite photos (yet). Pretty accurate, good route-finding (although it automatically assumes A-roads are faster than anything else, which is not the case in London), and all the business data is taken from Yell so it’s got lots of great stuff in. Like, for instance, all the Indian restaurants near me. The top link, Indigo, I can strongly recommend.
Recycled Plasticbag
19 April 2005
Tom Coates has redesigned Plasticbag. He’s worried about people not liking it; I say don’t worry. It’s a design that will support the longer blocks of text that Tom’s moving towards. It’s also a very pleasant site to read text on – too many people design sites badly for longer blocks of text, partly because they assume that everyone reads in RSS now. It reminds me a lot of Interconnected, another site that I love reading posts on (as opposed to merely from).
I’m also a big fan of the archives; perhaps the date-based stuff could be laid out better, but I do like the simple breakdown of each category.
I’m now a bit worried about the current look of Infovore; I’m still working out how to use the site, what sort of material will be posted on it, and how best to present that. It’s not even that I like redesigning; I just feel the content could be better presented. Tweaking, I think, could be the way forward.
Hacking a coffee machine
18 April 2005
Brian Meidell is hacking his workplace coffee machine. For serious. Dumping EPROMS, burning new ones. Not sure what he’s going to do with it yet, but it looks mighty fun.
SCIgen
14 April 2005
SCIgen produces randomised, automatic computer science papers. With graphs and diagrams and everything; clever Perl scripting combined with LaTeX abuse. The results are funny in themselves, but even better – the team of MIT grads who made it have been invited to give one of these talks at a conference. Bravo, young sirs.
Tiger here we come
12 April 2005
Woo yeah, baby: OS X Tiger is here in seventeen days… and for once, I’ll be able to buy it.
Multiple loops on the same page in WordPress 1.5
12 April 2005
I’ve been meaning to write up some of my WordPress-fu since I started playing with it. This is partly because the WordPress support forums are staggeringly unhelpful at times, especially to medium-skill users. (Note: this is not a flame or a troll; it is an issue I will return to at a later date. Whilst I like the product, I have several worries and issues with the community around it).
This is about the first big chunk of fiddling I did with WordPress, and makes it very useful as a more general purpose CMS, as well as if you have many categories on your site and want to display them all, at once, differently. So, without further ado: how to display multiple loops in WordPress 1.5.
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PerlNomic
11 April 2005
PerlNomic is a game of Nomic played out entirely in Perl source code. In short, it hurts my head.
Pic of me from Blogs In Action
11 April 2005
Semi-goofy photo of me from Blogs In Action (courtesy of Lee Bryant). Focused, intent… and writing notes on my Powerbook. Still, sideburns in full effect.
Calm Weekend, Culinary Action
10 April 2005
A lovely weekend there, then; very quiet, very calm. No big surprises, but lots of lies-in (I think that’s how you’re meant to pluralise it), reading, and tidying stuff up. House looking a lot better now. Also, as the picture to the left testifies: we made meatloaf.
It was awesome. Not only did we make it (and eat it), but there’s still tons left over to make sandwiches with. So, I hear you ask, how do you make meatloaf?
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Typo
07 April 2005
“Typo is a absolutely minimal weblogging engine”. There’s no admin interface; you just set it up and from that point post to it via XMLRPC. Nifty – it’s a database driven app, unlike, say, Blosxom, but all from desktop applications. Plus, it’s written in the language and framework du jour – Ruby on Rails.