The local nightly news just ran a segment on cell phone security, and one of their tips was to find out whether your service provider offers “Inscription software”.
To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if you know why this funny, you might be a geek.
Leo just blogged about A9.com‘s new “Block View” feature for their Yellow Pages and so I just had to try it out.
On their “How we did it” page they note that only a few major cities have been covered, but luckily for me, Atlanta’s one of them and I still remember a few things about Atlanta. I did a search for “varsity restaurant” and it came back with a list of possible hits, of which this one seemed like the best. Alas, there’s no block view image for the world’s largest drive-in, so I tried again with a search for “georgia tech” and landed here. This entry does have a block view image associated with it; now, for the moment of truth.
I recognized from the picture that we’re standing at the corner of North Avenue and that exit ramp that comes off of I-85 South, so I started clicking the little “Walk Right” navigation arrows to “move” to the right. Sure enough, I’m walking up North Avenue towards the Varsity; and after a few more steps, the Varsity’s parking lot comes into view! I only wish I could look “up” at this point, since you can’t see the Varsity’s big marquee sign out front. (If I walk a little further up the street, I can even see that the Subway restaurant at the corner of Spring Street is still there…)
I’m not exactly sure how useful this will be, in practice. If you’re already familiar with the area and some of the surrounding landmarks, as I was when “looking” for the Varsity, I can see how it would help you pinpoint the location of a business and perhaps what its storefront looks like in context. I’m not sure it would be quite as useful to me if I were trying to locate a business in an unfamiliar place, however.
But still, it’s way cool, isn’t it?
So I signed up to establish a Web site for the Auburn Knights Alumni Association, and since the primary focus of that Web site will be to keep the membership up to date with the latest news about what other members are up to, I’m leaning towards using some kind of web log as the front end. There will be other areas of the Web site that provide more archival data (e.g. old issues of the newsletter), but the front page is definitely where all the action will be.
Since we don’t have a real firm plan about what kinds of things we’ll want to do with the site in the future, I’m going to start out with a cheap hosting solution (most likely GoDaddy.com‘s $3.95/month plan). As a matter of personal preference, I’m looking for a lightweight blogging solution that generates static pages that I can upload to the site. One such solution is the venerable bloxsom, but to keep things in the Ruby family I thought I’d try out Hobix first.
Robert Brook is collecting some of the useful tips that have appeared on the Hobix mailing list. Elsewhere, on another of his Hobix pages, Robert reminded me of some hobix tutorials that I saw awhile back when I first started looking at all things Hobix. One of those tutorials (this one) provides what is probably the only description known to man of how Hobix’s “quick” templates work, and why you might want to use them. Actually, technically, those secrets were revealed on the Hobix mailing list way back in September 2004, as I just discovered while wandering through the mailing list archives; but you’d be hard-pressed to find them anywhere on the main Hobix Web site.
Two guys named Martin announced a couple of nice little FXRuby-based applications over the weekend.
First, there was Martin DeMello’s announcement of the latest version of FXIrb, an irb session embedded in a FOX window. As Martin noted in his announcement, this work builds on some code initially developed by Gilles Filippini (of FXScintilla fame) and later picked up by Marco Frailis.
This was followed up by Martin Ankerl‘s announcement of fxri, an FXRuby-based viewer for the ri-style documentation. There’s a nice screenshot over at Martin’s web log. Of special interest is that fxri integrates FXIrb into one of its panes, so that you can try out things on the fly to make sure that they work the way you think they do. Note that fxri depends on the FXRuby gem install and you may find it a challenge to get it working if you’ve installed FXRuby via the source tarball.
Not to be outdone, Laurent Julliard announced the latest version of FreeRIDE, the Ruby IDE. This version includes an irb plugin based on the previously mentioned FXIrb and Laurent says he’s also working on integrating fxri into FreeRIDE for a future release.
Update: Here’s a screenshot from Laurent, of fxri integrated into a future version of FreeRIDE. This is some pretty cool stuff.
Ed Dumbill has posted a nice short analysis of why he chose RDF instead of plain old XML for DOAP.
When he’s talking about the benefits of using RDF, it’s not really anything I hadn’t heard before when people are extolling the virtues of RDF; but it really helps to see what those benefits mean in the context of a specific application like DOAP. He wanted a decentralized system for describing projects and the relations between them and the people working on them, recognizing that any one source is unlikely to know all of those things about a project. He wanted the DOAP vocabulary to be easily extensible, not only by established ontologies like Dublin Core and FOAF, but by as-yet-unknown vocabularies.
Amazon.com is hosting the world premiere of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie trailer on their web site. I’m trying to maintain a positive attitude about it, despite the fact that I know that things won’t look exactly like I pictured them when I was reading the books. After all, the X-Men movies turned out so much better than I thought they would.
Also looks like the release date has been pushed up to April 29 (presumably to beat Episode III to the punch).
So my employer gave me a nice gift card for use at the local shopping mall, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I can spend it on. I generally try to avoid the mall and just don’t do a lot of shopping there anymore. But I was there today, buying Valentine’s Day stuff for the wife and realized what it is I’d like to buy for myself (as if I’d spend that gift card on anyone else).
No, it’s not one of those giant cookies. No, it’s not a remote-controlled Monster Truck from Radio Shack. It is Myst IV: Revelation, the latest game in the Myst franchise. I’ve been a fan of these games for a long time, from way back when I borrowed a co-worker’s copy of Myst and stayed up way too late for way too many nights trying to finish it.
Technically, since I have not yet finished Myst III: Exile, you might say that I need to hold off on buying yet another Myst game. To you, I say: Mind your own business. I want it. The problem, however, is that there seem to be a number of technical problems that would make it frustrating (if not impossible) to play the game on my Apple PowerBook running Mac OS X v10.3.7. So it looks like I have a little more research to do first, to see if there are workarounds to the problems. And if not, I need to wait patiently until Ubisoft gets another patch out.
Update: In an almost freakish twist of fate, MacRumors posted news of the Mac OS X Update 10.3.8 mere moments after I completed this post. I’m still going to wait and see if this update fixes things for the people who were having trouble after the 10.3.7 update, but keep your fingers crossed.
This morning Jeroen announced FOX version 1.4, the new stable release of that GUI toolkit. Work on this version of FOX began in May 2004, shortly after the release of FOX 1.2, so there’s a lot of good stuff in this release. A short list includes:
FXSplashWindow, FXChoiceBox, FXDockSite, FX7Segment, FXToolBarDock and FXDockBar.FXTable widget.Tom Copeland from RubyForge directs your attention to the latest download statistics for the One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows. Since Matz announced the Ruby 1.8.2 final release on December 25, 2004, and the final release of the one-click installer followed on January 1, 2005, it seems reasonable to assume that the 12,837 downloads during the month of January were all for that version. That’s more than twice the number of downloads during the month of December!