January 2005
Jan. 1, 2005
Where have all the good databases gone (via) Adam Bosworth talks to the open source community.
Image:Banda Aceh Before and After 2004 Tsunami.jpg (via) Devastating.
Pictures of Nothing. Tim Bray’s 2004 roundup.
Jan. 4, 2005
Review: The Sims 2 (via) This review had me in stitches.
Jan. 5, 2005
The Cultural Divide Between LiveJournal and Six Apart. Commentary on the rumoured Six Apart purchase of LiveJournal.
Google Search: inurl:“MultiCameraFrame?Mode=” (via) Unsecured webcams, another Google Hack.
Introducing mod_parrot. One Apache module for all the Parrot languages.
The Urinals of the Millennium Dome (via) I’ve long been telling people that these were the highlight of my visit to the dome.
map.search.ch (via) Unbelievably slick XMLHttpRequest powered map interface.
XOM Design Principles. Excellent guidelines for any API design.
ASCIIMathML.js. Translating ASCII math notation to Presentation MathML.
map.search.ch Launch. Technical blog entry about the awesome maps.search.ch.
map.search.ch
Forget about Google Suggest; if you want to see some really impressive dynamic web content go and have a play with map.search.ch. It uses XMLHttpRequest and a bunch of other tricks to let you smoothly pan and zoom over an enormous and detailed map of Switzerland, based on satelite photos (so you can zoom right in to individual streets and see the houses). Even better, it supports hackable URLs letting you link directly to cities or even street addresses.
[... 166 words]Jan. 6, 2005
Photos from my Christmas in France. Including my dad’s beautiful new horses.
Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal! (via) Brad’s post on the buy-out, with a detailed FAQ.
Gate’s Computer Crashes at CES. Sweet, sweet schadenfreude.
InfoWorld: Year of the enterprise Wiki (via) Wikis for business collaboration make a whole ton of sense.
SxSW 2005: Confirmed Speakers. Whoa! It’s like an A-Z of cool people I’d like to meet.
CSS: Mark-up guides. A smart way of reducing the CSS maintainability problem.
Truth and Bill Gates (via) Dan Gillmor’s outstanding response to the recent Bill Gates interview.
Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism. Dan’s on fire! A subscription to this blog is strongly recommended.
Jan. 7, 2005
Chicago 2004. Photos from my trip to Chicago in September 2004.
Publish or Be Damned. Excellent BBC Radio 4 program on the “open-access” movement in scientific publishing.
Jan. 8, 2005
safari not running preventDefault and stopPropagation. I’ve been bitten by this too; anyone know of a workaround?
Open source documentation (via) Wiki’s for technical docs. Note to Mozilla: PLEASE do this for your DOM support!
Decorators and explanations. Adrian explains decorators, and shows how our CMS has evolved since I left.
Greasemonkey: Hacking the Web with JavaScript. Greasemonkey rocks! Here’s a simple tutorial from Michael Moncur.
Fixing MSDN with Greasemonkey
Site specific browser customisations have been a a recurring theme on this site over the past six months. Thanks to the ever inventive Aaron Boodman that problem is pretty much solved. Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox that lets you create user site customisation scripts (.script.js), easily install them in Firefox and then set which sites they should be run on. Michael Moncur has a handy tutorial on getting started.
Jan. 9, 2005
Overcoming Procrastination (via) Some very smart sounding advice.
Jan. 10, 2005
Emulating Prototyping of DOM Objects in Internet Explorer. Paul Sowden with another cunning JavaScript hack.