My Mum was up in Edinburgh to visit Kerry and I on Friday and Saturday of last weekend. She shopped most of Friday and then we met up and went out for dinner in Kalpna. Kalpna is famous in Edinburgh for its food and this was the first time any of us had been. It serves Indian food but all vegetarian. The portions look small but the food is somehow deliciously dense. Good stuff.

On Saturday we went to 80 Queen Street for the ‘Jazz Brunch’, which is surprisingly on Queen Street. Its a gorgeous cosy hotel-like bistro place which does delicious food accompanied by some nice light jazz.

It’s amazing what you can do in your lunch break.

David Jones the guy behind Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings is currently working on a new game called All Points Bulletin (APB). It’s a MMOG but not in the Warcraft vein, instead it pits the factions that want to uphold the law against the rabble who prefers to break it. Sounds a little bit like an online GTA to me which is not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t sound amazingly original but then most of the stuff from Dave Jones turns out to be gold-dust.

There is a fascinating and informative history of multimedia and ‘interactive design’ over on smackerel.net. It’s written by some guys who’ve been around since the birth of the mac and really, really know their stuff.

I wish Google would filter out all these lame Adwords that just parrot back your search terms. They often make for some very silly results:

Just noticed, I seem to be the 3rd most know Olly in the world.

The blogging software I use for the front page of the site is the very nice WordPress. Version 1.5 has recently come out and has some very nice improvements so I upgraded last night. It was pretty painless but not as nice as the install process, could do with a little polish. The main new feature is a themes system which was sorely needed. Originally you had to hack about with all the default wordpress files to change the look and feel of various areas. This was done as nicely as possible through a web interface but still you were messing with things that could really break your blog. The new system allows you to create “themes” which are basically separate pages and styles for the different elements of your blog; the front page, the comment page etc. Now, you can leave the default WordPress theme alone and hack about to your hearts content. I converted my hacked pages to a new “cyber-junky” theme and switched WordPress over to use this. It worked surprisingly well. I had to make a few changes but that is mainly becuase of the way I use WordPress, I don’t use it soley as my front page. This theme system fits nicely into the old adage of seperating content from style, where the content is the blog logic/code and the style is the theme.

If you spot any bugs, please let me know.

update: wahey, it’s just been officially announced. Matt seems like such a nice guy 🙂

Both sixapart.com and moveabletype.org have had a re-vamp. A lot less cluttered and much easier to read. These rounded boxes seem to be getting very popular aswell, I’m seeing them everywhere.

Google have yet again pulled an amazing piece of work out of their magical hat. Google Maps is the latest project to enter their ‘beta’ program. It manages to dynamically resize your window, scroll with the mouse in real time, zoom in almost real time, search for businesses in the current map area and can be controlled via keyboard shortcuts! Its only the US at the moment but knowing google it won’t stay that way for long. They also manage to cram in route-finding, that will show you the route and give you a list of directions.

Like Google Suggest they do lots of requests in the background to maintain the ‘current page’ for the user. This time its not all with that new fangled XMLHTTP object, they request content in a hidden iframe and then switch it about. Even cooler though is the fact that they actually get back XML data and use a javascript XML object to do the transformation into something readable. It looks like the map segements are all pre-rendered aswell, they seem to want to keep the processing as much client side as possible. Which is extremely sensible for google as I’m sure they have a lot of computing power, but not unlimited.

More reading:

http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/09.html
http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html

Great interview with Neal Stephenson over on reason.com: Past, Present, and Future: The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America

This is very cool. It basically allows you to do slide shows in very simple XHTML and then the system does all the navigation and progress bars and basic layout. Very nice use of the technology. I must remember to try to use it the next time I have to make a presentation.

One blog that caught my eye as I was browsing the 2005 bloggies entries was SimpleBits. The design is very, very nice. It’s pixelly, very tight and precise and I love the colour scheme. I think I need more icons on the site here, another thing to do when I’m feeling better.

Some new FireFox extensions that I’ve discovered recently:

• ColorZilla gives you a little dropper in the status bar to quickly get the colour value of any pixel on a page. Great for matching colours or one of those “ooo, thats a nice colour” moments.
• Google PageRank adds the page rank of the current page to your status bar. Handy when you’re optimising pages for search engines.

I’m ill, been off work since last Friday. Being ill sucks…