The BBC recently launched their backstage project that aims to provide lots of the BBC’s data to developers to play around with and develop innovative applications. They currently have lots of RSS/XML feeds for all kinds of data like: news, weather, travel, sport etc. I’ve knocked up a prototype using Google maps and plotting the current UK travel data onto it.
archive for May, 2005
Threadless have another $10 sale on. Get out the credit card…
I submitted the site for inclusion in dmoz months ago. I’ve done this one or two times before and usually nothing happens; no inclusion, no email nothing. But this time I actually got in! Along with the 8 gatrillion other people in the “Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Personal/” category of course. Behold.
Now this is a sexy looking console. Give me this over the Xbox 360 and PS3 any day.
This guy is making a port of Grand Theft Auto for the NES, yes the NES. He is one dedicated guy, considering he had to make: an assembler, graphics editor, map editor and a host of other tools all from scratch just to make this game!
Another super-cool use of Google maps here. Chicago Crime plots all the crime data made available from the Chicago Police Department. Check out all crimes reported in the 3 a.m. hour on May 5, 2005 in Chicago. You can even map out all the prostitution busts. Excellent combination of the two technologies. Needless to say I’m working on something very similar at the moment for Google Sightseeing.
I just updated the site to WordPress 1.5.1 and being the numpty that I am lost all my images and themes. Stupid ‘replace’ and ‘merge’ buttons in ftp client….
Anyway, I dug through the backups and manged to extract all the bits I lost. All should be good now. If you spy any problems leave me a comment here.
Mutt is awesome. It’s a super hardcore console email client that I’ve been using for my personal mail at work. Not that I’m trying to be sneaky, but it keeps the personal mail out of the way in a terminal, and stops me getting distracted by it all the time. It supports IMAP nicely and has an insane level of customisation. I’ve got it colouring my inbox mails differently depending on the status of them and what their subjects/senders are. Its pretty neat. It also does threading, threading! I can’t live without it now and it drives me insane when I see people reading their mail in the wrong order through something like hotmail.
Great article by John Oxton on the current web design fashions. I was toying with using some of those “special offer” stars on the site here somewhere :).
These paintings by Robert LaDuke in the Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery are aces. They remind me a bit of those old British Railways posters saying ‘Skegness is Great’ and ‘Come see Blackpool’.
Wow, that was a great weekend. I am absolutely knackered, bruised, battered and still slightly hungover. But it was all fun! We were staying in some nice log cabins in the Yorkshire Dales for Friday and Saturday night. We got take-away from the nearest town on Friday and then drank and played poker for the rest of the night. When I say ‘played’ I really mean ‘bumbled along’. As only three of the ten of us knew how to play properly. They, of course, gave us a 2 second introduction and then launched into a full game of texas hold ’em. Good job we were only playing for chips 🙂
Saturday was spent getting covered in mud and paint at Go Ballistic paintballing in Dishforth. It was the first time I’d been paintballing and it was great fun. Wish I’d taken some gloves though as shots in the knuckles really sting. We had booked for a whole day and to be honest we could have just done with half. We were all knackered and out of paint (£6 for 100 shots!) by the afternoon. All fun though, and we had a game of ‘Hunt the Stag’ at the end 🙂 After a hard day fooling around with paint we collapsed back to the cabins got some dinner and then went on the ‘pub crawl’. There were only two pubs in the nearby village so it only just qualifies. After having a couple of jars in the first pub we go searching for the next one, only to find its not there. We stumble around in the dark for half an hour or so before giving up and going back to the cabins for more drink.
The next day we go to the (first) pub for a cracking Sunday lunch. The bar man has a good laugh at our expense as the mystical second pub had been demolished about three months ago. Oh and sunday lunch really was good, I’d heartily recommend it to anyone in their direction.
Stacks of photos for your viewing pleasure in our collective gallery.