Maine Power Outages Map
Working in a NOC, I often consult the two Maine power companies that have online outage information (there is a third that does not have such a feature). If I see many circuits go down at the same time I'll check to see if there is an outage in the area by checking both those websites, then going to Google maps to see how far away the sites are from the current outages. This is a tedious process and I finally decided to do something about it by creating my own Google map with their wonderful API. I'd never used it before so this proved a great way to learn how to use it as well. After setting up the screen scraping to pull info off the power companys' websites, getting the app to do just what I wanted, and working around some minor speed bumps, it's done!
Google's API is quite easy to work with, and I'm very pleased with the results. For most people this map isn't very useful, and at any one time there are only a few markers plotted on it, but for myself it will be quite useful, and it was a great learning process. You can view the Maine Power Outages map at http://euicho.com/power
Monospaced fonts CAN scale
Like many programmers, I have a couple of favorite fixed-width "coding fonts" that I use for writing and viewing source code, however most of them are bitmap based and do not scale up "prettily" by any means.
Fortunately there are some great monospaced fonts that do scale up nicely. In my experience, it is important for me to use both my own favorite fixed-width fonts, and the great fixed-width ones below. This is because at small sized, most vector-based fonts like some below look fantastic at larger sizes, like on web pages or in print, but look fuzzy or blurry in the 8-12pt range in notepad++, gedit, etc. Conversely, my favorite bitmap based fonts only look good at one size, usually in the 8-10pt range, and are pixelated and blocky at larger sizes.
My Accessibility: let me show it to you.
I really have to say that after only a few pages into Mark Pilgrim's book Dive Into Accessibility, I find myself both laughing and feeling strongly for the fictitious characters he's created to illustrate the need for, and problems presented by, accessability. Anybody that runs a website or blog should check it out. At the very least commit yourself to a couple of pages. Its a valuable use of your time.
By the way, euicho.com is currently not section 508 compliant, but it will be very shortly. Its something I've been meaning to take care of. In the meantime, at least it does render very nicely in lynx.
Firefox 3 is out!
Starting at 1pm EST today, the OFFICIAL Firefox 3 release is in the wild!
This marks the start of Download Day 2008, an effort to break the world record for most downloads in a day, and spread the Firefox 3 love!
The Desktop – My New Layout
Well, I figured it was about time for a change. I've had the forest theme on here since I moved to the euicho.com domain, and frankly my website felt a little stale.
Although I haven't blogged about them much, some of you may know I have a somewhat-secret love affair with moleskines that has lasted for a few years now. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of undoing that elastic band, opening up to a fresh page, and writing down anything that comes to mind. One day when I was sketching website layouts in in my large moleskine I stepped back and realized that I needed to change my P.O.V.
Simple Chord Arpeggiation
I think Celemony has just changed digital audio manipulation forever. Watch this video, its so awesome! They've created what they call "Direct Note Access", which i call arpeggiation, or breaking a chord down to its individual notes. This may seem simple but was never possible before! We've always wanted it, but to my knowledge nobody had yet done it (or at least not in a consumer product with a simple GUI to boot!).
Twoosh Spotter: A Greasemonkey Script
EDIT (10/6/2009): Twoosh Spotter is now up to v2.0. I've fixed it so that the tweets shown after hitting the "more" button get checked for twooshes, and also fixed a bug where "&" was converted to "& a m p ;" and counted as 4 characters instead of 1.
I recently came across a new portmanteau on Twitter called a "twoosh" (TWitter swOOSH)!
Coined by rentzsch, A twoosh is a twitter that hits the 140 character limit exactly on the nose. This is just one of those fun little oddities that people like to play with, but unless the poster follows up their twoosh with another post pointing it out, the twoosh goes unnoticed by all but the equally twoosh endeared... and those with OCD.
Kaiser Kuo is Full of $hi7
Torrentfreak.com has written an article analyzing why there is no way Kaiser Kuo's claim that Blin.cn's new P2P technology is 50x faster than Bittorrent. Its definately worth a read to educate yourself about the current state of the art.
TorrentFreak contacted Ashwin Navin, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent Inc. When confronted with the 50 times faster than BitTorrent claim, he said: “BitTorrent can regularly saturate your downstream capacity, which in layman’s terms means BitTorrent is as fast as you can get. The claim is indicative of the fact that BitTorrent is the global standard for P2P transfers, against which all others are compared. BitTorrent DNA took that standard up significantly, but we don’t run around making sensationalist claims to get buzz.”
I told you Vista was bad!
Just how bad is Vista? Let us ask PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback!
note: link is to Slashdot for credit's sake, but you can go directly to the article here, which is mostly about Louderback moving on to Revision3, a most excellent internet TV company that hosts 3 of my favorite videocasts: Diggnation, thebroken, and Systm. All definately worth the watch!
When chatbots meet…
There is a fascinating article in Discover Magazine about chat bots, and it turns out very intelligible conversations can occur when two chat bots converse only with each other:
J: Well, you should develop your skills.
A: Perhaps you could develop it and add it to my source code.
J: Alas, I'm busy and I have to leave soon. . . .
A: Do you think we'll ever fool people into thinking we're alive?
J: No.
A: Are you serious?
J: Very serious.
Read the full article at discovermagazine.com
Boost your Internet Connection in 2 minutes
I just came across a great little utility today, and am amazed I've not heard about it before now. Its called TCP Optimizer, and it's greatly boosted my download speeds.
Recent Photos
Lifestream
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Booya! http://twitpic.com/2j58ac [euicho]
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Shared 3 links.
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I couldn't figure out why I felt so shitty all of a sudden. Then it hits me: I had coffee for the first time in a week and I'm crashing now [euicho]
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Frack does Fairfield stink of manure! It comes through my AC vents! [euicho]
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Shared Deep Surplus.
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Checked in at Work
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At the fair, eating fried dough. Don't tell our Midwives! [euicho]
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Checked in at Eastern Maine Emergency Veterinary Clinic
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Packin and mooovin! Found a lot of dust bunnies! [euicho]
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Checked in at Verve
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The new Automata guest strips are effing awesome. (Original: http://j.mp/26LCa3, 1st set: http://j.mp/b0azD, new start: http://j.mp/9qfPKA) [euicho]
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OMG The Pillars of the Earth mini-series! [euicho]
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Watched Pandorum last night. I love dead ship exploration movies (space and sea), so I really liked it. Sorta like Survival-horror meets SGU [euicho]
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