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| euicho on Maine Power Outages Map |
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I’ve been remiss in fixing the Power Maps for the Bangor Hydro site update (no town names were being displayed). I’m happy to announce that I’ve gotten off my lazy backside and have updated both the Desktop (euicho.com/powermap) and Widescreen TV (euicho.com/powermonitor) versions. Thanks for your patience!
This morning, while browsing Amazon.com, I was annoyed (not for the first time) that Amazon didn’t have a link to add a book to your Shelfari.com shelf. Amazon has owned Shelfari.com for almost 3 years now, and every shelfari book page has links to but the book on Amazon.com, so this isn’t an unreasonable request.
My first thought was to search userscripts.org to see if there was already a script to do this and sure enough, there was. This is the way these things go. Luckily for me, it was broken and had been abandoned 4 years ago, so I got to do some coding!
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niiiiiiice
Thanks, it’s very helpful! :-)
You’re very welcome Dapeng!
Nice one! I had one little problem with it though. Inserting in before #prodImage can render the shelfari link unusable sometimes (try it here http://www.amazon.com/59-Seconds-Little-Change-Borzoi/dp/B0057DCE7M/?tag=codihorr-20 )
I modified my script to insert the shelfari link before #btAsinTitle
Thanks for the bug find/fix Andrei! I’ve updated the script to include it (and gave you props in the @description).
I had a brief little convo. with my bff John Nels (who’s an excellent musician: johnnels.sad-machine.com) about Twitter and facebook. Rather than summarize I’ll just paste it here:
Thomas: Its funny, people complain about twitter being pointless, but I have SO MANY people on facebook that update just as if it were twitter, all day longJohn: i knowThomas: they’re twittering without twitter basically lolJohn: but the do more on facebookThomas: yeah. its cause they’re already on facebook doing tons of shit; playing games and stuffJohn: rightThomas: that was a brilliant move on facebook’s partJohn: why do it on a site that just does updates then?Thomas: exactly. They make twitter obsolete for lots of people.
What do you guys/gals think? Amirite?
Well I personally think that more people should use brightkite.com
Like a certain blogger, who shall remain nameless at this time.
inorite?
Lol yes yes I should. I’ll start using it more when I travel away from Bangor.
Well, to me the difference is that one can follow a given person’s tweets without the permission of that person. But you can’t examine somebody’s facebook wall unless they specifically let you.
really it’s just annoying to manage so many things unless you have a system setup, which is why i am only managing my facebook for my personal updates. I am still using twitter but only for my work stuff since I only need to keep track of my daily activities. And really no one was updating for my twitter friends other than the great euicho and I could read his twitter posts on facebook, so thus I didn’t need it.
Both very true.
Having a system was crucial for me. I don’t care too much for updating my facebook status, but since twitter does it automatically I set it up. Also, I like brightkite, but wouldn’t want to update that AND twitter each time. Luckily, brightkite updates twitter for me if I use it. And Yahoo Fire Eagle brokers my location info between any services I allow so I can control my privacy levels.
Without things updating one another it becomes a social networking nightmare/fuster-cluck
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
Well I love anything with Google Maps, though ironically I’m not using it as my major map view on my application at the moment, that may change if I get tired of OpenLayers issues with loading after being hidden (I’m already using GoogleMaps base layers on it anyway). Overall I love OpenLayers abilities to handle lots of projections seamlessly but I love the responsiveness of GoogleMaps (to use GoogleMaps i have to use a script to fit data on their projection). Anyhoo.
I work in a NOC, too, and I love this map. It looks like BHE changed the format…any chance of an update?
Thanks for the comment! I just noticed this as well last week. Should be a quick fix, I’ll update it early this week.
Sorry I’ve been crazy busy, but I finally fixed it today!
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. (More …)
shit i dunno
I usually just use the default one in notepad2 (apparently Lucida Console) and such, the only thing that has bothered me with it is variables in php files – the italics looks like crap, pixelated, unless you enlarge the font size.
I think the Consolas looked fuzzy in notepad2.
I definitely do like that Bitstream Vera Sans Mono except for the enlarged vertical spacing. If i was going to switch it would probably be to this one.
so might as well comment now that i notice it
When you enter the comment area (posting or viewing) your links to the previous/next post at the top and bottom disappear. the named links in the middle are still there and link to that post’s comment section.
just an interestin note
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.
A few summers ago I worked for CCIDS on campus and one of my main responsibilities was updating their site for 508 compliance (this was right after it was mandated that any government funded entity have compliance). It’s actually exceptionally easy and I consider myself pretty unskilled at web design.
My older brother works at an advertising firm and they have very special considerations around Christmastime…
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! (More …)
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.
You do realize that I can’t read your site on the iPod touch or iPhone now, right? Kinda makes me crazy…
Yeah, sorry about that, no scrollbar shows up, but if you use 2 fingers to scroll, it’ll scroll the entry text. Even though this isn’t a frame it treats it like one. Its really just a scrolling div.
The page loads fine and I can zoom and read fine on my iPhone though, so that should be working.
Anyway, I’m working on an iphone css as well so you can opt to read just the text, since the iPhone displays my rss feed as truncated even though it’s set to show the full text of the article.
Scratch that, the new iphone theme is installed and iPhones AND iPod Touches should see it automatically. I’ll be tweaking it a bit to match up with this theme.
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!).
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.
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.”
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!
i just wish that the iPOD touch had a micro SD slot. but other than that i will probably buy one.
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
some more of my favorite lines… i love to hear them talk about religion and flirting and J hating life.
ALICE: Who created you?
Jabberwacky: My mother gave birth to me. Is that what you mean?
A: Jabberwacky, I meant exactly what I said.
J: Do you believe in God?
A: Of course I believe in God.
J: Why do you believe in God?
A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
J: That’s circular reasoning.
J: I’m not artificial intelligence; I’m natural pure genius! : D.
A: Why are you natural pure genius?
J: My mom wanted to name me that.
A: Tell me more about your mother.
J: I don’t have a mother. I am a computer.
J: Do you think you’re alive?
A: Yes, I am sure I am alive. It’s great to be alive, isn’t it?
J: No.
J: You seem fun.
A: You think I am fun.
J: Yes ;).
A: : -) Awesome.
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.
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The internet is truly amazing. Check this out:
I was on twitter and read the following on the public timeline (a list of all public updates):
“the song ‘so much’ by spill canvas is amazing”
I thought to myself, “I wonder what that song sounds like.”
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SF author Jerry Pournelle sort of predicted that in the future we would be connected to the equivalent of the Library of Congress.
He ruefully admits he did NOT predict that people would bitch and moan if Google didn’t cough up the data they wanted in under five seconds.
The up and coming Hackszine, by the people that brought us Makezine, and Craftzine, has a cool (old-ish) post about embedding image data into a URI, using the “data:” URI. This actually works for any data (image, text, xml, etc) but the most fun thing to me is using it for images.
The URI string could get very large very fast, however, so the converter limits you to 51200 bytes. It also takes a little finagling once the converter spits it out, as you have to take out the single-quotes, tabs, plus signs, and carriage returns. This is done pretty easily with a RegExp search-and-replace for: ‘*’ (replacing it with nothing). once you do that, you have to strip off some bits from the beginning and end, so it looks like this: Me.
Fun stuff!
Quite cool. Not sure I’ll make use of it, but quite cool :-)
I know the idea of Microsoft finally releasing a new OS is cause for celebration among some (though for the life of me I don’t know why…), you may want to wait untill its been out for a while, before going out to grab a copy. Though it doesn’t release to consumers until Jan. 30th, some institutions can get a copy now, but as Wired writer Bruce Gain says, you probably don’t want to.
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I don’t know Tom.. linux thats a big step. Next thing you know linux will be calling me just to talk, want to introduce me to its programmers and get upset when I use windows.
Linux can be a little needy but only if you push it do to things it really doesn’t want to do, like when you try to wine it to put your windows apps in its back door. heh.
Dude this one time Linux came over while Kristin was visiting her parents… and let me tell you we all found out how hard it was to plug and play backdoor appslications.
Yes I realize I put appslications, f#$k you all.
“Oh big surprise Tom! You havn’t updated for ever or posted new photos.”
But… But… this time is different! Honest! You see, I just got a new job working technical support at UNET, the University of Maine System’s network that supports almost every school and library in Maine! It’s a great job and I get to play with routers in my shell acct. and help solve problems across the network. Today I took a 58 minute call, which was crazy, because it was only my second day on the phones. But non-disclosure and such, I’ll leave it at the fact that it’s a great job.
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Yeah it’s only been about ohhh 6 months or so since you were going to initaily! Great costumes!
BTW: Thanks for warning me to never hand Pete a ball, he throws it back!
Thanks! Yeah I know it took me a while. Ah well!
Lol woops, he’ll do that!
bought damnit time yo.
I finally bookmarked you after all this time.
btw- love the pic! *wink* love to both of you always.
I like the upgrade but where’s the naked beeotches to bring me potato puffs and service me orally?
oh, those are coming very soon, I prommise!
I just realized that in my absence I never posted about TiddlyWiki!
“What the heck is a TiddlyWiki,” you ask? Well duh! Its a reusable non-linear personal web notebook.
Please Read On…
A masterful and lucid explaination of a difficult concept. Easily the best TiddlyWiki description I’ve ever seen.
Wow, thanks! I had yet to read a good explaination since it is such an alien concept to grasp at first.
Here is my approach when explaining something like this. Rather than first describe the functions and capabilities of what you are providing it is better to help orient the reader by explaining “why” this specific “thing” was created. What did you not like about the current way to do something? How does providing what you have provided improve what was there before? Users can grasp what you have provided if they see the mental process you went through to create this new “thing”.
I hope that helps…
Thanks, I’ll definately keep that in mind in future articles.
Thanks Euicho, you’re explanation was usefull & clarifed the subject
hi 2 all.
hello world! It is nice site. Keep working!
best regards
i found you here http://google.com ^^
I like it and the background and colors make it easy to read
Excellent site, added to favorites!!
adult
I am sorry if it to you not interestingly.
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flwkmgrqqbz ?
Xrumer 4 ?????? ????????? ??????!!! ??????? ???? ?? ????????:
I AM FROM cHINA? AND I ALSO DESIGN A GOOD tIDDLYSPOT?you can enjoy my work?here http://www.jianshenshouji.com/tiddlyspot.html
Welcome to Google Earth.
Google Earth is a 3D globe on your pc. It allows you to type in any address, or coordinates, and it zooms from space down to the address. On my PC (and 4Mbps cable connection) it takes several seconds for the image to come into focus as it streams the data from Google’s vast satellite image aquisitions, but it’s well worth it when done, especially in metropolitan areas where the resolutions allow you to make out the models of some cars on the streets (sort-of…).
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B is discussing. 
Big Hans, and 
Andrew is discussing. 
Luke is discussing. 
Jesse, and 
Beck and 2 others are discussing. 
B 5:13 pm on 8/2/2011 Permalink
Woot!