If you’re a PHP Architect reader (or thinking of becoming one) then you may be interested in this:

@mtabini I feel like celebrating for no reason. 50% off everything at php|a (except #tek09) with this coupon code: LVQ0-Q1XN-AV6C (24hrs only!)

I was lucky enough to attend the Yahoo!7 Open Session this evening. While talking to some staff I discovered that they have the tiles with street maps for Australia, which are available on maps.yahoo.com.au, but they aren’t yet available via the maps API. Hopefully they’ll be available soon.

Over the last two days I’ve found a couple of hours to play with both Yahoo maps and Google maps. It’s my first attempt at building an application that plots data on a map. After starting with Yahoo I quickly moved to Google. The main reason for switching was because the Yahoo (API) maps don’t include street maps for Australia. This seemed kind of strange as maps.yahoo.com.au does include them. A quick check of some US cities and London showed that they did have street maps so I think I set it up correctly.

Currently it displays a marker on the map for every data point. The next challange is:

1. Only include markers that will be rendered on the current map,
2. Combining markers as the user zooms out.

Congratulations to comrade Rudd & the ALP on the inspired move of declaring themselves the winner of their own tender without even bidding. I’m sure that will teach pesky ISP’s who dare to stand up for their customers or challenge your infinite wisdom about Internet censorship. Now you have the perfect way to filter out all those unwanted nasties including:

• illegal material
• child porn
• pro-Liberal websites
• anything suggesting that Kevin ever claimed to be an economic conservative

Feel free to flame me if you disagree.

We’ve just cancelled the April SydPHP Group meeting. For more information check out http://www.sydphp.org/