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Written by Rich on April 25th, 2009Yahoo! Maps Part 2
Written by Rich on April 22nd, 2009I 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.
Yahoo! maps versus Google maps
Written by Rich on April 20th, 2009Over 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:
- Only include markers that will be rendered on the current map,
- Combining markers as the user zooms out.
National Broadband Network
Written by Rich on April 8th, 2009Congratulations 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.
April PHP Group Cancelled
Written by Rich on April 1st, 2009We’ve just cancelled the April SydPHP Group meeting. For more information check out http://www.sydphp.org/
freeview debacle
Written by Rich on March 10th, 2009I don’t know who made the decision to go after the freeview parody for copyright infringement but I’m guessing that right now they wish they could undo that decision. I’m pretty sure they were hoping to limit the number of people who saw the parody but instead they only seem to have encouraged people to watch it.
March SydPHP is tonight
Written by Rich on March 5th, 2009The March Sydney PHP Group meeting is on tonight. Once again it will be hosted by Mobile Messenger. If you’re planning to attend then meeting in the foyer downstairs (17 York St) from 6.20
Faster web applications using message queues
Written by Rich on February 4th, 2009The first meeting of the Sydney PHP Group for 2009 will be at 6pm on Thursday, February 5. We have a new venue above Wynyard station and you need to RSVP using Upcoming. This month I’ll be speaking about faster web applications using message queues.
Sending an email to one or two people from a contact form is pretty simple but what happens when sending an email means 5,000 of your closest friends? Richard will cover how some of the largest websites provide fast response times by off-loading intensive, non-critical jobs to back end processes.
Connecting to Windows VPN
Written by Rich on January 28th, 2009After much pain I found this great article about how to connect to a Windows VPN from Ubunto 8.10. Thanks Dean!!
Lenovo fail
Written by Rich on January 26th, 2009About a year ago I purchased a Lenovo laptop. Being a Linux user I installed Linux on it and went along happily until a few months back when I installed the 64 bit version of Ubuntu. Suddenly I felt like a second class citizen. It’s bad enough that some software barely supports Linux but to suddenly have many applications completely unavailable because they’re 32 bit only was too much.
After putting up with this for about a month I decided that I need to switch. My choices were 32 bit Linux or Vista (which the system came with). During the last week I decided I would give Vista a try. The long weekend seemed like the perfect time to make the switch.
Sadly Lenovo don’t provide a restore CD or DVD instead using a protected recovery partition which I had been careful to keep. After starting my laptop I pressed the ThinkVantage button to start the recover process. I selected a complete factory restore using the wizard only to be told that it could not restore my system at the very end. The problems seems to have been caused because it could not find the Windows partition it was expecting.
Personally I always found the idea of a recovery partition to be dangerous at best. What if my hard drive fails? In that situation the last thing I would want to do is fork over more money to Microsoft for an operating system I already owned.
The end result is that I’m still running Ubuntu (the 32 bit version). Most of the applications I require are available again but I’m still without the latest features that Windows user have had for years.
LENOVO YOU SUCK!!
This site contains my personal ramblings on Linux, PHP, Java, .NET and anything else that I feel is important.