Techn(ical|ology)

Most posts will probably end up in this category one way or another, because I tend to write a lot about technology and tech-related topics. I work online and really enjoy gadgets and gizmos, so a lot of what I get involved in revolves around those subjects. Anything from regular expressions to iPods to The Magic Bullet is fair game.

It’s a FooCamp For The Restuvus

So I may not have received an invite to FooCamp, but now that I’m living in San Francisco, I’m able to attend the first ever BarCamp. I’m posting from there right now, and I’m just checking things out and getting a feel for the place. So far it’s pretty cool – lots of interesting people and discussions, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the day.

More to come.

Here Comes The Giki

You heard it here first – I predict that Google will soon release a wiki-based product of some kind. I don’t know what they will do, or how they will make it ‘simpler’ or ‘smarter’ than wikis are already, but that’s their problem I suppose.

I got my most recent copy of the ‘Google Friends‘ newsletter, and towards the end, completely unrelated to anything else in the newsletter, they offer a definition (sort of) of what a Wiki is. They provide a link to Wikipedia and then leave it at that.

Google have already delved into the world of blogs (they own Blogger.com and run their own GoogleBlog), so I guess it was only a matter of time before they got into wikis as well. I wonder where this is going to go… especially since Yahoo! is already an avid supporter of Wikipedia at least (hosting some of their servers).

Interesting Addition to Flickr

In their continued integration with other Yahoo! properties, Flickr has added a ‘Find Similar Images on Yahoo! Image Search’ link to their tags pages. What interests me is the search string that is automatically built into that link.

Looking at the tag page for ‘san francisco’, the link doesn’t go to the Y! Image search for just that tag, it is an automatically-built complex query (san francisco california OR bridge OR goldengatebridge OR goldengate OR alcatraz) which appears to be created using Flickr’s automagical tag-relations building feature. It’s calculating that those other words are related, so it’s including them in the search to broaden the result-set. Pretty cool!

AvantBlog Now Supports Titles

Now that I have a new Atom API library to play with (thanks to the development of webpad), I threw together a new copy of AvantBlog in about 40 minutes.

This version supports titles (so everyone can stop asking now!) and I improved some of the messages a little as well. There is also a new feature which allows you to specify the size of the edit fields so that you can maximize the use of your device’s screen-size.

To specify a custom size, add ?w=XX&h=YY to the end of the URL in AvantGo (or your handheld’s bookmark), where XX is the width of the main post body (and title field) and YY is the height. These values should be somewhere in the range of 10 – 30 each. You will need to play around to see what’s right for your device, but as a hint; my old Palm Vx used 17 and 6, my HP iPAQ uses 20 and 11 to get the biggest space available.

Happy Posting!

PS: For those who are interested, I’m also putting together a new ‘AvantType’ that will operate exactly as AvantBlog does, but post to a TypePad blog!

Random Hex

I needed some PHP code to randomly generate me a hex value for use as a color in a webpage. Here’s what I came up with (WARNING: Some colors are UGLY!)

function random_hex() {
	$color = '';
	for ($c = 0; $c < 6; $c++) {
		$i = rand(0, 15);
		switch ($i) {
			case 10 :
				$i = 'A';
				break;
			case 11 :
				$i = 'B';
				break;
			case 12 :
				$i = 'C';
				break;
			case 13 :
				$i = 'D';
				break;
			case 14 :
				$i = 'E';
				break;
			case 15 :
				$i = 'F';
				break;
			default :
				$i = $i;
				break;
		}
		$color .= $i;
	}
	$color = '#' . $color;
	return $color;
}

Flickr Playing Along

Those crazy kids over at Flickr are playing along with all the gossip going around about them being bought out – check out the logo that they have up as of right now. Even better – the file is called ‘gossipgossipgossip.gif’ – I love it!