Dean Sas's Weblog

Google Maps

// April 20th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Google have extended their local search and maps to the UK. I’ve played with this feature on the US google, but it’s all the more interesting when it’s places from your own country. So for example I can now search for pizza near stafford and have it bring up my favourite pizza place . Or I can just search for my postcode and have it bring up my house. It’s all quite interesting, and very easy and smooth to use, thanks to Google using XMLHttpRequest.

There is one flaw for it though…the map data is innacurate. My house is displayed on the wrong street to the one I know it should be and the directions aren’t very good, Googles directions take about twenty minutes more than mine do and offer no options to avoid heavily congested roads or toll roads etc.

I wonder how long till they reveal a photo map of the UK, like is currently offered in the US.

There

Ubuntu

// April 20th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linuxs Breezy Badger development version as my desktop for the last two days. This is because I’ve had a linux programming assignment to do and rather than ssh into the universities unix server and struggle with small windows and copy and paste failure, I thought I’d simply do it all in linux and use open office to type up my findings. As a whole it’s worked very well and I’m totally comfortable using the desktop environment. It basically feels more natural than windows to me I think.

This is usually where I’d write “but….”, however I can’t think of anything that just doesn’t work once the computer has been setup. The only flaw I’ve came across is that usb support can be a little iffy – but this is purely because I’m running the latest unstable “not meant for production use” version.

Setting the computer up was mainly fine apart from the fact that Ubuntu didn’t detect my Acer AL511 lcd monitor, I had to track down my horizontal and vertical sync rates on the net, then just add “HorizSync 24-61″ and “VertRefresh 56-75″ to my xorg.conf. Obviously this is too much for the regular user and should just work, but as regular users don’t go around installing operating systems it doesn’t really matter to them.

I’ve come to find it as a pretty good operating system and I think I plan on using it as my main desktop and only using Windows when I wish to do assignment work that requires it or play games. Now if only I could find an IDE as good as Visual Studio.net…

Exposed

// April 16th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Channel 4 have impartially reviewed the election manifestos of the three major political parties, Labour, Tory and Lib Dem as part of their factcheck series. Labour I feel certainly comes better off, some of their claims that are rebuked still leave impressive statistics in their place. Whereas a lot of the claims the conservatives use, such as “40000 students leave without a GCSE” fail to take into account that the actual pass rate for GCSEs has rose.

All in all quite an interesting read, I’ve added the factcheck RSS to my newsreader.

Political Survey

// April 16th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Your expected outcome: Green

Your actual outcome: Liberal Democrat

	Labour 11
Conservative -60
	Liberal Democrat 74
UK Independence Party -12
	Green 31

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Things I hate

// April 16th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // General

Putting toast into the toaster, going to do some work and then not remembering the toast until thirty minutes after it’s cooked so you have to eat it cold

IOU: The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It

// April 11th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

IOU: The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It

IOU is a book by Noreena Hertz about third world debt, she discusses the different methods countries acquire debt, how those methods come to be and the downsides of each one. She then goes on to talk about why the developed world should care – and there are selfish reasons as well as to be a “do gooder” She finishes off with her blueprint for the way to solve the debt crisis.

As a whole the books is very well wrote – economics doesn’t sound like the most interesting of subjects yet Hertz manages to keep the readers attention with her writing style. There’s not really any jargon or hugely complex economic theories in the book, the writing is very accessible. She even managed to make me laugh a couple of times. You can tell that Hertz really believes in what she writes.

One thing that the book has aplenty though is damning statistics – “for every $1 donated to the developing world $9 is paid to the developed countries in debt interest”

I feel that this book has taught me much about the economic state of the world, what happens when a country goes bankrupt and the methods in which countries acquire debts. The sad thing is, that in many cases the developing world didn’t need the loans, however they were gave them cheaply and encouraged to buy arms from the lender as part of the cold war. After the cold war ended, so did the supply of cheap credit. That’s when the commercial banks stepped in.

The one minus point is the opening chapter, which is about Bono and his struggles to get 3rd world debt cancelled. I feel that this is a bit gushy and overly fawning of Bono but you quickly forget as you progress through the book.

Structured Blogging

// April 11th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

PubSub have published Structured Blogging a website about a new way of marking up reviews of things in a similar-ish way that RSS marks up news. It also displays reviews in a different way to normal posts.

Structured Blogging will hopefully allow all sorts of network effects across the “blogosphere“. I can imagine a Technorati like site, spidering blogs and collating reviews together.

A reference implementation has been created for wordpress. This provides two new kinds of “write post” page; one for writing reviews which contains things like your rating of the item, the items front cover and support for multiple item types. The other new page is for writing about events, this allows you to set your role at the event, the place where the event happened, the date it took place and the duration.

Technical information is available for creating your own implementation of the idea.

I’ve intend to use Structured blogging in future, I’ve made my first review using it today