Off The Cuff

Google BargeView

2008-08-15T17:09:00.003+01:00

What happens when Google StreetView encounters this expanse of river?

Oh dear, looks like the road ends, what to do?

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Google Barge View!

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New Knol: Helicopter Underwater Escape Training

2008-08-07T10:15:00.001+01:00

Ever wondered what it's like to plumet into the ocean in a helicoptor?

Ever wondered if you'd have the nouse to escape and survive should that chopper roll over, trapping you below the surface?

Helicopter Underwater Escape Training may be just what you're looking for.

(Brought to you as part of my continuing experiments with Knol)

Knol Rant

2008-07-29T09:27:00.001+01:00

I posted this in the Blogoscoped forum, thought I'd put it up here too.
--
I think a lot of people have misunderstood the basic premise behind Knol.

It is not trying to encourage current Wikipedia users to create a new collaborative Wiki of knowledge.

It's specifically trying to get people who are subject matter experts to 'drop some knowledge' on the rest of us. In essense, if you're not an expert on a given subject the Knol doesn't really want your input. That probably rules out a fair number of Wiki editors, who (by definition) are modifying articles based on information they foudn elsewhere.

Knols are about sharing a expert knowledge from an individual perspective.

Importantly 'expert knowledge' in this context isn't limited to a PhD in a subject, if I lookup the 'Knee Surgery' Knol I'd love to see a detailed post by a surgeon detailing how the surgery is performed, but a personal account of what the surgery was like from a patient would be just as 'expert' in this context.

Both of these annecodatal accounts would be very useful, but neither is really suitable for Wikipedia. It's that sort of thing that's the target.

It's the sort of thing you see posted on Lifehacker, those incredibly detailed answers you sometimes see in AskMeFi, and all the knowledge and experience regular people don't have anywhere appropriate to put.

The 'editing other people's Knol' debate is a sideshow. Occassionally people will spot an error (typo, specific detail has changed over time, etc) and they'll use this mechanism to help the author fix it. But for the most part it will be single a author (or multiple in collaboration) per article, with multiple articles on a given subject.

As far as the 'dead branch' problem if an author stops updating an article... so what? If it's the sort of subject that needs constant, regular updates Knol probably isn't the right place for it.

Book Prices in Australia and Competition

2008-07-17T09:59:00.003+01:00

Interesting piece on the ABC this morning on lifting book import restrictions.

Publishers can say what they like about local "lingo" disappearing from books published in the states, but as a book reader living in the UK at the moment you can't help but notice that Aussie book buyers are getting royally shafted. Besides month long delays for new releases real hard covers have been almost entirely replaced by ghastly 'trade paperbacks'.

For example, the next Greg Bear book -- City at the Edge of Time comes out in a couple of weeks. In Australia it is a paperback only release. No hardcover. And it's STILL far more expensive than in both the UK and US:

Australia (Dymocks): Paperback - $35AUD
UK (Amazon): Hardcover - $27AUD
US (Amazon): Hardcover - $18AUD

Paperbacks in US/UK markets generally go for about half the RRP of a hardcover so for this book you're looking at a 400% premium to buy in Australia.

You can get the new hardcover, shipped from the states via Amazon, and pay a total of $27AUD, that's 25% off (plus you get it in hardcover rather than paperback).

Blogger iGoogle Posting Gadget

2008-06-11T09:05:00.002+01:00

If you're reading this then Blogger-in-Draft's new iGoogle gadget works like a charm.

It's a nifty little gadget that makes it easy to posta new blog entry directly from your iGoogle homepage. Not sure how well it'll handle things like links and markup text though, but it's still going to make it more likely that I start posting things to this blog again.

EDIT: Judging by the HTML in the above text I'd say that it handles markup quite well. Excellent.

New Year, New Opportunities

2007-12-31T11:14:00.000Z

Between Google Reader's share function and FriendFeed's aggregation I've not found myself posting much to this blog lately. Now rumour has it that GMail will soon be offering a version of FriendFeed of its own. The result? Off The Cuff is probably going to see posts of a more personal nature. We'll see.

Along those lines, 2008 is shaping up to be a big year. Wedding and honeymoon this January in the Maldives followed by our first return to Perth in 3 years. Professionally I'm going to be writing my first book(!), and I'm going to look to learn some new stuff by playing with WPF and Android development - both of which I think are going to be massive in 2009 - so I'll spend 2008 becoming a ninja master in both.

Writing a book means I need more practice writing, and I expect that the book is going to drive a bit of extra traffic to The Radioactive Yak, so I've made the focus more targeted and professional. Again, we'll see. I might even get around to launching Soap Drop, god knows Hollywood is giving me more than enough provocation...

When Too Much Sport is Barely Enough

2007-10-18T13:31:00.000+01:00

I'm living in London by my sporting heart beats proudly with West Australian blood. Luckily for me I could not care less for the Eagles or Dockers fortunes, so the Australian summer is where it's at. To keep track of what's happening in the 'real' summer of sport I've written a couple of mashups and iGoogle gadgets.

First off is an iGoogle gadget that shows the current NBL ladder...

...and Hit For Six is my home of cricket:

It's got a map that locates the exact position (center of the pitch where satellite coverage allows) of every game that's got a live score available, a map of upcoming matches everywhere they enjoy the sound of leather on willow, and a continuously growing map of every cricket ground in the world.

There's two iGoogle widgets to go along with it, Live Scores Map and Cricket Schedule Map.

Everything I've mentioned is written with the Google Mashup Editor, which I've found myself spending a lot of time playing with lately. It's a compelling tool, gives me the ability to put together a web site that looks the way I'd like it to without too much faffing about with CSS and Javascript.

It doesn't hurt that the GME team are responsive to feedback and aren't shy about releasing new features and bug fixes.

The Google Powered Book Catalog

2007-09-06T17:08:00.000+01:00

Oh hell yes.

Google's just added the ability to create a book catalog powered by their Book Search site (details at RadYak).

I've already got the ISBNs for all my books thanks to my efforts obsessively adding my collection to The Nexus, importing them into 'My Library' was a 10 second job. And because Google makes your library public, you can browse my library.

Two things you'll notice, it's:
1) pretty limited in what you can enter (review, rating, labels) -- and it won't let you import these prepopulated.
2) biased towards American releases, so it missed more than half my books; and we miss out on lots of covers and most of the better details you get for American books -- but I'm thinking that will improve as more publishers get on board.

There's an 'export to XML' functionality that's just begging to be used. Hell, if I'm lucky they'll provide an API to write stuff back to their online library and the Google Book Search library will become the back-end for The Nexus.

At the very least I'm thinking a diff tool that takes multiple libraries and outputs a Venn diagram of books in common. Oh yes, that will do nicely.

Attention Whoring

2007-08-22T20:08:00.000+01:00

When it comes to the online world I'm pretty much an attention whore. I love seeing my articles and web apps referenced on other blogs, so this past week has been pretty sweet.

I'm most proud of this, the Google Mashup Editor people seem to like what I've done with their (excellent) product, 'cause they got me to write a guest post on their official blog (sweet!). Probably not my best piece of writing, but it's my first on an official Google blog so I'm well chuffed with that.

Related to that, my Earthquake mashup has been getting a lot of press, notably from Google Maps Mania and The Google Mashup blog itself.

The WA Petrol Price mashup's been pretty well received too. I got a nice email from one of the guys who worked on the original FuelWatch site and the mashup got a mention in the Tech section of the Melbourne Age.

Just to round things off I did a little guest post on Google Blogoscoped about the new 'embeddable maps' feature in Google Maps.

I WNT PZA

2007-08-17T18:01:00.000+01:00

If Domino's Pizza wasn't so horrifically bad, this would be one of the coolest things ever.

Peru Gets Hammered

2007-08-16T11:58:00.000+01:00

Peru got hammered by a massive eathquake today, an 8 on the richter scale. Take a closer look at it on Earthquake!, the USGS (USA) tab has some of the best information.

Here's what it looks like in terms of area effect, along with all the aftershocks.

That dark yellow 'damage' zone has to cover a good third of the Peruvian coast line.

Earthquake!

2007-08-09T10:51:00.000+01:00

I was well chuffed this morning to see the Google Mashup Editor blog had announced my latest mashup project, Earthquake!

It shows the magnitudes of recent earthquakes plotted using coloured circles to show the 'damage' and 'felt' radii (more details over at The Radioactive Yak).

The interface is cribbed from the Real-Time Earthquake exhibit at the New York Natural History Museum.

I Loves Me Some Books

2007-07-31T06:35:00.000+01:00

I'm right in to some Neil Gaiman at the moment. Having bought Anansi Boys for a pound in Hay-on-Wye I just had to grab Fragile Things at the local Waterstones, which in turn drove me to find a copy of American Gods -- which I did at a tiny second hand book store in Notting Hill while on my way to buy cake.

Of course, everyone in the know has assured me that American Gods pales in comparison to his masterpiece, The Sandman. So, never one to go half way when I could instead go completely over the top instead, I've just purchased this baby from Amazon.

Oh yes, that's an over sized, leather bound, slip cased, re-coloured, special edition of the first quarter of the Sandman graphic novels all in one enormous tome. The good news? It looks spectacular on my shelf. The bad news? It's book 1 of 4. There's some slight guilt associated with the fact the this comes mere months after I indulged on US firsts of the entire Dark Tower series.

I fear my natural proclivities as an obsessive collector may be coming to the fore. I'm really not sure how I'm supposed to ship all this back to Perth, but damn it, I'll find a way. My current best option is wrapping them all in a great deal of bubble-wrap and constructing some sort of raft…

Save a Few Bucks on Petrol

2007-07-18T13:13:00.000+01:00

You might already know that FuelWatch (the WA Department of Consumer and Employment Protection no less) publishes petrol prices for every petrol station in WA every day. If you *do* know this, you've probably noticed

How crap their website is (particularly the 'map'), and
How useless the paper and TV news bulletin FuelWatch alerts are (cheapest northern suburbs price? I care about this why? I'm driving in to Hay Street or up to Currumbine to save a couple cents a litre? Ah, no.).

The data's good, it just needs to be displayed in a more useful way. Ergo, for all your thrifty petrol buying needs:

The WA Petrol Price Mapplet (for Google Maps)
(Here's a post on how to set up and use the mapplet)

and

The WA Petrol Price Mashup

Find the cheapest petrol in the suburbs you normally fill up in. 'Cause nothing's more annoying than paying 133 a litre when the servo up the street is selling it for 119.

*If you're interested in the technology, check out these posts on the making of the Mapplet and the Mashup.

Why did your employees ejaculate into my grandmother's milkshake?

2007-06-15T17:05:00.001+01:00

McDonalds responds to public questions on their new web site. All their questions, apparently.

The whole site is here. Absolute goldmine.

Judge: "What's a Website?"

2007-05-18T10:35:00.001+01:00

Came across this nugget while reading the Metro this morning. Judge presiding over the trial of two alleged terrorist conspirators who are alleged to have incited violence on a web forum.

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a website is."
-- Justice Peter Openshaw

Whatever happens I like their chances for an appeal...

Alone != Lonely

2007-05-17T16:06:00.001+01:00

Interesting article that contrasts the difference between people who prefer to spend time by themselves (introverts), to those who are lonely due to social anxiety.

Something for Kate

2007-05-08T09:23:00.001+01:00

Apparently Australia has run out of celebrities.

The *Gold Logie*?! I know it's an award that means nothing, but still -- Sally from Home & Away is the most popular TV personality in Australia? I suppose that's still a step up from Jordan.

Something for Kate[via ABC News]

There are people who don't use feed readers?

2007-05-03T09:31:00.001+01:00

Google Read now supports embedding feed articles in emails -- all done within the google Reader interface. This is what it looks like.

Sent to you by Reto via Google Reader:

There are people who don't use feed readers?

via Official Google Reader Blog by Brad Hawkes on May 02, 2007

It's fun to share interesting items with your friends and coworkers. Google Reader has a "Share" button and a public page to go along with it, and some people have been putting that to great use. Once you start sharing, others can subscribe to your shared items and see what you see (when you want them to).

This works great for your feed-savvy friends. But, what if you want to share something you find in Reader with someone who doesn't use a feed reader at all?

To the rescue comes a greatly improved email feature we're releasing today. Even Marge Simpson has email, so interesting feed items you come across can now reach almost anyone.

Now, clicking the "Email" link at the bottom of an item gives you the ability to:

send email from within Reader -- no more second window for sending email.
send the entire item as it appears in Reader, including formatting and images.
use your Gmail address book (if you have one) to add contacts with auto-complete.

So, there you have it. Now you can share the great content from your feeds with anyone. Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

The Good Life is Defined Ultimately by How Important Your Art Collection Is

2007-04-20T10:46:00.001+01:00

"Today, the good life is defined by the assets you have," says Margaret Mager of Goldman Sachs, "It's your homes, your cars, how you look, what you wear, who you socialize with, what you eat and drink and ultimately, how important your art collection is." -- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117702825463476245.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Exactly. At the end of the day you can have health, family, and friends -- but if your art collection is insignificant, who the f**k cares?

Seldom has anyone delivered such a scathing attack on the empty meaninglessness of materialism in modern society. That it was done with a straight face and absolutely no trace of irony makes this truly special. WTF. Margarat.

On the flip side, if you reverse her argument it sounds like a quote from 'Fightclub':

"[Your] Life is [not] defined by the assets you have. [You are not] your homes, your cars, [or] how you look. [You aren't] what you wear, [or] who you socialize with. [You're not] what you eat and drink and ultimately, [no-one cares] how important your art collection is."

…or as the friend of mine who pointed this out to me put it:

"Those rich people don't even know the meaning of fun. To me, the good life is about breaking into abandoned buildings and playing loud music with people who see through materialism."

Outlook and Microsoft

2007-04-20T09:15:00.001+01:00

This demonstrates why I hate Outlook with a fiery passion, and why Office 2007 is unlikely to improve my opinion.

As you are well aware, searching in Outlook is sub-optimal, to whit:

When Outlook 2007 runs, it checks to see if Lookout was running and disabled it if it was

Joel from 'Joel on Software'

Nice.

A Kurt Vonnegut Primer

2007-04-13T14:40:00.001+01:00

To experience the wonder that is Kurt Vonnegut I have some suggestions.

Let's start with some Vonnegut quotes:

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them. "
The only difference between [George W.] Bush and [Adolf] Hitler is that Hitler was elected.
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

Onto the books!

If nothing else, read 'Slaughter House Five'

If you enjoy that, read 'Mother Night' or indeed, watch the movie.

If you're ready for something a little more… interesting -- try 'Breakfast of Champions' -- do NOT watch the movie.

Or for something a little more accessible there's always 'Player Piano' that's pretty much a straight sci-fi dystopia.

Frankly, everything he's ever written is gold, but if I have to list just one more I'd suggest 'Cat's Cradle', essential reading for sci-fi loving pacifist nerds...

M40 Street Party

2007-04-11T09:40:00.001+01:00

On Easter Sunday Kris and I were headed up to the Cotswolds when a serious accident ahead of us shut down the M40 for the better part of an hour. When the medivac helicopter landed people decided it was probably safe to switch of their engines and stretch their legs.

M40 Street Party

There's something very surreal about getting out of your car while in the middle of the M40. It's even stranger when people are sun baking on their cars and having picnics on the grass bank on the side of the motorway.

I Want Me One of Those Belts!

2007-04-05T11:29:00.000+01:00

Apparently our brains can learn to intuitively interpret new senses (like direction or spatial orientation) provided to them using existing interfaces (like touch or taste). Nice.

Alanis Morissette Covers "My Humps"

2007-04-04T09:25:00.000+01:00

I'm not usually the sort to forward YouTube videos, but I gotta say -- this is some pretty funny sh**t.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W91sqAs-_-g

For more entertainment, the good folk at Metafilter had a spirited discussion of its relative merit yesterday:

http://www.metafilter.com/59945/Alanis-humps