OpenOffice vs. Redmond on the buses

Interesting bit of dialogue here. A blog notes bus ads from Sun pushing OpenOffice.org by taking aim at Microsoft… Amusing enough in it’s own right, but… …a Microsoft employee fires off a retort in her his blog with some taunts of her his (? gender assumption cleared up, thank you Sandy) own. Trouble is, the …

Case of the disappearing Pantone colours

We’ve (well, my work has) recently been issued a takedown notice by Pantone, insisting that we remove a page of hex codes labelled with numbers that correspond to the Pantone Matching System. The page was very well patronised, even though it wasn’t very accurate and did not claim any ‘official’ status. Not wanting a fuss, …

phew!

It took a bit of care and time, but upgrading to wordpress version 2 went quite smoothly. I’m hoping to start playing with new plugins and enjoy improved comment spam prevention.

Round-tripping geocodes from Flickr to Google Maps

I love Flickr. I love Google Maps. Like a lot of people, I’d like to combine my love for these two tools by accurately geocoding my photos and then being able to see where geocoded photos were actually taken. I was frustrated that all the tools to do this either required GPS equipped devices, or …

Mapping Australia – spoilt for choice?

Just a few months ago, Australians had no ‘new generation’ web street maps, now we’ve got three! By ‘new generation’, I mean smooth dragging, ajax/javascript driven, feature loaded maps – not the old point and click clunkers like whereis (though quite good in their own right, people want more these days). Now that I have …

Undocumented Google map trick

An article on Ogle Earth alerts us to a neat trick to get a location from Google Maps to Google Earth. Simply add ‘&output=kml’ to the URL of the map you are viewing, (be sure to click the ‘Link to this page’ on the map first!). I created this simple javascript gMaps2kml bookmarklet, that seems …