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 retort fails to defend any of the claims in the Sun ads and fails to target the direct opposition in this case, Open Office. Perhaps this implies acceptance of the facts.

She He even has a shot at Apple! … please! Lets hope she constructs better software than arguments. Though, history seems to suggest otherwise.

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, the page was taken down.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are annoyed – it was no.1 in google for ‘pantone colour chart‘. In fact, I’m annoyed! I can appreciate Pantone’s right to prevent us using their name and they probably have the right to the way a range of colours are assigned to particular numbers, but no way have they got the right to stop me publishing my own colour chart or to publish that a particular colour is, in my opinion, similar to one of their numbered colours.

Anyway, I got curious, so I checked other listings in Google and found that many had also been instructed to remove their pages: 1 2 3 though other solutions survive: A B C D E F (many more) and no-one seems about to take down partial pages of pantone conversions such as are commonly used in Coporate Style Guidelines.

Anyway, the thing that really ticks me off is this wierd phone call we received in our office a couple of months ago – no doubt related to the takedown notice we later received.

Here’s an excellent newsforge article exploring the credibility of Pantone’s claims of copyright.

Over at wikimedia they are building a creative commons pantone approximation chart that has so far survived a take down notice.

More information at Wikipedia. Pantone’s Terms of Use

the world cup soap opera

I have enjoyed watching the world cup. It was great that Australia participated and didn’t make fools of themselves (well, apart from Harry). Guus has cemented himself as an honorary life member of the gallery of Australian ‘heroes’. It’s been fun.

But then I woke up this morning to make the tea and turned on the box to catch the last ten minutes of France v Spain. Almost as soon as I turned it on a French player seemed to run into an invisible obstruction on the pitch, was awarded a free kick. The Spanish player, who did absolutely nothing, was awarded a yellow card. The kick was taken, a goal was scored. Spain were forced to push forward and eventually conceded another goal. And that is how soccer failed to find a place in the Australian psyche.

Australians, I believe as a rule, prefer a fair fight. It might not be this incident, or this particular game, or even this tournament, but one by one we realise we are not talking about the great goals, or the great saves, or the great runs down the wing. We are talking about the great injustices. Sooner or later, you want something with a bit more substance.

When the teams with the best actors are the ones that win, it’s time to find a new source of entertainment.

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 clunky and less than intuitive interfaces.

I also like bookmarklets. Little bits of JavaScript code that you can just click on to do things. So, I created these two bookmarklets that allow ’round-tripping’ of geocodes to and from Flickr and Google Maps. Hope you like them!

Continue reading “Round-tripping geocodes from Flickr to Google Maps”

Mapping Australia – spoilt for choice?

Link to a screen grab of the Google map of my neighbourhood.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 all these choices, I find myself skipping between them, with the natural comparisons that brings. So, at the risk of boring others, in the hope of kicking off some discussion, I thought I’d post my (very unscientific) ‘findings’, about the comparative features of each and how well they map my neighbourhood.
Continue reading “Mapping Australia – spoilt for choice?”

Get on your bikely!

Thanks to treadly for the heads-up. This is a really neat little tool. Bikely allows you to map your bicycle route as a google map overlay. It’s so easy, admittedly, I have a very short commute (5.5km.), but it only took me a few mintues to map it on bikely.

It would be nice if you could add photos to make it a full on ‘tour’ – and it doesn’t look all that scalable at the moment (no searching or filtering), but still lots of fun.

franco cozzo’s big incentive

franco cozzo's big incentiveFrom the ‘Moreland Leader’ newspaper, May 22, 2006. Franco Cozzo is threatening to give each socceroo a limited edition ‘Venziano’ bed if Australia wins the world cup. How can they lose?

I’m sure, his heart is in the right place, though if you’re familiar with him spruiking his furniture on tv, you’d realise he’s always got an eye on cheap publicity. Still, you’d have to say he’s made a pretty safe bet.

I must drop into the store on the weekend and see exactly what a ‘Venziano’ looks like – stay tuned!

Google Maps street maps for Australia and New Zealand!

From Google Maps Mania, I was alerted to the (as usual) unheralded release of new content in Google Maps. This time, it’s maps for us and the kiwis.

The maps are excellent in coverage and detail though the hybrid view shows up a little bit of inaccuracy in my suburb at least, though this is not uniform across Australia.

The biggest problem seems to be with searching, something in common with the Euro maps, that the search only allows very general searches. It doesn’t even respond to suburbs, let alone streets. I can see this severely limiting the number of mash-ups we see, at least until there is a reliable way of geocoding street addresses.

tatty going in circles

This is Tatty. She’s growing up, but obviously still very much a kitten. Here she’s whoopin’ it up with her very best toy ever… her tail. Her (adoptive) mother thinks seems to think it’s a sign that a young cat that still chases it’s tail might be a bit backward, but I reckon tail chasing is a perfectly acceptable way for kitties of any age to spend their time. Don’t you?