Slurredspeech

Deployed new features on Nearbie.com like history item commenting, history browsing (earlier and later for each item that makes up the history) and slowly adding more cities of the world (all Canada is imported — I think UK is next).

Enjoy!

We recently released a bunch of updates to Yfly.com (personal videos/music and ability to use limitied markup) just in time for the Nick Lachey concert at the Target Center. Star Tribune did a small story mentioning the event and YFly.

This new Dictionary Tooltip Extension beats the crappy old “Dictionary Search Extension” since it displays the results on the same page in a sweet little web 2.0ey “tooltip”. FEBE: Firefox Extension Backup Extension finally solves the problem of trying to synchronize firefox extensions accross multiple machines. It allows you to save one machine’s configuration and “install” it to another machine. It has some short comings like no FTP support, but for the most part will be very helpful.

Google notebook just released today — useful for saving small clips of text… And notice … they stole the black triangles from WidgetWeb.

http://www.google.com/notebook/

I started using Tool Man about a year ago to help with javascript drag and drop sorting of lists. Lately however, I have been using crap.taculo.us and have come to like many of its features especially the “$” referencing of dom elements. Unfortunately they can’t coexist. They both try to hijack the window.onload method rendering Toolman unusable. I’m sure after some debugging I could figure out a work around, but for now I recommend just using scriptaculous. It has all the same sorting features as Toolman plus tons of other AJAX stuff that you can’t do without. It is also built into Rails so it won’t be going away anytime soon.

Summer of Code is a program designed to introduce students to open source software development. Google provides stipends to about 400 students to work with a mentor on an open source project over the summer. This is just another example of why google is google… supporting the open source software movement and mining the best and the brightest students as future employees. Brilliant!

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html
http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html

I found this paper “Research Project: An Analysis of JBoss Architecture” while trying to figure out the correct way to share a Connection between a CMP and BMP bean in Jboss 4.0.3. I thought I would post it since it is very well done, even though it didn’t solve my problem. I think we are getting the deadlocks and transaction timeouts because we access our Datasource in our BMPs via the InitialContext and a JNDI lookup. I have yet to verify that is actually the problem, but will report back if I find an answer.

Yahoo is doing some interesting things which are sometimes overlooked with all the GOOG hype.

Buzz Game – A Tech Fantasy Prediction Game
Mindset: Intent Driven Search
research.yahoo.com

Complete “Human Intelligence Tasks” for money. Amazon’s Mechanical Turks

A panel of judges in the Florida county of Sarasota has granted a request by a group of over 150 citizens accused of drink-driving to view the source code of the breathalyser that was used to determine their breath alcohol levels.

…
If CMI keeps refusing to subject the application to an independent audit, it is unlikely that a judge can force it to do so. This would render the results of the test inadmissible in court.

(The Judge’s Ruling)
(Source http://www.vnunet.com)

Google maps rocks for so many reasons. Here are a few.

• Weather camera integration
• Real time GPS integration
• Kmaps – integration with the Treo 650!!!

Software security and cryptography guru Bruce Schneier explains how the Transportation and Security Administration is violating federal law by using commercial data about its passengers. It is has also lied to congress about doing so.

Everyone is familiar with the GNU Software Foundation, (Richard Stallman) Free Software Movement’s mantra, “Free as in freedom, not as in beer.” But now thanks to a group of students at the IT University of Copenhagen, beer may also be free.

Opensource Beer!

Sounds like Kent Beck and Erich Gamma are back in the lab working on JUnit 4.0. They are looking to “evolve JUnit in a test-driven way” as well as trying to leverage the Java 5 annotations.

Here is the interview by Bill Venners.

(Via Rojotek)