This may not work for everybody so my apologies if you can’t access the linked web site. WPF is part of Vista but comes separately ( I have Windows XP but upgraded to the recent version of the .NET Framework) and is a demo of Microsoft’s new display technology. It can also be used on websites (with a small download) if you have WPF installed.
This is a nice demo of WPF- it makes a web page just like using Windows with slick multi tabbed controls, sliders and some 3D display. Yes it could be done in Flash but would probably take a lot more work. It’s all part of the future of the web- do we want slick graphics and videos but easy website development or still stuck in a HTML page with embedded videos mindset? Microsoft are trying to make it easier to develop web sites like this. And they will be accessible from non-Windows PCs. Interesting stuff! After nearly 15 years of html websites, it’s about time!
Popularity: 15% [?]
For years I’ve used Tinyurl.com to take a long ugly url and make it sendable through email. Long emails tend to get cut in two which needs a bit of cutting and pasting to restore.
Now though someone has come up with an alternative, though more I suspect because it’s search engine friendly. Just paste the link, add a title which is then transmogrified into a friendly URL. Quite neat.
For example I was at The Science Museum in London yesterday. The Google maps link to this location is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=
science+museum&sll=54.162434,-3.647461&sspn=17.369149,28.78418&ie=UTF8&
ll=51.497262,-0.174247&spn=0.002248,0.003514&t=h&z=18&om=1
While the decenturl.com version is http://decenturl.com/maps.google/science-museum-on-google-maps
Of course if you want a bit of fun, why not try hugeurl.com!!!
Popularity: 6% [?]
If you write comments on blogs or forums, you’ll often see Avatars. Gravatar, a globally recognized avatar lets you upload or link an Avatar image that is associated to you email address.
Quoting Wikipedia again (I’m getting lazy!) “Although blog comment pages can sometimes act like Internet forums, there is no single way to provide avatar support on blogs. One solution is the “gravatar”, an avatar called from a centralized server at site.gravatar.com and linked to one’s e-mail address. Gravatars are centrally moderated, which allows them to be filtered for family friendliness.”
The image shows me uploading a (pretty rubbish!) icon- I’ll get a better one. You can se it in action on the earlier story about the Click and Point puzzle where I have added a comment. Yes Portent is now gravatar enabled.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Combining the earlier themes of Star Trek and overlooked things, did you know just how many languages Wikipedia is being translated into?
This page has a list of them. It’s up to 252 which is very impressive though many only have a small number of articles. Curiously, there are more translations into Volapük than Esperanto. (Both are contrived languages but Esperanto is the more popular) and although there are only 2,030,000 articles in English in total, all articles add up to nearly 9 million with nearly 28 million pages.
However they are still awaiting articles in Herero (a Nigerian/Congo language) and Tokipona (a constructed language not dissimilar to GoodSpeak from Orwell’s 1984).
But the website linked to is the Klingon Encyclopaedia which started as another Wikipedia language but has shifted to a different url. This has 83 articles on it for a total of 1,314 pages. If you like Star Trek and can read Klingon (or even write it), I’m sure they’d welcome your help.
Popularity: 4% [?]
There’s a simple premise behind wikirage- it shows which pages are being the most edited. This could be because it’s topical, i.e. breaking news or because the pages are being furiously edited and re-edited in some kind of dispute.
Wikipedia has now passed the two million english article mark which is a phenomenal achievement in six years. So I expect one or two tracking sites like this to appear as people create new ways to study this.
Popularity: 6% [?]
There are some tasks that humans are generally better than computers though clever software techniques mean that computers are catching up. For example trying to spot a lost human on a map, post reviews, or devise new quiz questions.
Amazon, the popular online bookstore (and also the people behind a9.com- the search engine) have set up their “Mechanical Turk” (named after a chess playing automaton that had a hidden human inside) so that people can complete tasks and earn small amounts of money, typically 5 to 20 cents per task.
Amazon themselves seem to be using their service to find UPC codes for various manufacturers which makes sense. Some of this work is dull and repetitive but if you need cash, you know that this isn’t a scam.
Some of the tasks require qualifications for example being able to do a Java test (which has none qualified) or take photos in the Seattle area. (14 qualified for that).
Popularity: 6% [?]
MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to games where lots of players play er online- in games like World of Warcraft, Everquest and many more.
Metaplace looks interesting and I have signed up for the Alpha. The idea is that they provide the technology to let you set up a game, puzzle, role playing game in 5 minutes. Mind you, I don’t expect anything to be brilliant with just five minutes work- call me cynical. But you can reuse others work- inherit from them, with their permission. Metaplace’s technology provides the back end scalability to let lots of players interact in your world with 3D or 2D technology.
Each game is a website but with links to other games, well if nothing else it will provide lots of work for artists. Questions I have are - what are licensing terms regarding commercial use? How much logic can i put in to the backend server? If I make money out of this, what do I have to pay or is it even allowed? But it looks very interesting.
Warning - The site appears slow, I expect it is getting a lot of traffic so be patient!
Popularity: 12% [?]
There are a number of reasons why you may need to access a website indirectly via a proxy, rather than directly and many of those reasons are legitimate not criminal- ie you may be whistle blowing and don’t want a direct trace back to you. The main way to do this is via an external proxy. You go to it, enter the web address and the address in the target’s web log is the proxy not you.
There are paid services that let you do this- anonymizer.com being the best known. There are also plenty of free services though they tend to be popular and hence slow or they are not concerned about security and pass on identifying information. This one is free, seems fast (for now!) and lets you control what is passed on.
Note: Using this does not let you access a website from work without work having a log, but it may let you access a website that is blocked from work (until they spot it and block access to the proxy).
Popularity: 6% [?]
I’m a bit paranoid about backing up. However today one of my disks failed. 300 GB! Now most was copies but I didn’t have a backup of about 1 GB of photos I’ve taken over the years. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I’m hoping that my previous PC, whose disk I erased (but not wiped) will have photos up until last year when I got the new one, but thats at least 1 holiday shots lost. Sigh.
Anyway, earlier this year I tried an online service and it went very well until it started to become a bit error prone for no good reasons. I emailed their support and when they did nowt, emailed their MD. If you are reading this, you know who you are M***.com. It was not a happy experience. I tried reinstalling the software and their servers lost 25 GB of backed up data. Tch tch tch…
That put me off online backup (to put it mildly) but I’m now trying Carbonite. It works on just one PC per sub but that means unlimited. Now I don’t want all 800 GB backed up but a small portion would be nice. It started 30 minutes ago and has nearly 200,000 files to munch through. About 15.5 GB. So far it’s done 4% The picture shows it 15 minutes ago. Anyway it’s easy to use, just right click and select files or folders in Windows Explorer so I’ll come back to this and let you know how I get on. First impressions are very favourable and I feel almost happy to fork out about £25 a year. But I’ve got a two week trial so I’ll give it a good run to start with.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Web 2.0 is the title for the modern type websites (eg Google Maps) that use modern web technology, including advanced JavaScript to update web pages without redrawing the entire page.
Many of these sites have logos that look similar in their style, so it’s not surprising that Web 2.0 Logo generators have started to appear. That said, this is a pretty good one with 5 different looks, such as the Google look that I used.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Ah, old but still fun. Enter a block of text or a website (bit like Babel fish or Google translation), select your dialect and you have a new version.
The dialects include, redneck, Swedish chef, cockney, jive, Elmer Fudd, pig latin and moron so plenty for everyone!
I took the first para of the last Portent story (on Streetwars) and ran it through as redneck. This is what it gave!
“Eff’n yo’ find yo’seff in London an’ witness varmints bein’ soaked by water pistols in a determined but fun way, don’t be alarmed, cuss it all t’ tarnation. It’s probably jest players fum Streetwars doin’ a hit on someone.”
Just think Cleetus from the Simpsons…
Popularity: 2% [?]
Well London Underground (who receive over £1,200 a year from me!) have only themselves to blame after the earlier fiasco when they got heavy with one of their supporters over his anagram map.
Ed Sanders, a Cambridge Uni Computer Science student (I guess) and Wikipedian sysop, together with JDFoster has put together individual maps of the various lines as well as Zone 1 and (shown) Zone 2 maps using public domain data and software he’s written to fit smooth bezier curves through the stations. They look very nice and are licensed under Creative Commons. There are also some derivative maps including the July 7th 2005 bombings and July 21st.
The maps are hosted on the Wikimedia site, part of Wikipedia.
Popularity: 11% [?]
ShowmeWhere is a simple free service that lets you create and save Google Maps, complete with your own markers and/or lines. You can then host it on your website, view it in Google Earth or email to a friend. You don’t need to register to get started, only to save maps.
It’s a Web 2.0 Application- those are easy to spot- look for the word Beta somewhere on it plus it uses Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) behind the scenes. The screen-shot shows a marker I added for my home (in London). It’s neat!
Popularity: 3% [?]