Archive for January 2006
At the bottom of yet another v1agra ad came:
squirrel you scranton me, symphony cursive domicile . churchwoman you high me, shimmy oscillatory armoire . burroughs you britain me, elisabeth fault hoe . filter you armload me, mulish hysteresis bellman .
cellar you tartar me, defunct . slav you industry me, roadster galbreath .
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I’ve just hacked together GoogleCompare, its a PHP-screen-scraper that compares googles Chinese results to its American results. Please note that I haven’t spent long on the script and may have many bugs, check anything you are relying on independently.
As I’ve developed it I’ve noticed constant switching, Google is obviously doing work on adjusting things. Sometimes Wikipedia is first result:
and sometimes its not there at all. The chinese Google has a completely different ranking system so with GoogleCompare you say I want to see which pages of the first X on Google.com were not in the first Y in Google.cn. In general, the amount of pages shown increases as X increases and decreases as Y increases.
Please don’t bombard Google with it as it can send up to 4 requests to Google per refresh.
It is sinister that BBC News seems to be blocked but, other things like www.bbc.co.uk do eventually show up but are far down the list because Google does not consider them important to Chinese users. Many of the results are false positives (e.g. Amazon comes up alot). Never the less I think its a useful application to monitor the level of censorship.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
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Wowee, my house in perfect detail! The Official Google Maps Blog points to Sydney Opera House, and its boats. I’d also recommend Heathrow and the London Eye (look at all the people!)
All in all I’m very pleased.
[Via Google Blogoscoped]
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1. Spacemonger
Spacemonger is a brilliant idea, it spends a short amount of time indexing your hard drive and then displays all of the files and folders inside it correctly nested. The size they take up on your screen is proportional to the size they take up on your disk. This means that huge files hiding deep in a distant directory are very visible and tiny text files in the C: drive are less so. But you can zoom in to see everying. It’s invaluable for clearing up your disk, immediately giving you a sense of scale.
Official Site
2. TweakUI
This is probably the best known of the Microsoft PowerTools, but some of its features are still horribly under-used. If whenever you turn on your computer you type in a username and password and you don’t want to have to then the autologin feature shown on the right is perfect for you. There are hundreds of other features many very useful: repair shortcuts, make My Computer first icon, adjust the places bar to your favourite folders and add a PHP file to the templates which appear when you right-click and go to ‘New’.
3. foobar2000
A really lightweight music player with a number of great features and good extensibility, foobar does take some getting used to after iTunes and Media Player. But the performance savings are wonderful and the lack of graphic design is actually rather refreshing. Once you’ve got used to the interface and installed some nice extensions you should find it a pretty effective music player with good playlist support and compatible with most formats.
Official Site
4. WinGREP
5. VLC
Do not be confused by VLC’s complicated name (Video LAN Client) it’s simply a small, low-resource and simple media player that will play virtually anything you throw at it. Even if there are bugs and it always freezes at a certain point in other players, VLC always seems able to manage to continue playing, well worth having whether or not you use it as your main video (or audio) player.
Official Site
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Diggdot.us is a very useful website which combines the feeds from slashdot, popular del.icio.us and digg on one website and eliminates some duplicates. Either use the feed or the site directly, great starting page.
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From file-swap.com is fun: Give one file – get one free!:
Choose a file that you want to swap. Use the browse button to find the file on your local hard disk or enter the complete path to the file.
Link
File swap is a fine idea where you upload a (uncopyrighted) file, and in return you are presented with a random one. No real ‘use’ that I know of, but good for combatting boredom.
[Via Google Blogoscoped]
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Email: 
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From Lookup PHP functions with AJAX:
You just type the first bit of a PHP function at this website and it gives you the argument list, short description and verison number. Really useful for PHP developers.
I made the front page of digg today with the phpFunctions AJAX thing I mentioned earlier, I’ve garnered 371 diggs at time of posting as well as a fair few negative comments.
wow. totally useless and hard to get the info you really need.
going to php.net/whateverthefunctionnameormoduleis is much easier…. and better.
It added quite a lot of traffic to my total. By the way the source for the functions thing will come tomorrow.
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11
Sitting On Chair Laughing At A Very Funny Video Clip (SOCLAAVFVC)
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This post serves two purposes:
- It is an example of Google Video’s new functionailty (including buying copyrighted video & posting video on your site.)
- It features an incredibly funny video.
Without further ado,
If you haven’t worked it out they are diving (freefalling).
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From Pleix films:
NETLAG
Link
This really, really clever video was made by plotting webcams based on their location on a huge world map, you can watch the wave of sun move over the world.
I wish I had ideas like that.
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Yesterday I put together this AJAX (actually AJAH) tool that allows you to quickly view the important details (argument list especially) of PHP functions.
You just type in the beginning of the function you want and you are presented with a list, click one on the list and the details are filled in.
See if you find it useful, post feedback in the comments.
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