Pomme::TAB

Flickr has today announced support for video media.
I’m impressed on how the integration is done, it’s the same experience as for photo plus the added value of what they call “long photo”.
Very elegant indeed.

Firefox users have been able to use microformats-enabled web sites (like the schedules on Upcoming or BBC Programmes) for a long time thanks to a couple of extensions (Operator and Tails Exports).

Now coming alongside the release of Safari 3.1, there’s a new Safari plugin that allow the parsing of microformats for integration in various Mac OS X applications (Adress book, iCal).

For Mac OSX users, the integration with Address Book and iCal could make Safari a better microformat reader than Firefox. I cannot test the plugin myself as I don’t have Leopard which is a requirement.

Alternatively the latest version of my feed reader NetNewsWire can also parse microformats but it requires you (obviously by the very definition of microformats) to render the web page in Netnewswire not just the summary.

Safari 3.1 is available for Tiger and Windows though.

A funny but familiar comic strip

Your Company’s App: “Company’s”

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Another silly diagramme unearthed by the people at BoingBoing and themed on Dungeons and Dragons whose creator Gary Gygax died recently.

When you look at the full version of the diagramme, you’ll see a rectangle about “people blogging about diagrams”. I am such a nerd!

“

(Via Boing Boing.)

I’ve come back from the open weekend organised by The London Transport Museum Depot in Acton.
Part of it consisted in a tour of all the posters, maps and the original artworks they were based upon since 1908.

These posters were used mainly as promotional material for London (and therefore the Underground), and it was quite fascinating: the diversity of artistic styles as well as the messages conveyed through them.

These posters can be browsed online on on a dedicated web site.

Among the original artworks, there was a special edition of Harry Beck’s London map:
The topology is about the same as the original, but all the station names are replaced by personalities names and the lines name are replaced by careers(engineers, dignitaries, film actors, italian artists,…)
A cross between two lines represents someone who’s known for being more than one thing, which make the whole process quite a challenge
unfortunately I couldn’t find this map on the online collection but It was quite funny to read and is nice followup to my previous post.

Here are some suggestions for other alternative London maps:
• each station represents an airport and the lines are airline companies
• each station represents a food and the lines are the group of nutriments supplied by the food
• each station represents a london pub and the lines are types of beverage served

Any more ideas?

World Metro Map by Mark Ovenden

Originally uploaded by Annie Mole

This is a map I’ve just found on Flickr even if it’s quite old news (sorry).

It’s the metro map of the world and that’s so amazing. I do leave in a city with a dense metro system, and looking at this map make my brain start planning some exotic trips the same way I plan my high street shopping

This map is a powerful mind stimulator, kudos to Mark Ovenden.

Londoners will obviously recognize that the network diagramme is based on the London underground tube map:
the topology is almost intact and you can easily identify the central line and the circle and the others where there are supposed to be

It’s also made twice nicer as: Transport For London guards jealously the copyrights on their data (making tube map/status based creations rare and dangerous) and this one is available with a Creative Commons licence!

I’ve started to miss making blog posts with fancy diagramme, mind-blowing pie charts.

The Open letter from Opera’s CTO published in The Register has given me the opportunity to drawn this blog under the total wisdom of yet another pie chart as buried in the comments to the article, I found this:

You’ll notice it’s in the same vein as that one from last year

I hate subversion right now.

For reasons outside my control I have to keep development branches open for a long time and therefore I need to sync them regularly with trunk and these merge operations are quite annoying and source of headaches.

Additionally, in the recent months I found myself coding disconnected from a network more often than before and I wished I could commit my changes locally and sync them when back online.

Some perl developers around me have played with SVK in the past, and at the end of last year I came across a blog post reviewing several Distributed Version Control System (DVCS).

And Let’s not forget DARCS.

I’ll play with a couple of these, but my choice may be simpler as two developers in my team have already started using Git with the git-svn hook between themselves.

Recently, I’ve been working on a Rails project for the first time.
It’s a nice change after years of perl.

There are quite a few little things that I knew how to do in perl, that I didn’t have clue on how to do it in Rails. Also I run into issue peculiar to Rails or ruby.

I solved all these issues so far and the links below give pointers to some helpful information.

I’m quite annoyed at Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!

I’m a happy user of several Yahoo services but given the services overlap between the two and what Microsoft wants Yahoo! for, I fear for future of the Yahoo services (I’m a paying customer for some of them).

I fear because I’ve chosen to use them and for the way I go about online things, I feel they are superior to the competing offerings from MS, Apple or Google (in areas like user experience, platform agnosticism, integration between services and use of open standards).

After some grumpy start following Yahoo’s ingestion of Flickr, I’ve actually started to like Yahoo! integration between web services and I like their openness (use of microformats, restful apis, recent adoption of OpenID).

Most importantly though, I’ve got quite a few former colleagues and friends working at Yahoo! and I can just imagine how p**ed off they are at the moment.

I think, in my humble opinion, part of Yahoo!’s troubles comes from not having played the openness card in all their areas of business. I’m thinking about Instant Messaging where they slept with Microsoft and Search where they stood alone. That way they let MS think that there are “synergies” possible or a common vision can be shared.

It would be different, if say, Yahoo! were part of a cloud of interacting open APIs with liberal licensing between coo-petitors, partners, clients.

Elsewhere, Daring Fireball is making a layman’s translation of a Yahoo! memo about the subject.

Also, Roughly Drafted has an article about Microsoft’s intention and why everyone is going to loose if the bid goes through. The article is interesting as it’s full of background and historic information.

In another part of the web, the TechCrunch blog proposes a solution for Yahoo! (or the new entity) to survive in the Search market.

Finally, Yahoo! has rejected (for the moment) Microsoft’s offer.

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yahoo, microsoft, search