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Google Maps - Street View…in Australia!

Published

on August 5, 2008

. 1 Comment

When Google Maps was released in early 2005 it was quite cool to be able to see a birds-eye view of various places (even if you could only zoom in so far). Since then, there has been many improvements - more view types, clearer pictures, closer zoom etc.

In mid 2007, a new view type: Street View was made available. I must say, it is quite cool - Street View allows you to actually see the street as if you were there at the place. This view was only available to a selection of cities in the USA and Australia (the ‘birth’ place of Google Maps) was left out…until today!

Yes, as of today (5th August 2008) there is Street View in Google Maps for pretty much all of Australia! At first I was quite excited, as I’ve had a look at Street View in USA before (1 Infinite Loop ) and thought “Wouldn’t it be cool if this was in Australia?”. Now that it is in Australia I must say it is cool, but definitely also scary! In my opinion, being able to see your own house on Google Maps and with the correct (or a very close) address feels scary!

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creating a time capsule

Published

pyko

on June 23, 2008

in Cool stuff and General

. 0 Comments

Quite some time ago (about late 2007) I saw this documentary called “21 Up Japan” which is similar to the “Up Series“. The idea of the documentary is the follow a group of children from when they were 7 years old, and then every 7 years they go back to them and see how they are going. The interviewers had a set of semi-structured questions which they asked, and it was very interesting to see how everyone’s answers changed from when they were 7, 14, and 21.

After seeing this documentary I decided I wanted to do something similar - make my own time capsule However it wasn’t until a few months later in early 2008 when I found an old exercise book which had some short stories that I had written in 1995 that really got me started. Reading those stories made me realise how much can change in a few years (and how much we can forget!). My time capsule is bit different to 21 Up Japan - it does have a set of questions which I plan on answering once every year or so, but the majority of entries are more diary-like entries of times when I feel like something important has happened.

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effective powerpoint presentations

Published

pyko

on June 4, 2008

in Nifty tips

. 5 Comments

Recently my friend and I, have for some reason, talked to a lot of people about presentations - and we’ve been trying to convert them all to use “bullet-point-less” presentations. For those who we’ve talked to, you’ve probably already heard this, for those who haven’t…welcome to a whole new perspective on presentations!

Late last year, through random blog reading we found a wonderful blog all about presentations: Presentation Zen. There was one post in particular that compared the different presentation styles of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates which I feel is a great introduction and gets straight to the point.

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upgraded to WordPress 2.5

Published

pyko

on April 4, 2008

in General

. 2 Comments

On March 18th when I saw the sneak peak for WordPress 2.5 I was amazed and couldn’t wait till the release date. Not long after, comes March 30th when WordPress 2.5 was finally released Unfortunately, the first week of April was a super busy week, so haven’t yet had a chance to upgrade until now.

So here it is - the new and shiny WordPress 2.5 with K2 RC5. This time the upgrade went much smoother than upgrading to 2.3, no more drama with file permissions - FileZilla is wonderful. Though this time, since K2 wasn’t quite ready for WordPress 2.5, there have been a few minor bugs (though so far easy to fix).

For those who are still unsure if they should upgrade to 2.5, I strongly recommend you do! The upgrading process is simple (I recommend you use FileZilla), and even though the Dashboard (in admin) looks a bit foreign to begin with it soon becomes very nice and easy to use - especially when writing posts

For those who are also using 2.5 and K2 RC5, here are the two small fixes that I’ve found so far after the upgrade.

theloop.php (line 12)
original:

require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . 'wp-config.php' );

change to:

require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . '/wp-config.php' );

rollingarchive.php (line 10)
original:

require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . 'wp-config.php' );

change to:

require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . '/wp-config.php' );

The other bug which I am still looking at is with the plugin dDeviantArt which doesn’t seem to quite work with version 2.5, hopefully it’ll be a relatively simple fix.

As the adversary is always out there to get us, I’m sure there are more hidden bugs/broken pages etc. So if you do find something that is broken please tell me! Thanks

ps. not a bug, but I’m definitely going to have to find a plugin for formatting code - the above 4 lines look horrible! anyone have good suggestions?