Friday afternoon...

Friday afternoons always seem to lead to pointless conversations, which sometimes lead to classic moments of comedy...

During an E-mail conversation about being vegetarian:

"In fact humans aren't carnivores at all. We meat eaters are technically eating carrion, which is meat that is dead for several days or weeks. That's why they hang cows and stuff up to enhance their flavour. We eat carrion, I.E. like vultures and hyeenas. This means we shouldn't kill at all, just eat what we find. I just happen to find it in the supermarket. It's not my fault there's a load of people who go around murdering animals and leave them in shops for me!"

Google maps? PAH!

Ever since Google released the API for Google Maps it seems the whole of the internet has gone crazy for it. Cool things have appeared like an index of the current BBC news stories on a map of the UK. Add to that the fact that Google Earth is pretty tasty too and you'd be forgiven for thinking that no other mapping tools existed.

But... there is, and one of them does something cool and useful that Google Maps doesn't.

I run. Not much, but enough to manage a 10km run without passing out. And when I train I like to make sure that I know exactly how far I'm travelling. I like to plan my training schedule so I know that on Monday I'll do 5km, on Wednesday I'll do 2km fast + 1km jog + 2km fast + 1km jog. I know, I know, I can't help it.

Anyway. Google Maps doesn't help me there. But Map 24...

Map 24 has a really handy little ruler tool. Point and click a rubber band round the route you run and BOSH, the distance travelled rounded to the nearest 100th of a mile (or thereabouts). Very nice for working out 1km / 3km / 5km laps round your local streets.
Oh, and it does a really cool wooshy zoom thing when you put an address in!

Technorati Tags: Google, Google+maps, Google+earth, Map+24, Robert+Baillie

Feeling Smug

We've just gone live with a 40 user pilot of the latest version of the product we're developing, and once again I've been reminded why we work in an extreme programming kind of way, and why sometimes I just plain love this job!

Feedback, from the coal face...

• "This is really, really good. You've done a great job."


• "It's very straightforward, isn't it?"


• "I'm loving this! You can tell that a lot of thought has gone into this"

And my personal favourite:

• "I thought I was going to hate it - but I love it!"

Technorati Tags: extreme+programming, XP, agile, Robert+Baillie, software, development, rollout

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Chaaaanges

Well, after a couple of weeks of fiddling with HTML and CSS I've finally managed to replace the blog's bog standard Blogger template with a home grown one...
It may not be perfect, but at least it's mine!

Comments are more than welcome.

Easy RSS syndication with FeedDigest

Thanks to a heads up from Andrew Beacock, I've taken a bit of a look at FeedDigest.

It's a very simple syndication site that allows you to easily put together RSS feeds and then produce HTML versions of them for placing on your site.

I can see how this sort of tool can really start to push the use of RSS. For me all it's meant that Bobablog now has the last 5 OraBlogs posts and the last 3 BobaPhotoBlog posts. But there's no reason why it should stop there.

You could put up a feed of your del.icio.us bookmarks, the latest news from the BBC, a central collection of your task lists from BackPack, or (using the search facility) a short list of your own posts on a particular topic.

The reason I think this is cool isn't because it does anything new... it doesn't. The reason is that it does things in a way that means that non developers can do it.


Technorati Tags: feed, digest, feeddigest, rss, syndication, feed+digest, Andrew+Beacock, Robert+Baillie