The most recent short book release by Pragmatic Programmers is titled - Google Maps and Ajax. It outlines and explains how to hookup Google Maps, Geo Coding and AJAX to create a simple mashup.
With lack of daylight during the winter months, it’s a great time to take up night photography! The School of Photography has a great Free Night Photography Lesson that covers topics from exposure to flash techniques for creating some really cool pictures. This is where having a digital camera comes in handy as you can do as much experimenting as you like without wasting money on film and processing!
ShowAll is a simple application that allows you to show or hide hidden files on your OSX system. Why? Many configuration files in OSX are hidden (ie. Apache .htaccess files), so if you want to edit them with a GUI based text editor, you need a way to see them before you can open them.
Tooltip.js
is a very neat JavaScript library that creates beautiful tool tips using unobtrusive JavaScripting techniques. The tooltips themselves are <div> elements created at runtime so they can be styled any way you want using CSS.
DBEdit is a plugin for the Eclipse Workbench that can be used to explore databases, edit tables directly with a spreadsheet like editor, and edit SQL queries. Dan Switzer recently posted his installation notes that should get you up and running with this nice Eclipse plugin and SQL Server 2000.
[link via DopeFly]
Looking for a free, open-source alternative to commercial programs like Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost? Partition Logic is a hard disk partitioning and data management tool that can create, delete, format, and move and clone partitions. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a standalone system, independent of your regular operating system.
The Songbird Media Player is a very cool looking product. Actually you can’t download the product yet, but the screen captures and articles on Songbird’s blog make the product sound very compelling. Songbird is a media player that is built using XUL and the Mozilla Platform to create a cross platform, Internet enabled player. I’ll be really interested to see how this product develops. I proposed a similar idea to a client over a year ago, and it was met with very little enthusiasm. I thought is was a great idea as I had been developing in Visual Basic, but was looking to take my work to a devleopment environment that would make my software cross platform.
There is now an official del.icio.us firefox extension available directly from the fine people who created the public bookmarking service. The extension provides nice integration of del.icio.us’ features into Firefox.
Seems like web frameworks are all the rage these past few months. Symfony is yet another open-source PHP framework that might be worth checking out. It supports features like:
One thing I find interesting though, is that on the Ruby platform there is one framework (Rails) and if Python is your scripting language of choice, there is Django. On the PHP side however, there are at least 4 that I have come across. It would be nice if one PHP framework would lead in this space, to make the choice much more clear and focus the efforts of the open-source contributors to creating one great project.
try ruby! (in your browser) is an interactive shell hosted in a web browser using AJAX to send your commands then display the resonse. To get started, you can try the 15 minute tutorial by typing help at the command prompt. This is a great way to try Ruby as you don’t have to install the Ruby scripting language on your system. It’s kind of like demoware for scripting languages!
