PUBLIC MARKS with search back-endloadfund

National Geographic sent Nichols to spend an entire year in California's redwood forest. His mission was to capture the majesty of some of the tallest trees on Earth, some of which date back before Christ. And if you've ever photographed in a forest, you'll understand the challenge this presented. There's no capturing the awe one feels before these monoliths that measure, in some cases, upward of 300 feet.

This poster (800×1000mm) was designed to summarize and explain the summer holiday of 2009: a roadtrip/ moving house expedition undertaken by my partner Marthe and I, from Norway to England and back.

Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".

Times are generated by running shell commands like

env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"

every 20 seconds

The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

You can set your preferences for who can add you to photos and who can add people to photos you’ve shared. You can even determine on a photo-by-photo basis if you’d like to be featured — after all, everyone has a bad hair day now and then. If you do remove yourself from a photo, only you will be able to add yourself back in. If you decide that People in Photos isn’t your thing, you can remove yourself entirely.

Enter annotate models, a really trivial Rails plugin I hacked up in the plane back from the first No Fluff of the year. The plugin adds a comment block to the top of each model file, documenting the schema.

When searching for something on the web we’ve all had the experience of clicking on a link in a search engine’s results page only to find that the page no longer exists. If there’s no information on that page other than a default error message, the most likely course of action on the user’s part is to press the back button and try the next search result.

As site authors we can make our error pages more meaningful to our users, so that an error becomes an opportunity to bring the user back into a site and show them content that’s relevant to what they’re looking for. In this article I’ll show you how to do just that.

Way back in 2006 I wrote a blog post concerning the modelling of time in RDF (see Refactoring Bio With Einstein Part 3: Temporal Invariants. That post also provoked some discussion in the blogosphere. Although I haven’t written anything on the subject for the past three years I haven’t stopped thinking about it. In fact I’ve been working quite hard on the problem, mainly by modelling real data, especially geographical information. This is the first of a series of blog posts describing my experiments. I’d like to thank Leigh Dodds and Jeni Tennison who gave me valuable feedback on an earlier version of this write-up.

Apache Sling is an innovative web framework that is intended to bring back the fun to web development.