PUBLIC MARKS with search back-testing

The Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. You can pull just what you need from a large set of reusable UI widgets and controls, and from lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and more.

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.

The USGS is now testing out Twitter to collect early response information about earthquakes: “the USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and quantity data to provide geo-located earthquake detection within 60 seconds of an event’s origin time.“ Social media can be a valuable tool in helping to assess earthquake hazards through anecdotal information from hundreds and potentially thousands of local users.

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.

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms. It has various pieces (Core, RC, IDE, etc), and I struggled trying to figure out how everything fits together and works. At the end of the day, all I wanted to do was use Selenium from my Python code to drive a browser session.

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.

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load. We tested several free software tools that do such testing to see which work best for what kinds of sites.