"just plain cool" entries

Map the Candidates

Totally cool mashup of the day (for our US readers or those that like to mock our wacky political circus): Map the Candidates. Track where the US presidential candidates are traveling, marvel at how little of Iowa and New Hampshire are visible on the map, gasp at the amount it must cost to flit back and forth like that. Good…

German and Japanese Wikipedia scanner

Time for more excitement on the Wikipedia front. Last week Virgil released the English Wikiscanner, as I wrote about previously. This week, it is time for German and Japanese edits to be exposed, with the newly-released German and Japanese Wikiscanner. Sadly, I don't read either German nor Japanese, but I am sure some of you readers do. If you find…

Virgin America Inaugural

Today I had the pleasure of going on Virgin America's inaugural 'California Dreaming' flight number VX0846 from LAX to SFO. It was a pretty fantastic experience altogether, starting with taking off from the Imperial Terminals Flight Path Museum at LAX and ending with a reception by Mayor Newsom. I will post a bit more about the technical details later, but…

Travel Tips: FlightAware

In the course of my travels, I have discovered a few sites that are extremely helpful to get a smooth ride. Airlines currently have an information advantage over the customers. They have all the data, you have none. Want to know how many seats are free? They know but they don't want to tell you. When is that flight really…

Three Rings' Nautical-Themed Office Revealed

Three Rings' office are featured in a Wired photo gallery. The motif of the large space is sunken treasure (in keeping with the theme of their popular game Puzzle Pirates). I was at their SOMA offices a couple of weeks ago and was marveling at the octopus-themed desks and tentacle couches. Three Rings CTO, Michael Bayne, gave a workshop…

Google releases open source toolkit for offline web apps.

Google joins the group of companies trying solve the offline web application problem with Google Gears. Released as an developer oriented open source technology, under a BSD license, as a new browser extension. It provides 3 significant components to the browser ecosystem. A multithreaded javascript environment, which provides a restricted background taks JavaScript environment for accessing remote data source without…