Geekblok

As some of you know, I’ve been messing with Fire Eagle for some time now already (I was lucky enough to get an invitation) and yesterday I noticed the site went public. That means you, yeah you, can sign up now too.

But what is and does Fire Eagle? Not a whole lot to be frank. It’s basically a broker for your geo-data. It can share your position on earth with a number of other services, like wikinear (see previous post).

I do applaud the initiative of Fire Eagle though. It’s a Yahoo! application and for a change, they didn’t simply buy a company. Nope, they’ve created this themselves! I’m happy to see this and hope the other big players will do the same: be creative, invent new stuff (knol is not innovative at all, to me).

Since the launch of Fire Eagle, quite a few websites have joined the effort and use the API provided. That includes Pownce. The application gallery is growing and I’m really interested to see what other websites will join and be created, inspired by this functionality.

Every once in the several years I am a little too quick at the keyboard and manage to wipe a part of my home directory. I refuse to alias rm to rm -i because I always know what I am doing (Yeah right).
Yesterday it happened again. I managed to ctrl-c quickly, so I didn’t loose to many important files. It only got ~/bin/. Most of those files I already had on a backup machine.

I thought on what I could do to stop this from happening without converting to the alias rm=rm -i. The trick that I am now using is to make rm into a function, which I put into my ~/.bash_profile:

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With a plethora of social websites, it’s hard to keep track of everything. And like with all itches, people will try to make money out of it and come up with sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream, etc.

But what if you want to build something similar yourself? You’d have to download all your RSS feeds, combine them and most likely filter and sort them. Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy!

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The NOS (Dutch public broadcasting system) recently launched a mobile application for their website. This includes their TV news show, Internet news feeds as well as weather forecasts, traffic information and an interface to Teletext.

Of course I had to give it a go on my Nokia N95 8GB and I must say I’m quite impressed! The application works well. The interface is slick and the videos of the news are streaming without many problems. The NOS claims they will also stream the Olympic Games and see no reason why the great uitzendinggemist.nl couldn’t be streamed through the application as well. Wow!

So far, I’m quite happy to watch the morning news in the train, see the traffic jams I skip (by using the train) and browse Teletext.

Some screenshots:

NOS, well done!

Last week I had to design a table where I’d liked to specify the with of a table. I used to do this by giving a class to the columns of the table like:

<table>
<tr>

<td class=”col1″>some data</td>

<td class=”col2″>some more data</td>

</tr>

</table>

And then to specify the layout of the td classes col1 and col2 from a stylesheet.

This week I discovered that there is better way to accomplish the same, using colgroup and col. Never knew that there was already a way to do this the “right way”. So my next tables will look like:

<table>
<colgroup>

<col class=”col1″>

<col class=”col2″>

</colgroup>

<tr>

<td>some data</td>

<td>some more data</td>

</tr>

</table>

It might not look too different in this small example, but I sure I will find some use for it.