« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »

February 22, 2005

Nuclear toys

There's all kinds of cool toys at United Nuclear including some serious UV flashlights, Phosphorescent powder "doped with the element Europium, along with other rare earth elements that give it an astonishing glow time of over 12 hours", Neodymium Magnets which are so strong they carry warnings like "Our larger magnets can easily bruise fingers and possibly even break finger bones as they attempt to connect together." or "If you or someone in your household has a PACEMAKER or another electronic surgical implant, don't even think of ordering these items." If that's not fun enough, they even have pyrotechnical supplies. Still not fun enough for you? Try some super high radiation level uranium mined from the People's Republic of Congo.

But in keeping with the Knowledge is Power theme, there's also a chemical database "Within these pages you will find descriptions of almost 150 chemicals that are used in Fireworks, Explosives, Rocket Fuels or are explosives in themselves. This list is not complete and is not intended to be complete. All of the uses are not given and only the related purposes of each are stated."

Posted by kiplog at 11:37 PM | Comments (1)
February 21, 2005

Google Maps

How many times a day do we hear "this is going to change everything"?

J.J. Garrett explains what's behind Google Maps with Ajax: a New Approach to Web Applications.

Maybe the concepts behind Google Maps aren't going to change everything, but it's sure going to make some smart people stay up late and make some cool webplaythings.

The article includes a link to a more technical review of how Google Maps works, followed by a long list (just ignore the web-standard trolls) of comments filled with hacks, perl scripts, bookmarklets and other stuff the more technically-minded can play with.

Unfortunately it doesn't really answer my question - why doesn't it work on Safari? I'm not sure if it's because it doesn't have a XSLTProcessor, and I'm too tired to do more research to see if it does. I thought if it had something to do with the request side of things it might clear up some other issues I have with Safari.

I've seen a lot of complaints towards websites that don't support Safari, and the complaints are always spouting on about how Safari is so good at standards and how well it renders clean code. This is true but I'm running into many errors related to the way Safari handles forms and cookies. However, for now, I'll just put researching and documenting these errors on my long to do list.

Posted by kiplog at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2005

Taxonomy

The NY Times has an article on humorous species names. The article points to Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature which has a good list of species links, as well as puns and other taxonomy wordplays - like Ittibittium Houbrick, molluscs which are smaller than molluscs of the genus Bittium.

A few other good species resources are the Tree of Life Project and Wikispecies.

Posted by kiplog at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005

Blog news

I knew there was another Knowledge is Power blog, but I never would have guessed that there's another kiplog.

Dan Hartung is back. Dan's Lake Effect was one of the inspirations for this weblog. I'd link to my blogtree pedigree, but apparently it's down due to some hacking.

Speaking of old webloggers, Jorn Barger is writing again.

Posted by kiplog at 10:24 PM | Comments (4)

Google Death

For years, if you put my name, Paul McCann, into Google, this page was the first result, even though my name has never appeared on this page. It is in the meta tags as the author name and this page gets a fairly regular updating so it rose in the results and stayed at the top position. But now I've completed disappeared from Google, except for a few off-handed references here and there. This might be proof that Google has completely abandoned meta tags altogether.

Hopefully this entry will get me back up there.

It is cool that MSN Search returns my commercial site, coincidentally named paulmccann.com, as the first result.

Posted by kiplog at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2005

Test entry

Everything is completly FUBAR, around here.

Hopefully we'll be fixed soon.

Posted by kiplog at 05:47 PM | Comments (1)
February 11, 2005

Broken

Fatcow, my trusted web hoster has gone and changed platforms, hosing cgi scripts on ever client I have.

I can't believe they would change something that would break ever path to Perl, and every path to every cgi-bin without telling me. Sure I got a nice email that told me I'd have to change my email settings, but that's it.

So in the meantime, everythings broken around here to I find time to fix it.

Posted by kiplog at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)