Posts relating to computers, software, the internet, and more.
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Written by Frank Summers
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Thursday, 09 April 2009 14:01 |
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 I was searching today for directions to one of my daughter's friend's house. Of course, I just typed the address into the search bar and up it came in Google Maps. However, the hybrid view, with major streets identified on top of satellite imagery, showed discrepancies. The overlay drawing of the streets at one important intersection did not line up with the roads in the picture. Which was correct? Naturally, I would just assume that the picture is out-of-date, as it is easier to update a map than a satellite image. But, as a geek, I wanted to prove which was correct.
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Written by Frank Summers
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Saturday, 04 April 2009 07:11 |
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 Yesterday's post about twitter as a source of breaking news got me thinking about misuses of twitter. After all, two uses of all communication media are advertising and porn. Both are almost guaranteed to be part of the present and/or future twitter.
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Written by Frank Summers
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Friday, 03 April 2009 10:02 |
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I have been playing with Twiiter for several weeks now (I am known as @franksummers in twitter-speak). If you haven't played with it, twitter is a way to broadcast short (140 character) messages. Other people follow your twitter feeds and can see what you have to say with enforced brevity.
On the face of it, twitter seems like yet another internet distraction. Another way for an already over-stimulated generation to waste time.
However, today I saw a truly useful side of twitter. Twitter became a source for breaking news.
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Written by Frank Summers
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Saturday, 14 March 2009 07:47 |
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One of the common frustrations with open source projects is a lack of dicumentation. Coders love to write code (me included). For a coder, it is often a big task just to add sufficient comments to their computer code. Producing good documentation on how to use the program is yet another level of task. And one of the cool apsects of open source programs is that they can change and improve quickly - which is not so cool for those writing documentation.
While building this website, I encountered a documentation problem in Joomla!, the open source content management system that I'm using. Here, however, it seems that information needs to flow in the opposite direction: from the documentation folks back to the coders. A configuration variable called $live_site is known to the documetation folks to be important, but the coders seem to consider it optional and make it hidden to most users.
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