Day: March 23, 2005

Ok, it’s time… 2005 is the year I will actually learn Java. No. Really. I mean it this time. Of course I’m excited… No I’m not being sarcastic! Really.

In fact, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium next month.

It’s been many years since I’ve been to Minneapolis, so that will be interesting. I’m not actually sure I will make it, but if the RasterMobile! can make the trip, I will be there.

I mainly need to learn a lot more about JSP, since I’ll be hacking at that this year. From my experience so far with JSP, it’s pretty much like PHP, or ASP, or (shudder!) ColdFusion, But with, you know, Java.

It’ll be nice to be forced to… I mean, able to learn something new. Heck, who knows? I might even release some JSP-based app? (Of course I won’t actually run it on my server, since I don’t run Tomcat…)

Ok, come on now, I’m serious, it will be cool to learn more Java. There, I’m done.

(If you’re going to be at the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium in Minneapolis April 29th through May 1st, let me know…)

Back when Google Maps showed up, the cool thing about it (from the hacker’s perspective) was that the URL‘s were simple and elegant, and you could use something like this:

  http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=43.116%2C-88.491

Where you stick in your latitute and longitude and get a map. Nice eh? It’s not exactly a standard, but it’s sort of how everyone does it (more or less) and makes it easy to write a plugin to use that data.

In contrast Yahoo! Maps didn’t seem to be able to do this. Their URLs were long and scary and obfuscated. Or so it seemed… I managed to figure out that this will work:

  http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?lat=43.116&lon=-88.491

Am I the last one to know this? I mean, it will redirect you to one of those long and scary and obfuscated URLs, but it will actually work, and you’ll get a map. (Add the parameter mag=4, or some other number, to affect the magnification.)

So I once again hacked at the Geo Plugin and added Yahoo! Maps. It should be working now on this site. I may switch back to Google Maps in the future. I’ll leave that option open. You never know who will have the better API. ;)