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Hey, you wanna hear some dork talk to another dork? Then check out the most recent Weekly Ramble.

(This is the longest you’ve ever heard me talk on a podcast, guaranteed!)

I went out EasterSkating today… What is EasterSkating? It’s when you go out skating on Easter. Any other day it would be called RasterSkating, but we’ll make an exception today. I mean, it’s not like Easter is really observed as a holiday anyway, not like Groundhog’s Day, right?

The details? It was sunny out, and over 40 degrees, and I went about 2 miles. I didn’t fall (came close once) took about 4 breaks to stare at the river, waterfall, lakes, etc… Perhaps in the summer I’ll offer RasterSkating Tours of the area… Well, that’s if my RasterCanoe Tours idea doesn’t take off.

I’ve got the search working again, this time using mnoGoSearch, which I must say I’m finding extremely nice!

It’s all written in C, and it’s fast, and it stores data in MySQL and you can use templates, and blah, blah, blah…

I first saw mnoGoSearch about 6 years ago when it was called UdmSearch, and it’s improved quite a bit since then. Hooray for open-source search software.

I’ve still got some work to do customizing the template, and in setting up an indexing schedule, but so far I’m very impressed, as are the people I’ve shown it to. Neat!

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. ;)