I’ve posted a search plugin to MozDev for Google Maps Australia.  You can install it into FireFox or IE7 by clicking on the ‘Google Maps AU - Hybrid’.  If there are two showing up on that page, use the second one, it’s the latest version.

Because this is the .au version of the maps search, you can put in the town and state (or even just the town in most cases).

Other cool things:

• Search for a business directly: cafe penrith will show cafes in Penrith NSW.
• Lookup driving directions: Russell street Emu Plains to Appin
• Drive on water: The directory includes the Bass Strait Ferry, so I can find the way to drive from Melbourne to Hobart, but not from Sydney to Auckland.
• The street directions work in New Zealand, but not the business search.  I imagine that this is coming soon, so you can drive from the south to the north island.
• Just in case you get lost driving across Kangaroo Island
• The classics: all the way from Perth to Sydney or Darwin to Melbourne.

So much to see!  It’s a big country, go find somewhere new to go this weekend.  If you end up going on a trip, why not post the directions here and let us know where you went.

From the Google Blog:

Many Australians have used our maps and satellite images, so today we’re especially excited to launch Google Maps Australia. We’ve expanded service to include Australian business listings, driving directions, and support for Google Mobile Maps in Australia.

As mentioned earlier, the maps.google.com.au domain has been live for a while now, but it’s now ‘official’.  The site’s still got the beta tag on it though.  Much easier to find a coffee now!

The business directory info is coming from True Local, which is a News Ltd. company.  I would imagine that this is going to put a serious dent in the Yellow Pages once people get used to using it.

The driving directions also work for New Zealand too, but the business search doesn’t yet.  I imagine they’re still negotiating with a local business directory.

Good stuff Google.

Scott Bellware of CodeBetter.com has a great article on CoDe Magazine about agile development and how it improves the whole development lifecyle.  He has this to say about the old way of running a development project:

Somewhere in the lost pre-history of software development, some mythical programmer archetypes chose how the generations of programmers that would follow did software development. They would choose between defined process control and empirical process control. Their choices may have been appropriate to their work at the time, but here in the present-day software development world, we’re doing little more than mechanically following the kind of professional superstition that kept 15th century sailors from sailing off the edge of the world to be snapped up by one of the elephants on whose backs the flat Earth sat, or by the giant turtle on whose back the elephants stand.

Where would we be without Great A’tuin, Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon, and Jerakeen?

Anyway, his point is well made & goes well with the recent podcast by the DotNetRocks guys where they interviewed Scott Ambler from IBM on agile development. Scott talked about agile database development, in fact he’s got a book about it. One thing he mentions is how difficult it is to make even simple changes to a production database:

“If I ask you to go back to work tomorrow, and what I’d like you to do is rename a column in a production database, can you safely do that and roll into production in less than a day?” It’s amazing, very few people can. And I mean, and as soon as you’re asking so how long it will take, and some people can do it in a month and some people can do it in three months, some people would think it’s so risky, they wouldn’t even try to attempt it. So, my point is that well, first of all, renaming a column, is an absolutely trivial thing and trivial things should be trivial.

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Very impressive image, showing the relative sizes of starships in Starwars, Star Trek, Farscape, Babylon 5 & a few others. It even has the mothership from V.  But seriously, where’s the Ha’tak or the Al’kesh, or even the Prometheus?  Come on, how can you include the NSEA Protector and not include anything from Stargate!

Very cool none the less, it must have taken ages to work out.  It shows just how crazy big the Super Star Destroyer was meant to be.

[via rebecca's pocket]

Update: Via reddit I found the original maker of the image, and he’s got a second one showing some larger ships too. Still no Stargate though!

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day. You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way

Pink Floyd - Time

WordPress 2.1 brought with it a number of new features, one of which is a pseudo-cron scheduling framework.  This has been is the pipes for some time now, Scott Merrill developed a plugin called wp-cron back in 2005. After the 2.0 release of WordPress, there was a discussion on the wp-hackers mailing list about getting a cron-type scheduling feature into the core of WordPress and the functionality that was released with 2.1 started to take shape.

One of the more important points to come out of this discussion was that this was not meant to replace the actual cron feature built into the Linux operating system, it is not meant to be anywhere near that precise

As for the precision, perhaps the minutely thing might be a little much (mostly cause it’s hard to guarantee a hit every single minute of the day.) but I would still leave that in with a warning to authors that a * rules on the minute option is not likely to work — it’d still be handy, though, for every hour, on the hour.

What has been produced is a system that allows plugin developers to schedule events to occur at certain times.  It does this by checking the current time against the list of scheduled tasks every time a page is loaded on the site.  If the set time has passed the task (a callback function) is done. 

Getting the scheduling to do what it should is going to require a working knowledege of how WordPress hooks, actions & filters work.  If you don’t here is some recommended reading:

• WordPress Codex: Plugin API
• WordPress Codex: Filters
• WordPress Hooks FlatEarth.org (as of this post it has not been updated for 2.1’s new hooks yet)
• WordPress Codex: Hooks complete list, but not a lot of documentation for each hook.

I highly recommend you appraise yourself of this information before proceeding.  It’s ok, I’ll wait…

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All back now? Alright, let’s continue.

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