Lance's TextBox

Larry Osterman explains how to play "Last Checkin Chicken"

In the lifetime of every single project I've ever worked on, there's this little "game" that's informally played at the very end of the ship cycle...I call it "Last Checkin Chicken", it's kinda like the childrens game of "Hot Potato".

posted @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 2:53 PM | Feedback (0) |

XKCD rocks

I dig this XKCD comic so much that I subscribed to it in Bloglines last week. Here is one that I particularly enjoyed.

Also, here's a funny Far Side that I saw recently:

Posted from Google Docs.

posted @ Thursday, October 12, 2006 1:31 PM | Feedback (1) |

Google says "Features, not products"

Google says "Features, not products"...Hallelujah!

posted @ Friday, October 06, 2006 1:23 PM | Feedback (0) |

AmzWish widget parameters

The Amazon Wishlist widget that I created last week is now at Widgetbox, a widget directory. Their site is quite nice. It allows users to browse widgets and use them in their webpages. For developers, Widgetbox provides a nice interface for submitting your own widget.

When I put AmzWish on Widgetbox I exposed some querystring parameters for it:

1. wishlistid - An Amazon assigned Id for a particular wishlist to use (required).
2. maxitems - The number of items to display in the widget (optional, defaults to 4).
3. associatesid - An Amazon Associates Id to use, so that you can get paid when people buy things from the widget (optional).
4. sorttype - For now there are only two accepted values: "random" and "none". None outputs the items in the order of the date they were added to your wishlist (most recent first). Random outputs the items in random order (optional, defaults to none).
   

Technorati : amazon ecs, amzwish, atom, rss, rssbus, widget

posted @ Friday, October 06, 2006 12:38 PM | Feedback (0) |

Apex explosions

The town of Apex, where I live, is on the front page of cnn.com this morning because of a series of explosions last night and early this morning at a hazardous waste plant. Everyone has been evacuated for a 1 mile radius, and my home sits about 3 miles west of the explosions.

I was at a tavern which got evacuated. You could smell the chemicals in the air, people were walking around with cloth over their faces trying not to breathe.

The last word is that the fire is still going, but there is no positive confirmation of this because nobody is there except the HazMat teams. Now the concern is the rain that we got this morning, and how that might effect ground water.

Update: Apparently air quality tests have turned up nothing horrible.  Water quality tests forthcoming.  I went ahead and bought a few gallons of water just in case.

posted @ Friday, October 06, 2006 6:37 AM | Feedback (1) |

Generating KML with RSSBus

RSSBus is good for more than just generating RSS feeds or helping you easily create an API for your data or services. Its also useful in easily outputting other formats as well, such as KML (an XML format for Google Earth).

For example, recently Tim posted an example of using XmlTextWriter to generate KML. For most of ius, its not rocket science, but compare his code and the ease of writing it with how it can be done with RSSBus. With RSSBus you can just literally write the XML and plug-in the values you want to change with variables like [icon], etc.

Tim's example takes three querystring variables: lon (a longitude coordinate), lat (a latitude coordinate), and icon (an icon to mark the location in Google Earth). Below is the same example as an RSSBus template. Simply hit the template with your own lat, lon, and icon, and the KML is generated and opened on your machine. If you do not provide a lat, lon, and icon it will default to Bank of America Stadium where the Carolina Panthers win.

You can hit this script live here.

Also check out FeedMapper, which can also generate KML (as well as Virtual Earth and Yahoo maps) for entire feeds.

<rsb:allow user="*" host="*"/>

<!-- This script takes the following optional inputs from the querystring:
lat - latitude of geographic point
lon - longitude of geographic point
icon - url of icon that will plot the point
-->

<!-- Set the content type for kml -->
<rsb:set item=_httpheaders attr="Content-Type" value="application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml"/>

<!-- check for required inputs, or set defaults -->
<rsb:set attr="lat" value="[lat | def('35.2257')]" />
<rsb:set attr="lon" value="[lon | def('-80.8531')]" />
<rsb:set attr="icon" value="[icon | def('http://www.textbox1.com/examples/panthers.jpg')]" />

<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0">
<Placemark>
  <Snippet>KML generated by RSSBus</Snippet>
  <description>KML Demo</description>
  <name>KML Demo</name>
  <LookAt>
    <longitude>[lon]</longitude>
    <latitude>[lat]</latitude>
    <range>300</range>
    <tilt>20</tilt>
    <heading>0</heading>
  </LookAt>
  <visibility>1</visibility>
  <Style>
    <IconStyle>
      <Icon>
        <href>[icon]</href>
        <w>-1</w>
        <h>-1</h>
      </Icon>
    </IconStyle>
  </Style>
  <Point>
    <extrude>1</extrude>
    <altitudeMode>relativeToGround</altitudeMode>
    <coordinates>[lon], [lat], 0</coordinates>
  <Point>
<Placemark>
<kml>

Technorati : atom, kml, rss, rssbus

posted @ Monday, October 02, 2006 9:23 AM | Feedback (1) |