[Geeky, slight popular appeal:]

I have begun a perverse new project which I call Billustrator, a simple drawing program with a familiar interface:



It is written in Java, and thus runs on Mac OS X and Linux as well as Windows. It will be small and lightweight, so that users can do simple editing quickly. The architecture is extensible by design, and so it is not limited by its own assumptions. I think it would be keen to be able to embed it into web pages as an applet, and thus enhance the graphic capabilities of this 'Web 2.0' nonsense. [Along the lines of the (e:strip) chalkboard, only more so.]

(e:dragonlady7) thought I was cracked, until this afternoon when she said she needed to crop & scale an image and had to resort to Photoshop. I guarantee that Billustrator could have had the job done before Photoshop had even finished launching.

The main UI is nearly done, and all the commands and tools are stubbed out. Even the builtins are implemented as plugins, so the plugin architecture is coming along as well and should end up very robust. More details [or not] as they become available [or don't].

- Z

...but I wanted to see what it would look like if I put our entire bar/business/gallery/restaurant directory on one map. Answer: really crowded. [requires Google Earth]

If anybody can think of any real use for it, I'll fix it up real nice and officially put it on the site; otherwise, I'll just leave it around as a curiosity.

Also, you can get notified of our events by RSS now; there are feeds for each calendar, category, and venue in the database. I think this would be an excellent application for the wireless web, but sad to say, I've got other stuff that needs to get done first.

- Z

I got some productive fucking-around done at work today.

I've been playing around with Django a lot. It's a very young framework, but as long as the developers retain tight control over the architecture, I think it's got staying power. Not very long ago I started reading up on J2EE and Jakarta Struts, and it seemed to me to be such a brilliant idea, but like anything Java, it was just way, way more complicated than it needed to be. As I read more about it I kept saying, yeah, if this were done in Python instead we could just cut that out, ... and that ... and wow, you'd actually be able to use it. Django is gunning for everything in J2EE and Struts that is useful, without all that other bullshit that's only there to circumvent Java's fascist static typing. I get the impression that Django is a lot like Ruby on Rails - except that I know Python.

Today I started poking around at the Yahoo Flash Maps API. I like it. I know this is going to offend certain people, but let's face it- AJAX+DHTML is an egregious hack based on a misbegotten API [XMLHttpRequest I'm looking at you]. I think using Flash instead is a much more elegant solution to map service in particular, and Flash's HTTP library, while a little weird, at least suggests to me that someone thought it over before they released it. Also, Yahoo offers the Boring-old-image API to their maps, which I intend to use on our fledgling mobile website. Feature request: you should be able to dump a pile of markers onto the map and ask the map to make sure they all fit. Yahoo's agreement says Non-Commercial Use Only, but as long as (e:ajay) doesn't blow me in, I think we're cool.

- Z

Item: when I was at school I took a class with a professor who was very instrumental in the VRML (WIKIPEDIA - VRML) specification. One of his big proof-of-concept projects was called vrmLab which was intended to demonstrate the extent of the functionality of VRML. It's basically a fictional 3D space where you can set up a homestead, interact with it and other peoples' digs, and, through an insane amount of Javascript and server-side scripting, interact with the other people on the site at the same time. The idea was cool but sadly, VRML tanked, and I don't expect xVRML (WIKIPEDIA - XVRML) to do much better.

Item: I recently discovered that, as a byproduct of a Homeland Security project, USGS is making available extremely high resolution [1px=1ft] uncompressed aerial photography of the 133 most populated urban areas in the United States at what I understand to be very low prices. The Census Bureau already makes available location data about all the streets in a city through their TIGER/Line program for free. The NWS has begun offering geocoded satellite data with 2min resolution.

-Where is (e:zobar) going with this-- you say.

A couple weekends ago I smoked a J and hit Google Earth and it blew my mind. All Over The Wall. [Which happened to be on the hifi at the time.] I thought it would be so freaky to set up a house WHERE YOUR HOUSE IS*. And you could put your car where your car is, or drive it down the streets to hang out at your friend's house. And if you looked up in the sky, you could see the actual clouds that were actually there at that moment. Because sometimes it sucks outside. My car would be the Monopoly shoe. Dude.

- Z

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• And if you looked at the computer in your virtual house, you'd see Google Earth with your house where your house is.