I so hope they dont screw up the transformers like how they do with everything else
With the Google Maps API release, I definitely wanted to play around with it and come up with something fun. First thing that came to mind was to show the various highway cameras on the maps and in those small boxes show a screenshot of the current conditions. I now present to you Houston Traffican Cams powered by the Google Maps API which can be found here http://kashif.f2o.org/gHoustonTraffic.html . The maps shows about 10 popular intersections with little markers. Click on the little markers to show a little camera shot .
These are the intersections that it is currently showing ( If you would like to see more, leave me a comment 🙂 ):-
I-10 at Heights.
I-10 at TC Jester.
I-610 West Loop at Bellaire Blvd.
I-610 West Loop at Beechnut
I-45 at Cross Timbers.
I-45 at Tidwell .
I-45 at Little York.
59 at Hillcroft.
59 at Weslayan.
59 at Shepherd
59 at Beechnut.
Please let me know if there are any improvement that I can make to it. If there are other intersections that you would like to see you can visit the Houston Transtar and drop me a line at kashif-khan at excite dot com.
Excellent little tip to use your gmail account as an organizer
http://www.tipmonkies.com/2005/05/12/use-gmail-as-a-personal-organizer/
After a simple little test, seems like yahoo maps have the most up to date information. They were able to locate my place while the other services like google, a9 didnt even know that it existed. +1 Yahoo
Is anyone actually surprised that yahoo released its maps api soon after google ??? http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000136.html
Anywho, this will surely lead to some amazing applications using the power of AJAX
An excellent guide for PHP programmers who wish to make their code more secure
Some of the most powerful functions implemented in PHP are those involving regular expressions. They make common procedures like file parsing, string extraction etc really quick and easy. But actually learning to use them successfully is not that easy. Here are a couple of my favorite links that do an excellent job of going over regular expressions
The new msn maps looks awesome, screenshots available here http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050523-125208
Satellite images with 45-degree-angle views of buildings and neighborhoods
Satellite images with street map overlays
Ability to add local data layers, such as showing local businesses or restaurants
From the screenshots the image quality is definitely awesome. Hopefully they have updated their maps, since google maps still cannot locate my house. Impressive stuff !!
Its good to be back to a zippier blogger 🙂
As for other news, the semester is over and I have been busy adding features to my blog at f2o.org . I just recently added a rss feed for the sucker and am distributing it using feedburner, so lets see how that turns out.
Oh yes, the Sony Playstation looks awesome