ruki spot

Every now and then, Google uploads high resolution photos to its Google Maps solution. These are typical taken by fly-by planes. Those of you in Australia would have heard of Google’s plane taking aerial shots of Bondi Beach, Sydney. Try it, click on this link to go to Bondi beach and zoom right in using the Satellite view. You will be able to see all the sunbathers and swimmers in detail. These shots were taken on Australia Day, 26th of January.  

This post is about safari on Google maps. So here it is, a link to a list of amazing shots of animals caught on the maps. My favourite is the  ”Large pod of hippos”. To get to the really amazing shots of these animals you must:

1. Make sure you are in Satellite view. 
2. Click on the link of the animal you want to view
3. Move the slider to the highest zoom level, this will give you the highest zoom level you can go using the Google maps interface.

But! Did you know, Google does have higher resolutions to a few photos. To get access to these higher resolutions you must:

1. After following the above steps, click on “Link to this page” which can be found on the right hand corner. This will basically update the browser’s URL so that you can get a link direct to the view you currently have.
2. Now edit the URL, increase the “z” parameter to a higher value. I recommend going in steps of 1 until you have finally reached the highest resolution photo. Note that some of the links to the animals support a higher “z” parameter than others, so if you get the “We don’t have imagery for this zoom level” message, decrease the “z” parameter till you get something.

Happy Google map safaring!

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I have finally launched the Dungeon Bash website. This is a website that promotes a Java mobile game that was designed by a workmate and programmed in partnership. There is MIDP and Doja versions of the game and it is currently being offered in English and soon to be released in Japanese.

In this strategic game you control three characters, each with vary abilities and skills. You work your way through the dungeon, killing monsters and picking up objects. The skills of your characters will increase as you kill more monsters. There are various types of attacks, melee attacks, chemical attacks and ballistic attacks. The aim of the game is to gain enough strength and skills by killing monsters and collecting objects to face your toughest opponent, the evil wizard!

If you own a mobile phone capable of playing Java games, visit the Dungeon Bash website and download the FREE trial version which provides you with ten levels of game play.

There is also a forum you can join up in the website to discuss various aspects of the game, strategies, monsters and their abilities.

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Mid last year, I bought myself a Mac. At first I had trouble doing the tasks I did on my Windows box. I simply did not have Mac alternatives to the programs I used in Windows.

Now it has been almost a year with my Mac and I have hunted down most of the useful programs to have. I list them here so it may help others converting from a PC.

Word Processor: You can get Microsoft Office for Mac, this is what I use. But if your looking for a free alternative then you can always use Open Office.

HTML Editor: I used Dreamweaver in the Windows box, and now use the Mac version. Dreamweaver is a commercial software.

Graphics Editor: Fireworks has served me well in this area. I am not much of a graphics artist so my work in this area is limited. However there is a version of fireworks for Mac and also the professional graphics package Photoshop has a Mac version. Both Fireworks and Photoshop are commercial softwares.

DVD to DivX: Most people would have used DVD Shrink to do this. Unfortunately, DVD Shrink runs only on Windows. I recently came across a Mac program called HandBrake. This is open source and best of all is just as easy to use as DVD Shrink. It will rip your DVD and encode them to DivX and other formats. It is very powerful and provides a lot of options with a nice clean easy to use interface.

Yahoo Messenger: Luckily Yahoo supports a Mac version of their messenger, so there is no issues here.

MSN Messenger: If you get Microsoft Office, it will come bundled up with MSN Messenger, but a very cut down version. There is no webcam functionality and is missing lots of other features. I use an open source version called aMSN. This does have support for webcams but voice is not supported and won’t be for a while as the open source MSN library it uses does not support voice. There are other messengers such as Aduim, but I have not tried these yet.

If you get completely stuck for an alternative program and feel like you need Windows to complete your task, you can use Parallel Desktops to run Windows on your Mac and then you will have access to all the Windows programs. I sometimes use this as a last resort, however I find myself using this option much less as I discover Mac alternatives to get the job done. The other alternative is to use Boot Camp and run Windows on a seperate partition on your hard drive and then when your Mac boots up, you can decide which OS you wish to run. I personally prefer the Parallel Desktop option as it means you can share files easily between OSX and Windows and not have to keep rebooting your Mac.

I would like to hear from my readers other good alternatives to popular Windows programs.

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My blog as of last two weeks have been attacked by spammers trying to promote their websites. I for one do not mind links and think they have their place within blog comments, as long as they contribute to the topic and are related.

I’ve got numerous cheeky comments along the lines of “Wow great site, keep up the good work” followed by a link to a website that has nothing what so ever to do with the topic or this blog at all.

The idea of these comments by spammers is to build inbound links to their websites. A good way of getting the spammer’s website PR up. However, it is a complete waste of time targetting WordPress blogs and other popular blogs and forums, as they now support the “rel=nofollow” attribute. WordPress will automatically add this attribute to the anchor tag of any link embedded within comments. You can verify this yourself. Look for a link within a comment, view the source of that page, and you will see the magical attribute telling search engines not to follow the link.

The nofollow tag was Google’s invention for controlling blog/forum spam links where spammers try to manipulate the search engines results. Google will completely ignore those links marked with the nofollow attribute and the PR of the website the link is on will not contribute towards the spammer’s website. So really, spammers are wasting their time.

The only benefit I can see posting a link within a comment is that if the link is related to the topic, this will entice viewers to click on the link bringing in free traffic.

 My blog is also setup so that all comments need to be approved by me, this is simply to combat spam comments littering my blog.

 Having said that, I completely encourage my readers to leave their two cents on the topics I write about.

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Most web programmers are unfortunate when it comes to web design skills, and most web designers are unfortunate when it comes to programming skills. I consider myself a programmer, I can try and get creative with web design, but the result still looks amatuer and hasn’t got that wow feeling I try and aim for. I now prefer to write my scripts and then hire out a web designer to give my script that wow feeling.

Recently, I have had to write an online web quotation system for my fulltime job. I quickly decided that I will have to seperate the HTML code from the PHP code. This seperation will make the solution very flexible. I can hire out a web designer who can redesign my basic sample HTML templates to something that looks professional and they can even do this without access to the code, so I can protect my asset. By also seperating the HTML code from the PHP code, I can also create different theme skins for my system and even let the user decide which skin they prefer.

XTemplate is an example of a PHP template system. This PHP class allows you to seperate your HTML from your code. It is an open source project and has been around for a while. The class itself is well optimized and efficient and there are lots of large projects making use of it. Some of you may have heard of Smarty, which is another templating system. However, as far as I can tell this system still requires some code within the HTML and hence I prefer to use XTemplate instead.

The class itself is very simple to use. You can find examples in the XTemplate homepage. However, I believe the best way to learn to use it, is to take a look at other projects that make use of it. The Cube cart shopping script makes use of it, and this is how I discovered this templating class and now use it whenever I need to write any PHP scripts.

Templating systems have been around for a long time and if your writing your script in another language other than PHP, hunt the web for a templating system that will work in that language. By having your script’s processing seperate to its output generation, it will make creating spicy looking scripts a breeze.

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