jorge's jome

At least, that's what my friend Jim tells me. Ben Hammersley's book, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom came out earlier this year and in it he mentions my weather podcast. Of course, faithful readers of my blog (I think I have one or two) will recall that the local weather podcast was Ben's idea in the first place, I just did the coding. So now that I have my name in print in an O'Reilly book, I will reign supreme over my fellow geeks, muahaha. Bow down before my uber geekiness!

Seriously, though, it's a good book. But don't take my word for it, read the reviews. Or, even better, pick up a copy of it. Especially if you're developing RSS or Atom feeds.

Ben, thanks a bunch, and keep up the good work!

Posted by at 10:25 AM | Permalink

So Google finally released their Google Maps API. Look for all kinds of cool apps in the near future based on this API. Of course, I couldn't resist the urge to write my own, so I came up with what I think is a neat little project, combining several things that I really enjoy doing.

Okay, non-techies can skip this paragraph since it's a bit heavy on the geek factor. I start out by taking photos with my digital camera, and also make sure to bring along my GPS receiver when I do, marking waypoints as I take photos. Later, when I get home, I extract the timestamp from the EXIF header of a JPG file I want to upload, geocode it, and stuff it in a database, along with a short description. From there, the Google Maps API takes over. I feed it the latitude/longitude coordinates, html description for the overlay window and center on the last location from which I've uploaded data.

Pretty fun stuff. You can check it out here.

Posted by at 1:53 PM | Permalink

Back in May, Nokia announced the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. This device features a full Opera browser, Gnome-based UI, email client, RSS news reader, media players, and lots of other cool stuff. Nokia will offer a complete source distribution and SDK for the device, also. Very cool. Expected availability is Q3 of this year.

Posted by at 2:40 AM | Permalink