dasman’s World

Now that Google have release documentation on how to write widgets (or “modules”) for the Google Home Page, it seemed only logical to port the Sudoku Solver across.

So, you can now sign into your Google home page, read the headlines, check your stock quotes, check the weather, and solve that Sudoku you were working on during the trainride in!

You can find the details here. As the page discusses, we (AITC) have some plans for a more fully featured Sudoku “workshop” in this format. But, in the spirit of “release early, release often”, we’ve decided to make this simple version available now.

Anyone who knows me will know thats it not such a good idea to try and set your watch by the regularity of my blog postings… My enthusiasm (and spare time!) kind of comes and goes…

Nontheless, I spend at least a couple of minutes a day on my blog. Why? *&^*&^Y&*&^ Spam comments! Even though 99% of the comments go to moderation (depriving them of their valuable link count for search rankings), I still need to go in and clean them up. What seems to happen is their automated tools post an innocuous comment like “test” (which gets through the comment spam filter), and when they see that postings go online, they hammer away adding link after link (which goes straight into limbo, awaiting moderation).

When I have an infinite amount of spare time, I might try and get some captchas working. In the meantime, comments are now turned off.

I’ve just spent the last half-hour downloading yet more tools I need onto my main workstation. My workstation is around 1 month old – consequently, it doesn’t yet have that “wealth” of utilities, tools and must have “thinggies” (its a technical term ). So, when I find a project that I’d like to explore, I find that I need to satisfy a zillion dependencies!

(The cases in point tonight are CVSNT and the J2ME toolkit. Those who know me may have a clue as to what the project of interest is…. )

I have a utopian solution to this problem, based on Perl (as all good utopian solutions are!). Perl has the famous CPAN repository – full of indispensable modules to expand the library. Too many indespensable libraries, in fact. So there exist a range of “bundles” – metapackages that simply point to other packages. So, you can pull down the Bugzilla package which in turn pulls down all the Perl packages required by Bugzilla.

Be cool if you could do this for something like “Developer-0.6″, right? Automatically brings down GCC, CVS, MYSQL, etc. Well, it’d be nice…..

Been on my TO DO list for some time, but I finally got round to downloading Google Earth. Wow! Those crazy Google guys have done it again! They’ve taken a way-cool app, jazzed it up, and put it in the public domain.

Now, I’m not going to get into the whole “Do No Evil” Google motto, or whether they are the great saviours of the Net, or a well disguised evil corporation. But as the hours have dripped away, flying over the globe with this software, I couldn’t help but notice that I was learning “stuff”. And enjoying it!

Geography was always a subject that bored me to tears in High School. Who cares where the capital of So-And-So is? Even when my sister went overseas, knowing the name of the city she was spending the next 6 months in was enough. But now, I have to “fly” there, check it out. Zoom in to ridiculous levels of detail. There’s something almost intangible – a kind of “zing” – to the whole experience that makes you want to check this stuff out.

When they talk about computer-aided education, this is what it should be about. Not some textbook transcribed onto a computer screen with a few hyperlinks for good measure, but something a little bit outside-of-the-square that makes people want to explore.

You know?

Now, the geek in me is sitting back and waiting for them to upload the maps of Mars into that baby – that will be incredible.! Can’t wait to be flying around the surface of mars, tracking down where the little NASA rovers are currently trekking…