Lifehack: Sports Jersey Stripes as Paint Design for Room

If you have a sports team that you are particularly devoted to, my friend Dale Hampshire has a good idea for you: profess your loyalty by painting your room according to their jersey stripes. He did it for the Vancouver Canucks, and the effect is surprisingly good. You can tell instantly that this is a "Vancouver Canucks" room.





Try it for your favorite team!

Gift wishlist tracker

There's an app called Wishlist that I'm using to track my gift wishlist. Actually there's nothing I really really want badly. Well the Starbucks gift certificate would be nice I guess, but I'm not super-excited about it (and it would probably be healthier not to get it). A Nintendo DS, perhaps, but then again games are so expensive (and time is in short supply as always).

My favorite thing is of course the Internet and, thank goodness, I've already got that.

Barking dogs MP3 to keep burglars away

I found a 44-second MP3 of barking dogs. Should come in handy when leaving the house unattended.

Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, side-by-side

I have created a demo showing Google Maps and Yahoo Maps side-by-side (both the AJAX and Flash versions of Yahoo Maps). The maps are linked together, so if you pan/zoom on one the others will pan/zoom at the same time. It's an easy way to compare them by their looks and performance. And if you look at the HTML you can glean some valuable tips on working around each one's quirks.

I got the idea of a side-by-side comparison from Ryan Jonasson's wonderful side-by-side demo of Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps.

Cloneable Craigslist-like Ning app with maps

I have added Google Maps to Anytown Marketplace, which is a totally customizable Craigslist-like Ning app that you can clone for your city or club.

Find-A-Developer: Matching Open Source Developers To Open Source Projects

I have written a web app called Find-A-Developer for matching developers to people with good ideas for Ning projects.

But the beauty of this is that you can clone this web app for your own project. Start by clicking Clone This App (email me if you need a hand).

For example, I have created a clone called Find-An-OpenJUMP-Developer for matching open-source developers with people who need an OpenJUMP plugin or customization. (OpenJUMP is an open-source GIS that I've been involved with for a couple of years).

Yahoo! Maps Restaurant Reviews

I have created a Restaurant Reviews app based on Yahoo! Maps. The cool thing about it is that it might be the first Yahoo! Maps app that automatically chooses between the Flash and AJAX versions of Yahoo! Maps, depending on the capabilities of the user's browser (using code from Macromedia's Flash Detection Kit).

Here are a couple of PHP classes that others can use to do the same thing: YahooMap.php, FlashDetectionHelper.php.

(Actually, under the covers it lets you switch between Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps at will, but I commented that out to keep it simple).

(Props to Nancy Chacko for testing it out and generally stomping on it, and to David Sklar for writing the original Restaurant Reviews).

Customizable Craiglist for cities without Craig

For the past couple of weeks I have been working on this (Ning) webapp called Anytown Marketplace. It's a Craigslist-like app that you can clone and customize for your city if it doesn't yet have Craigslist. It was recently featured on the Ning Blog.



If you click View Source you'll see that the PHP code is really clean -- this is because I've laid out the files like a Ruby on Rails app.

(Props to Nancy Chacko for the detailed QA and May Woo for designing the UI)

I love Gmail's autosave

Dang, I love Gmail's new autosave feature (automatically saves a draft every few minutes). I hate retyping stuff (and trying to remember what I typed). My browser died on me and I had to shut it down; fortunately the autosaved draft was waiting for me when I went back into Gmail: