Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of
the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 224 million miles is an utterly insignificant little grey rock by the name of Douglasadams.
You Know That Place?
Recent exchange with the brother (male sibling, not a member of a particular ethnic group or religious faction):
- Brother:
- In the sentence "The user can update the patient’s details…"
- Me:
- Before the S
- Brother:
- Okay
It’s about the only thing I’m ever asked these days.
20m
Thunderbird Gets Inline Spell Checker
Okay, it’s not in the nightlies yet, but Scott MacGregor has released a Windows build of Thunderbird with the new inline spell-checker he’s been working on for the last few weeks. Since it’s built into the core editing component rather than tacked on as an extension this should ultimately be less buggy than previous attempts (read: not buggy at all).
It’s still in the early testing phase; it’s not even checked into the nightlies yet, but it’s a good indication of what’s to come. If this gets ported to Firefox for its text fields I’ll be very happy indeed. Actually that’s not unlikely as Asa was lamenting the lack of features in Firefox’s editing controls.
Caution
Via Anil Dash, More Scientific Truth in Product Labels:
PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability Is Implied Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to the Heat Death of the Universe.
An Army Marches on its Stomach
and a bureaucracy marches on its 26-page recipe for oatmeal cookies and chocolate-covered brownies (military specification). Courtesy of the US armed forces.
Switzerland. All of It
Via, Simon Willison, a fully interactive map of Switzerland. This sort of server interaction without page reload is shaping up to be the big web technology of 2005. A few months ago I saw my first example, a simple search-term predictor for someone’s weblog (unfortunately I didn’t bookmark it). Now we have Google Suggest, Gmail, and now this map. PHP.net recently added a similar search-term predictor to their PHP function-list search. This is a fairly major step in the evolution of web-based applications. Expect to see the same technology utilised by Amazon and Ebay by the end of this year.
Twelve Hours Later…
While this advice might not be the most widely-applicable I think it’s worth giving anyway: if you plan to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a single sitting it might be a good idea to start before 8PM.