Archive for the ‘The Web’ Category

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Farecast: predict airfare & know when to buy

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Here’s a great site I recommend to check before you purchase your next airline tickets:  Farecast.com.

Farecast is a site that not only searches current airfare prices, but also prices stored in it’s huge database of past prices which are correlated to the date the prices were offered prior to the flight.  Based on all its data, it can predict with some certainty whether the prices for a flight X number of days or weeks in the future will go down or up.  Plus you can check trends of recent prices to see how the current prices compare.

They used to predict the BHM-MSP trip, but no more :(   They offer the service for many routes between many major cities.  The following screenshot shows its claim to fame, the price predictor:

graph

Even without the price prediction, the site has some easy to use filters for flight duration, departure/arrival time, cost, etc.  Plus, Consumer Reports recommends them.

Since Microsoft bought (4/18/08) and relaunched (5/21/08), Farecast you will now end up at http://farecast.live.com.

I’m wondering if they can adjust for the recent fuel cost increases?

Posted in Northwest, Technology, The Web | 1 Comment »

UK Security Camera, 30th Aniv. of Spam, Robotic Suits

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

4.2 million surviellence cameras hasn’t reduced crime in the UK.

ccta

“Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.”

30th Anniversary of Spam was May 3rd.

spamboy

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Gary Thuerk, who at the time worked for Digital Equipment Corp., sent what is believed to be the first spam message, an invitation to an open house for a new DEC computer (a VAX 11/780?) that he sent to 400 of the 2,600 or so people who had email accounts on the ARPANET at the time.

Thuerk claims that his email generated about $12 million in new sales. However, many people who received his email also got highly irritated, complained to US Defense Department (which operated the net) which in turn told him never to do it again. Thuerk says he never did, either.

Thuerk also said in the story that “people have one of three reactions when they meet him: Some are excited to meet someone with an unusual claim to fame; some want to beat him up on the spot; and others just avoid him like the plague.”

Robotic Suit for the Army Being Tested

robosuit

There was an AP story last week on the Army’s “exoskeleton” robotic suit being developed by Sarcos Inc (now owned by Raytheon) that potentially will “multiply a person’s strength and endurance as many as 20 times.”

“Jack Obusek, a former colonel now with the Army’s Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in the Boston suburb of Natick, foresees robot-suited soldiers unloading heavy ammunition boxes from helicopters, lugging hundreds of pounds of gear over rough terrain or even relying on the suit to make repairs to tanks that break down in inconvenient locations,” according to the story.

The suit is still not practical: it is very expensive, and the suit’s battery life currently lasts only 30 minutes.

Posted in Culture, Food, Privacy, Security, Technology, The Web, Trivia | No Comments »

Google Maps adds Photos and Wikipedia to their online maps

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

For example:

gmaps

Click the image to see at full resolution.

This type of mapping metadata has been available in Google Earth for a long time, I’m actually surprised these features weren’t available sooner.

Posted in Geography, Maps, The Web | No Comments »

WorldWide Telescope – Microsoft unveils the universe

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

From Microsoft (http://worldwidetelescope.org)

Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth? How about taking a 5 minute break and viewing a panorama of a different city? Install WWT and start your explorations.

The WorldWide Telescope is a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

screenshot

Review at Astronomy.com:

With WorldWide Telescope, users pan left, right, up, down, back, and forward seamlessly — down to the full resolution of the available data. Users can view the stars and planets at any time and date from any point on Earth, explore the sky in dozens of different wavelengths, zoom into images by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, or see Mars from the Opportunity rover’s point of view.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds and then cross fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” says Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

Download now, download page.

Windows XP & Vista only :(

Posted in It's Science, Maps, The Web | No Comments »

United’s EasyCheck-in = EasyBuck$ for United

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

I wonder how many unsuspecting passengers have clicked on the prominent arrow to continue through the check-in process not realizing that it’s really an “Accept offer”  button to upgrade to seats with a little extra leg room for $14?  There is a much less prominent “Decline offer and continue” link in the lower left, which is probably not where most people look for the continue button/link.

Pretty clever marketing scheme United.

Click to see the full screenshot.

united

Posted in The Web | No Comments »

Comcast launches 50 Mbps internet in Minneapolis

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

coax For some reason, the New York Times decided to lead into their story with this trash-talk: “Minnesota sports teams are not known for coming in first. But the Twin Cities are now out in front in at least one respect: Comcast plans to announce Thursday that it is beginning the introduction of a new broadband Internet technology in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, starting this week.”

Coincidentally, David Letterman was poking fun and the city’s own New York Nicks with his Top Ten Questions On The Job Application For New York Knicks President.

The jump to 50 Mbps (“Extreme High-Speed Internet”) is the biggest residential internet service bandwidth increase since Google launched their revolutionary TiSP service last year.

Thanks to Gil for letting me know about Google’s TiSP service.

Posted in Technology, The Web | No Comments »

Browser Split – Firefox extension for blogging

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

The Browser Split extension for Firefox allows you to have several pages open in the same Firefox window. This way you can have your post window open along side the other web pages so that you don’t have to have multiple windows open or keep switching back and forth between tabs while you blog and search for links and text and whatnot. See the attached screenshot for an example situation.

screenshot

Here are several other Firefox extensions I recommend to make browsing and blogging easier:

  • Adblock Plus – block ads!
  • Copy All Urls – copy the urls of your current tabs to the clipboard (to save, email, etc.)
  • Copy Plain Text – copy only plain text without any formatting
  • Download Statusbar – eliminates the download popup window
  • Forecasfox – live weather in your status bar
  • It’s All Text! – edit text areas with an external editor (notepad, gvim, etc.)
  • Link Alert – shows and icon beside the cursor when hovering over a link to indicate what type of content the link points to
  • OpenBook – customize the Add Bookmark dialog so that you can enter a Keyword; you can type a keyword in the address bar and Firefox will load the associated bookmark (skip the bookmark menu for frequent pages, e.g. “g” for google.com, “m” for mail.gmail.com, etc.); use Ctrl+L to select the address bar (& Ctrl+K for search)
  • KeywordBar – display all your bookmark keywords
  • PDF Download – gives you options for handling annoying pdf documents (save, new tab, convert to html, etc.)
  • Split Browser – split the content area into multiple panes (see above)
  • Tiny Menu – reclaim valuable screen real estate by making the standard menu bar into a tiny menu (see example in the screenshot above)
  • TinUrl Creator – convert long urls to tinyurls (see tinyurl.com)
  • URL Fixer – correct typos in urls that you enter in the addres bar (e.g. “imdb.cmo” becomes “imdb.com”)

And a couple others I have installed:

  • Answers – search Answers.com; includes the Wikipedia entry!; searches from areas where the standard context menu “Search with Google” doesn’t work (viz: form fields)
  • ErrorZilla Mod – replace the standard error page with a fancy error page
  • FireFTP – FTP client within the browser
  • Tabbrowser Preferences – more options for the tabs

Happy browsing and blogging!

Posted in The Web | No Comments »

Programming Language Popularity Index

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

Programmers, you might want to check out this index of programming language popularity. It’s updated monthly. Here’s the March index.

tiobe-march

Posted in Programming, The Web | No Comments »

Is Blu-ray’s Victory an Empty One?

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

IEEE Blogger Steven Cherry predicts that movies on disk, be it DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray, will become a thing of the past as they are replace by movie download services from Apple and Netflix.

And so when you look past the Blu-ray victory, the latest ­developments in digital movies are all about downloads, not disks.

At MacWorld, which directly ­followed CES, Steve Jobs announced a new download service for ­renting ­movies. As with music, Apple has struck deals with the major movie ­studios. You can begin a show on your ­computer or television and finish watching it on your iPod or iPhone. The service started in February with 1000 ­movies, ­costing US $2.99 to $3.99 each.

…

So do we really need to trudge out to Blockbuster, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart for a disk? Or wait for the now-­familiar red envelope from Netflix? A lot of ­companies, including Apple and Netflix itself, are ­betting no. Sony and the other movie studios, even though they get a cut from movie downloads, hope the ­competition is wrong. I don’t think they are.

One thing I’ve noticed that is missing from the online/download movies is the extra features that are usually on the DVDs. Plus downloaded movies lack the easy of portability that disks provide.

AppleNetflix

Posted in Electronics, Standards, Technology, The Web, TV | No Comments »

Finally, FREE Wi-Fi at Starbucks! …

Monday, February 11th, 2008

… but only if you have AT&T internet service.

Starbucks Corp. is teaming up with AT&T Inc. and will start offering a mix of free and paid wireless Internet service in more than 7,000 of its U.S. coffee shops beginning this spring.

The world’s largest specialty coffee retailer’s move ends a six-year partnership T-Mobile.

Starbucks said Monday it will give customers that use its Starbucks purchase card two hours of free wireless access per day. After that, it will cost $3.99 for a two-hour session. Monthly memberships will cost $19.99 and include access to any of AT&T’s 70,000 hot spots worldwide.

People who already use AT&T as their Internet service provider will have unlimited Wi-Fi access at Starbucks.

Posted in Coffee, The Web | No Comments »

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