Ah, IRC!

Apparently it’s all the rage on the interweb but I’ve never really used IRC all that much, and since Firefox is my main browser I haven’t got easy access to ChatZilla, or so I thought. Of course, it’s available as an extension and works just great with Firefox 0.8 and is even executable from the command line with a quick

firefox -chrome chrome://chatzilla/content/

Finally I can keep up with what’s going on over in #foaf!

Dying company gives dying brand a chance

AOL: New Mozilla-based Netscape 7.x coming shocker

AOL are going to be releasing a new version of the Netscape 7 browser based on a recent Mozilla milestone. This is really awesome. Despite AOL’s financial, uh, downturn millions of people use it around the world, and know it as a brand (let alone as a coaster manufacturer).

Hopefully bundling the latest Mozilla code will serve to raise people’s expectations of what a browser should be able to do, and then, when they move on from AOL replace their flaky IE with the browser they’re used to. From tiny acorns. 🙂

UK Blogger Map

Appalled by my recent low level of productivity, I’ve set myself a number of small achievable tasks to perform. The first took a few hours of coding and is presented here:

The UK Blogger Map

What surprised me the most about doing this was that I ended up with so few entries. Admittedly there are two layers of selection – first you must have registered your blog with weblogs.co.uk, and secondly you have to provide the geo data the map needs, but there are ~250 sites listed, only 87 of which have geo data.

Of course I could have used the data from GeoURL, except then I’d have had to do much more processing – first to limit the locations to the UK and secondly to filter out all the crappy deviantART sites. Neither of which I wanted (or could be bothered) to do.

Pagerank a sham

Finally! Google’s true technology exposed! Pigeonrank

By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.