This post is only tangentially related to birding but ultimately this web tool I am working on will be a widget to draw data specific to a birding location at Western Maryland Birding from the eBird database. This tool will allow users to generate a table of birds seen at the location by specifying how many days back and how many miles away from that location they want to search (with some limits set so as not to tax the e-bird database).

I spent part of today learning a new tool called exiftool by Phil Harvey. It is a pretty cool command line tool for reading, and writing exif data from your photographic images. It is kind of nice to have it updating the geographic data in my images before I upload them to Flickr. I posted a little more about it on my GIS blog http://gisblog.jbchurchill.com/

I've been using Google translate (among other things) to try and learn a little bit of Spanish in hopes that if & when I travel I will be able to speak a little of the native tongue. I know that the Google Translate site can translate an entire web page when you type in the url but perhaps I missed this tool that you can add to your site (see my left sidebar near the bottom). It's pretty cool. I might have ignored it thinking it would be difficult to implement but it was very easy.

I just finished listening to an interview that Paul Boag conducted with Jeremy Keith about what happened with the W3C working group and the split between XHTML2 and HTML5. He explains a little bit behind why things went the way they did and why its for the best. Jeremy Keith is the author of the Friends of Ed book Dom Scripting Book which has great examples of javascript and DOM scripting used in a way that supports graceful degradation.

I just started taking some courses from Lynda.com (for about 4 months now) and I'm really enjoying them. They have some really great instructors and some really good courses. I've been using Adobe Photoshop more seriously for a couple of years now and recently bought CS4. Deke McClelland of deke.com is my absolute favorite teacher of all time. He has a great sense of humor and an un-matched working knowledge of the software. He is the ultimate mask-master.

I found this in my RSS reader courtesy of Paul Boag. Slickmap is a template for making a simple flowchart out of unordered lists. It comes with a set of images necessary to make the connections between the flowchart and some other minor effects, a CSS starter file and a starter html file. They have a demo showing what it looks like linked from that page also (http://astuteo.com/slickmap/demo/).

I thought about titling this post “Microsoft's most despicable act to date”. I listened to Security Now number 199 the other day where Steve Gibson from GRC.com described a windows update that installs an add-on for Firefox that allows websites to run code on your computer. This is truly dispicable. Leo Laporte called it “unconscionable”.
How to remove the add-on
Show Notes from Security Now 199

I'm getting a little frustrated. I'm trying to figure out a way to send SMS from my phone to a service that will forward my message to my gmail address. Then I would theoretically set up a filter in gmail to forward the message to a LISTSERV.

I had been trying to figure out the simplest and easiest way to start categorizing birds into taxonomic groups (families or other natural groupings) instead of the chronological photo albums that I have been creating all along.

I just checked out Design Float which appears to be a Digg site that targets web design and web development. I found a few jquery and css tips in the articles that were linked to from this site. It looks pretty cool. It won't replace Digg for most users but, in my opinion, the narrow focus is useful. I'll be checking this site out from time to time.