Don't Back Down

If you have the Linksys WRT54G or WRT54GS router, and want to update the firmware, this is your lucky day. While Sveasoft charges for the software, it is a GPL product, meaning that it can be distributed - in fact, it's nearly a requirement! So (at least) one enterprising soul has provided a site where you can download a vast number of Sveasoft firmware, for free!

Yes, Sveasoft has some valid points - picking up firmware on any old web site, or on a P2P network, may be dangerous. Keep that in mind, and if your router blows up because you didn't listen this time, maybe be a little more cautious the next time around. Or just pay the $20 to Sveasoft to download it. Some costs are worth paying. This may be one of them.

In the course of working with a project today, I came across some useful information. First, the use of command-line parameters in Perl. All you really have to do is add a space between the program name and the first, and then the first and the second, and so on.

Read "Little URLs and Parameters" »

The chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, has been in and out of the hospital. Recently. I'm all for the right of older people to work. I think it's good. But when you can't go to work because you're back being treated for cancer again, perhaps you ought to forget about the public being interested in your personal business (as Rehnquist refers to his health) and spend a little time getting healthy, and allowing someone else to take over.

Sandra Day O'Connor recently retired and apparently she wasn't even sick - her husband was! So she decides to retire, to help her husband. Meanwhile, someone who may very well be even worse off than her husband continues not only to sit on the court - but to be the ultimate authority of the same.

Maybe lifetime terms were a good idea when a lifetime was much shorter, and once you got sick you couldn't expect to live long. But when someone can struggle for weeks, months, even years, maybe they ought to take the time to concentrate not on their authority, but on their life.

I hate it when people change their links and don't provide any way to get from the old one to the new one. It's even worse when organizations do it. And the absolute worst culprit of all is the government. They have all sorts of data, and loads of it is at least marginally interesting to someone. Take the Mecklenburg Board of Elections. I had a number of links to past results and informational pages, and they all just died. Actually, they may have been dead for a while. But I just noticed it.

I understand some elections are two years old. So what? Keep 'em out there. That way people can look them up later. Informational pages shouldn't change that much - provide redirects to the new locations, or at the very least to the home page. Come on people.

Update: Have this problem? Try the free Alexa Amazon Associate Site Report. It's limited to 50 broken links per report, and 1 report per day, but hopefully it won't take you long to get through it. I had to run three days straight at first, now I barely break double-digits, and that's mostly when someone removes their archives. Cut it out!

I came across the Blogmapping service the other day. This is a neat use of the Google Maps API, allowing you to search for blogs be geographical location. I like it better than GeoURL, simply because of the visual nature of the application. You can even add your own sites.

The Boston Subway Map is the nicest application of the API I've seen yet. It's not that it's fancy - it isn't. It just provides a great service, very well done, that loads quickly and is quite usable. The problem with some services is that they load very slowly, making them less useful. I don't know what everyone is doing in Boston, but Joe Hughes also has a great addition to your toolkit with a mashup for planning trips. The MBTA Nearby Stops Experiment will plot the nearest stations to the center of the map, and the pop-up info will even include upcoming trains at that location. Very cool.

Which brings us to the New York City Subway Map offered by onNYTurf.com. Very nicely done, but something about the page makes it load really slowly, unlike the Boston map above. There are other NYC subway maps out there - MonkeyHomes.com has a nice one - but this one is a better use of the API, with colored paths and the like.

Finally, if you want to add that special touch to each and every page you visit, take a look at the Greasmap script for Greasemonkey. It adds a little map to each page where it finds location information. Very nice.