Having realized that I have way too much tags – something around 250 and around 1/3 of them with a count of 2 or less, I wanted to get rid of them. Unfortunately Delicious only offers a very rudimentary interface for this which needs a whole lot of clicks and confirmations and the only alternative I could find (Delicious Tag Cleaner is not working anymore).

I could remember that I once started working on a Delicious API library for Ruby (rulicious, originally hosted on Google Code). So, re-activating my old source code, moving it to GitHub I have a working concept for a tag manager (and the first state of a Ruby library for Delicious).

Unfortunately it doesn’t yet support OAuth for the new Delicious accounts, which are using Yahoo’s login. As soon as Yahoo’s API key generation is working again, I will fix this.

What I’m looking for (or willing to build) is a website with a very simple interface: a map, showing you current location (no problem with todays technology), spots nearby along with a scoring and the possibility to vote for a spot, meaning “I was there and I liked it”, kind of like digging the spot (although I shouldn’t use digged, is that copyrighted?) If you didn’t like the spot, didn’t feel comfortable or the food was not up to your expectations, just don’t vote.

There should be also the possibility to define a timespan for valid votes (or scores), so that you can judge the quality of a restaurant over time.

Time Lapse Hamburg from Christoph on Vimeo.

Unfortunately this code will not work for WPF (and I doubt that it will even work for Silverlight, considering the strange GetCapabilities parsing and the missing formatter information when parsing floating values). Anyway, I had some time at work and fixed the code for WMS version 1.1.1 and 1.3.0 (I didn’t test other versions, but will do so along the way to some fancy, internal prototype).

Have a look at the code on Github.

But: Couldn’t Google, the great data and information cruncher, tell me which items are of greater interest to me than others? I starred some 100 items so it should be fairly easy for them to find a general pattern. Would you do that for me, Google?

What do you do with more than 25 gigabyte of compressed AIS data? You play around with it, load it into databases (and wait over a day for an index to get generated), do some funky .kmz files or you generate heatmaps, like this one to the right.

It shows AIS traffic for the UK and northern Europe during 24 hours. You can clearly see the high traffic zones. The original algorithm is not by me (and unfortunately the whole code is in the office, so the attribution will follow tomorrow) but I tweaked it a little bit.

The whole thing is quite memory consuming (the original rendering size was 4000×2000 pixels) and at the moment the .NET Garbage Collector and I are not a good team. I would re-implement it in C (maybe even with proj4 support?) but I first need to read about some drawing algorithms.

Effect.Flip = Class.create();
Object.extend(Object.extend(Effect.Flip.prototype,
  Effect.Base.prototype), {
 
    initialize: function(element, flip_graphic, original_graphic) {
      var options = arguments[3] || {};
 
      this.element = $(element);
      this.flip_graphic = flip_graphic;
      this.original_graphic = original_graphic;
 
      if (this.element.getAttribute('src') == this.flip_graphic) {
        this.flip_graphic = this.original_graphic;
        this.original_graphic = this.element.getAttribute('src');
      }
 
      this.width = options.width || this.element.getWidth();
      this.delta = this.width * 2;
      this.flip = 1;
 
      this.start(options);
    },
 
    update: function(position) {    
 
      var change = this.flip * (0.5 - position) * this.delta;
      var padding = this.width / 2 - change / 2;
 
      this.element.setStyle({
        width: change + 'px',
        padding: '0 0 0 ' + padding + 'px'
      });
 
      if (change < 0)
      {
        this.element.writeAttribute({ src: this.flip_graphic });
        this.flip = -1;
      }
    },
  });

You can use it like that:

new Effect.Flip(element, 'graphics/original.jpg', 'graphics/flip.png', { width: 120 });

I will post a demo tomorrow – I promise, it looks cool!