mattlary's weblog

It looks like Google added transit information to Rochester’s google maps recently.  They’re not very useful yet, but at least you can click on a bus icon and see which routes serve that stop.  I also noticed that the locations of a couple of the stops are off, and you can’t edit their locations like you can with addresses.  It would be nice if they put the schedules and routing in there too; perhaps that’s coming next.

Click here to see my stop in front of Thomson Reuters.  (It’s off by a bit like I mentioned)

BeanShell – Lightweight Scripting for Java

BeanShell is a cool thing I found a little while back; it’s a scripting environment for java.  At first I didn’t see the point, but when you bring up the BeanShell Desktop that’s included in the download, it gives you a console where you can test out java stuff.  It even lets you use Swing, or any other java library I suppose.  I use it mostly for testing out regular expressions, or for doing quick sanity checks to make sure my code is going to do what I expect it to do.  Check it out; I’m sure you can find something to use it for.

Ok; back from the movie (Stranger Than Fiction). It was really good by the way; it was original, and Will Farrell did an awesome job in it; and it wasn’t just the normal crazy Will Farrell, it was a fairly serious role. I would highly recommend it. I’m pretty excited about some of the movies that are coming out in the next year or so; I just saw a teaser ad for Spiderman 3, and Tenacious D: Pick of Destiny has the potential of being an awesome movie (it has an equal amount of potential of being a really dumb movie too). There were a few others too that looked good, but I can’t think of them right this moment.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to blog about was a program that I’ve had for a while; it’s called Pure Text, and it allows you to strip the formatting out of text you paste from your clipboard. I really hate it when I try to copy text from a web page into an email or something only to have it mess up my font and everything. Anyway, it’s free, and you can get it here. Many thanks to lifehacker for that by the way; I check it daily and find all sorts of cool tips.

I read an article the other day about the ‘invisible web’, or the parts of the internet that you can’t find from google or other search engines. There are a lot of fee based databases out on the net, but they cost money so most people don’t know they’re there. For example, at work, we make an extensive legal database (westlaw) that lawyers use to research cases, statutes, etc… You can’t find the stuff on there unless you pay.

Anyway, the article went on to say that many good libraries will give their card holders access to a lot of valuable databases, some of them from home. They also said that in most cases, you can get a card to any library in your state for free. The New York Public Library is one such library, and I just got my card today- they have a lot of encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases and other databases available for free, and my card came in just 3 days! They even have a lot of databases from Thomson Gale, a sister company of Thomson West. (No westlaw though).

It’s really easy to sign up for a card there, so if you live in New York State, try it out, it could be nice to have around if you need to settle an argument, or if your kids need to do research for school.

I’ve been searching for a way for people to subscribe to my site and get updates via email; I finally got a plugin installed that will allow people to subscribe directly from the site! To get e-mail updates, click here and fill out the form. It will send you a confirmation, and then you should recieve updates as I post to the site!

If you want to take it a bit further, visit bloglines. Bloglines aggregates all of the sites you keep up on on one page- I use it to watch all sorts of stuff. To see what I subscribe to, look here.

Check back soon; I’ll be posting big news tomorrow!

Apparently the Consumer Electronics Show is going on in Las Vegas this week, so the blogsphere is reporting on all sorts of cool stuff I don’t need; here are a couple things I saw that I wanted to share:

http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/ces/live-from-ces-sony-microdrives-146637.php

http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/ces/live-from-ces-eyebud-800-146626.php

I just saw a couple things I thought I’d share- first, check this video out; it’s a spectacular Christmas light show at some guy’s house that would make Clark Griswold proud. (Originally found here)

Second, read this article; it’s about how some of Sony’s music CDs install spyware on your computer- it’s been a big deal lately, and the article covers the whole thing quite well.

I found this article about a service which can be used to make a bound book of flickr photos for as little as $15.00! Once I get all of the disposable cameras developed, I think I’ll upload them and make one of these books- that would be a lot easier than making photo albums.

Just found this; it has a neat firefox trick that lets you search different places from the address bar. Read the article here: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/special-geek-to-live-129658.php.

(If you don’t have firefox, then try it here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/.)