I like it when I think that an app should exist and then find that it does. That’s what happened when I realized that a) I couldn’t use my phone’s GPS capabilities with its native (Google Maps) map application without a data connection and b) that it should be possible to download maps that work with GPS but no data connection.

The answer: MapDroyd. It does precisely that, letting you download vector maps to your phone and see where you are on them. I’ve used it a little bit over the last three days, and it’s been pretty good. There have been a few odd bits on the maps—a major street in central Manchester appeared to be missing, for example—but overall it’s been great, and the utility of having maps of more or less everywhere that can point to where you are on them should not be underestimated.

Despite my techie nature, I’ve never been enamored of books in electronic format. I love the feel of books, and while I have no trouble reading large amounts on screens of various kinds, I don’t like the idea of doing so for books.
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As a geek of my generation, I cannot help but find an eight-bit map of San Francisco (there are maps of other cities too) a wonderful thing. It became even cooler when I found out it was programmed in Python.

The current interface upheaval is centered on touchscreens. I think this is an important step, and one which may allow for some significantly different interaction paradigms to emerge. I wonder how long touchscreens will remain dominant, however, even though the interfaces they help spawn may stick around for a long time.
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Ars Technica reports on a new FCC survey [PDF] which found that about 30 million Americans have experienced unpleasant surprise at unexpected jumps in their cellphone bills. I’ll take this opportunity to complain about AT&T, who recently decided to simply tack a data plan (at $30/month) onto my bill when I switched my SIM card into my new Nexus One—and this wasn’t a request, they just did it and informed me by text message. I was able to get them to credit my account with the amount, which works since I’ve left them for T-Mobile, but that was extremely irritating.

In addition, the amount they charge for text messages is simply ludicrous, all the more so given that I had to pay not merely to send but also to receive them. Finally, I hate the fact that they concentrate on “minutes” so much while refusing to make talk minutes fungible—other services should be expressed in minute cost, e.g. one text message should deduct one minute of voice from your account. I realize they have every incentive not to do this, but it’s still extremely irritating. So far T-Mobile seem better; it looks like my T-Mobile bill will be around the same as, or maybe slightly more than, my AT&T bill, but now I have an unlimited data plan as part of that charge.

My friends Will Moffat and James Home, and their friend Peter Burns, created a site to highlight just how exposed your Facebook updates are: Openbook. It’s an interface to Facebook’s public search API, and the first thing you should probably do with it is search for a phrase from one of your recent status updates. If it shows up, change your privacy settings!
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I got an iPad for work on Friday, and have been playing around with it. I would not have bought one for myself, and have grave misgivings about the device, primarily due to its highly proprietary, locked-down, walled-garden approach.

That being said, I think it’s an extremely slick, well-designed device, and may represent the first steps towards a new phase in accessing computer and/or internet artifacts.
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After a highly enjoyable, productive, and extended period, it’s time for me to return to the world of paid work.

I’m quite happy with the things I’ve done during my time off. Many of them are important only to me, but then, it’s been my time off.
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Slate has put together a tool that gives a very rough indication of a user’s political tendencies by checking which sites on a list the user has visited; each of the sites has a score based on readership by people with declared political affiliations.

It doesn’t actually read your browser history per se, instead just checking to see if you’ve visited the home pages of the sites on its list.
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This post could be summarized as “regular expressions are a lot faster than naive for loops”.

I’ve been working on improving the script I use for live wordcount in Vim, partly for performance and partly so that I can package it up as a plugin and share it with other people. Along the way I’ve improved the speed of the script rather significantly, and will go through the key part of that change here.
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It should be clear that having better access to information than others will make it pretty easy to make money in market trading. And:

While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

—Charles Duhigg. “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds”. The New York Times, 23 July 2009.

That seems like quite the loophole.
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I use a notification system for OS X called Growl, which provides a single channel for various applications to use when they have something to tell me. I mainly use it for IM and email. I’m fairly happy with it, but one issue that irked me was dealing with clearing a bunch of the notifications off the screen.
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The New York Museum of Modern Art has added the @ symbol to its architecture and design collection. Originating perhaps as a Latin abbreviation for “toward”, it showed up on one of the early Underwood typewriters (possibly the Underwood 1; it was definitely on the Underwood No. 5) and was used for “at the rate of”, which usage still survives.
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Microsoft Surface is an advanced touchscreen display built into a table, backed by a fairly advanced suite of software for gesture recognition. I hadn’t seen many compelling uses for this technology… until SurfaceScapes, a group at the Carnegie-Mellon Entertainment Technology Center, released demos of Surfaces customized to hangle playing miniature-based D&D on them.
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As a result of my porting over jEdit (Jython) macros to Vim, I now have a fair amount of (Python) Vim scripts, and have learned some things about how to set up those scripts. I’ll go through some of that below, and hopefully other people writing Python scripts for Vim will find it useful.
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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hacking away on scripts to customize Vim, replicating the scripts I made for jEdit. I’m more or less done, and this blog post is being written in MacVim. This hopefully means that when I’m done with it I’ll be able to publish it from within Vim, the same as with jEdit.
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I’m currently trying out Vim (again), and have made more progress this time, mainly due to Seth’s help. The key things that have made it better:

• :set hidden. Absolutely critical, this. Stops Vim from complaining when you try to switch buffers and your current buffer has unsaved changes.
• bufexplorer. Makes switching buffers a lot easier.
• A better Python syntax file. I didn’t like the defaults.
• My own indentation and syntax files for reStructuredText.

Really, though, the key first one was :set hidden. Before that I felt that I had completely misunderstood Vim’s file management model.
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I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.9 today, and it appeared to go entirely smoothly. Please let me know if you notice any breakage.

Duke Nukem Forever is the vaporware king of games, a game that was promised for so long that its release was a punchline even in the late 1990s. At one point it and Daikatana were frequently compared to each other; Daikatana was also extremely late and ultimately a failure—but it came out in 2000.

Wired has a long look at what happened, and it seems fair to conclude that one of the problems was a lack of limits.
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This article is an excellent overview of how near-future space combat might actually work, and also points out plenty of things that depictions of far-future space combat have gotten very wrong.
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Mark Pilgrim, author of the excellent Dive Into Python, is working on Dive Into HTML5, and his draft chapter on HTML5 semantics is an excellent introduction to the advantages of the new HTML standard. It’s unfortunately quite far from becoming a real standard, but as a web developer, I’d like to see it happen as soon as possible.

I came across a contrasting Mark Pilgrim article that’s also worth reading: “Why do we have an IMG element?”, which goes over the history of that element in HTML, the objections raised at the time, and how it won out over alternatives.

Figuring out what plug (or adapter) to use in a given country is almost like a game; in any case, I found this Gizmodo article well worth the read: “Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug”.

The Kardashev Scale is used to measure a civilization’s technology level, using the measure of its energy consumption—or, more accurately, the amount of energy the civilization can harness. In light of the ongoing computing/networking revolution, I’m curious about what percentage of our energy use is by data centers.
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