In Loki We Trust

This is the unofficial Google Maps viewer for the OSX Dashboard.
Current version is 0.9c

Download

Version 0.9c Screenshot:

Upcoming Version 1.0a Screenshot:

Future Features:
• Pop-out sidebar for directions support.
• Print Functionality – options include new safari window, handle it within the widget, etc?
• Some sort of route following function be of use (in directions mode)?
• Support for loading your own xml/xsl mapping files.
• Support for google’s satellite maps (this is already done, just not enabled).
• Support for TerraServer satellite mapping data – allowing better resolution, though with older photographs, for the satellite view.
• Much better GUI – with design by Daniel Burka of SilverOrange

Update:
Still working on the bug fiexes, as google has switched to a new API – see the newest post on the subject here

Current Bugs
• It will not show the content in the popup pin windows.

I am always open to suggestions and improvements, so feel free to post in the comments section, or email me directly at lokkju@lokkju.com

Normally, when using DB9 Modular ends, you use them with a “standard reversing” Cat5(e) cable – which is really only standard to a very small subset of people. If, like me, you are one of those people who always have the real “standard” Cat5(e) cable around – the stuff used for normal computer networking – then this pin diagram will show you how to create modular ends to turn it into a null modem cable. It is, after all, easier to carry a couple ends then it is a whole seperate serial cable. The other advantage, and the reason I do this, is because this makes it east to have double ended female, or double ended male serial cables – which are hard to find.

Anyway, the table:

Null Modem Cable End “A”

Null Modem Cable End “B”

Bind-DLZ (Dynamically Loadable Zones) is a patch for BIND version 9 that simplifies BIND administration and reduces memory usage and startup time. DLZ allows you to store your zone data in a database. Unlike using scripts, the changes in your database are immediately reflected in BIND’s response to DNS queries, so there is no need to reload or restart BIND. You see, BIND “dynamically loads” the “zone” data it needs to answer a query from the database.

Though DLZ is the best thing to happen to DNS (and Bind specifically), it has one major flaw – there is no suitable front end for managing the database that DLZ uses.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a front end for DLZ, and I think I finally have a decent one. Please note, this is a beta, and demo, only, and the code is for you to look at, not to use, as I am not sure on my licensing yet for this.

At any rate, here is a link to the demo:
http://www.lokkju.com/projects/dnsEditor/SampleEditInterface.php

It currently edits against a mysql database of sample data, which has the exact same table structure as the version I use for production (live) editing of our DNS records.

The two things that currently do not work right are adding and deleting actual domain names (only because I have not figured out the method I want to use, in terms of the GUI), and the SOA record layout is a little funky.

BAStats is a statics package for tracking visitors to Wordpress enabled sites. Though in beta stage, it works great in both WP 1.5 and 2.0, however it has a flaw in being able to store ip addresses where the initial quad is greater then 127. There have been a few ideas for fixes posted in the comments of the BAStats blog announcement, but not none of them seem to be effective.

After looking into the code for a while, I think I found the problem, and a simple fix. The stats package is attempting to write a signed integer value into an unsigned bigint database field (mysql only supports unsigned bigints perhaps?). The simple solution is to wrap all calls to the php function ip2long() in a sprintf function, converting the signed int into an unsigned one before writing it to the database.

Here is a unified diff patch for fixing this bug:

BAStats patch for fixing the 255.255.255.255 Bug

About 6 months ago, when the Google Maps API first came out, I did some major work with it, both in providing functions to make it run better, and in extending it. Based on the idea by David Schuetz’s TerraServer functionality for the old style of Google Maps hacking, I wrote a simple library to enable TerraServer maps through the Google Maps API (you can still get it here). I released it through the newsgroups, and then prompty forgot about it.

Well, today I was looking into some more Google Maps stuff (I use it on and off in many of my projects), and I found that there are quite a few sites out there using my library. Needless to say, I was pleasantly suprised. The two best are below:

AccuTracking – http://www.accutracking.com/
Weather Quality Reporter – http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/C0506

Demo:

So I was working on my DNS Editor back end last night, while using iTunes - and I decided I want the same type of filtered list that iTunes has. About 4 hours later, I came up with this, so here it is. It really only takes two lines of code, and one class statement, to add:

then, in your table, just make sure your class name includes "filterable". The input box ID must be the table id plus "_filter". In addition, if you want to make a row that never gets filtered, you can include "nofilter" in the td's class name.

If you want to get the library right now, you cen grab it here. You will find the code for the demo down further.

Right now, I am filtering on the inputbox value being anywhere in each cell's text - however, since I am using a regex, it would be very easy to modify to only match at the start of the string, etc. Here within the next few weeks, I hope to mature this library to the point of have some way of specifying (perhaps based on the class) what type of match you want, as well as specifying which columns in the table you want to match against.

Thanks go to Stuart Langridge, over at Kryogenix, for ideas on handling tables unobtrusively, in his sorttable library (here). In fact, I wrote this library to be compatible with his - so you can have sortable tables, that are also filterable.

Sample code after the break

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