EGOPOLY

The google maps API is now “official.” I tried it out; it is incredibly easy to use. It took about 20 minutes for me to make a nice map on my wife’s web site. I could do it again (now that I understand the API) in about 3 minutes.

There is one serious problem, and that is their API access key system. It is incredibly brittle, and can cause your maps to work on “www.example.com” and fail on “example.com.” And randomly work or break on funny hosts like http://test.example.com:8080/.

Hopefully google will fix this soon or just disable the API key thing until they can.

Google Maps API

My sample map

I tried really hard to get PDF files on my Mac to open with the Apple “Preview” application instead of Acrobat. Sometimes it would just work, but there were clearly some mim types or something that refused to give up the Adobe connection. Finally I got fed up and delete all the Acrobat software from my disk.

Guess what? It worked. Now “Preview” opens all PDF files. I’m so happy. No more fat bloated viewer that takes 15 seconds to open and display an annoying splash screen. (Come on, splash screens are so 1994.)

Delete Acrobat Reader from your disk. You will be happy too.

I was always bothered by the behavior of velocity that on certain errors, it would throw a stack but no message. I finally got fed up and decided to track it down. It turned out to be not a bug with Velocity or Kayak, but rather a bug in the “logfilt” tool that I wrote to trim down log output. The regex to strip away the preamble stuff in [] was too hungry, and was eating the entire message when the velocity message had a ] on it. Bah! There is probably some trite lesson here, but I am too sleep deprived to articulate it.