I have long been annoyed by the Triangle Expressway's PDF by which you have to carefully piece together the toll charges, so I made a map-based calculator.

NCSU's Centennial campus is growing quickly. Now that all search engines have their own satellite image powered maps you can watch the growth unfold.

On the same day I got screenshots of the campus at various stages of construction over the past three years from Microsoft Terraserver, Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps, Microsoft Live, and Ask Maps and stitched them together with Slideroll.

On a side note, Slideroll does not seem that impressive in its current incarnation. It restricted my 1592x1265 screenshots to a mere 360x240 animation. Even with a pro account you are limited to 600x480, a bit weak for a Web2.0 site. Maybe they just don't get it.

I once saw a similar and much larger community canvas whose location I have since forgotten. Several months later I got to thinking how it was made. I had and idea of using AJAX, so I whipped this up using just that to see if it could be done. That, in a jiffy, explains why I made this.

So what is it? Community Canvas allows you to draw by colouring in squares. As you draw your changes are saved for all to see. Also, as others make changes the changes will propagate to your canvas, even as you are still drawing! So go ahead, try it out with a friend.

Good thing this is not a blog or that would be a seriously sorry state of affairs. One post every two months, course for par I guess. Anyway, some actual news this time: two Java applications were released. Both of these were written to fulfill a need I had and have been released in case anyone has the same needs.

2005-04-30: Photo Notes
Photo Notes is an image caption program. Basically all it does is allow you to save captions/notes for photos you take. Its main strength is that it doesn't lock you into a proprietary caption format or program. It's all stored in plain text so your captions will remain accessible for many years to come.

2005-03-13: Alarm Clock
The title for this one is pretty self-explanatory. It looks a lot like a real alarm clock, is fairly simple to use, can be run as both an application or an applet, and supports 12 hour and 24 hour formats.

Some olds (not exactly new anymore): News & Observer got another letter to the editor on January 19th after they ran a story on the new Airbus A380 with this diagram.

Airbus bets big on 747 knockoff

Or so it seems from the comparison visual aid on the front page of today's business section. It is quite clear that the Airbus A380 visual is just a modified version of the Boeing 747 one, yet in reality the two look nothing alike. The A380 does not share the 747's pronounced nose, opting instead for a first floor cockpit and a large forehead.

For many in the Triangle this may be their first introduction to the A380 and you've just given them the impression that it is a close copy of the 747. Why would you mislead them in this way? A little research (a 30-second visit to Airbus' corporate web site at the very least) would have revealed your error.

Dominique Bischof