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I’ve make a bookmarklet out of David Gouch’s Javascript implementation of John Gruber’s Title Case Perl script.

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Title Case

Seems to work ok in Firefox, IE 6 has issues.

I use vim coupled with the SuperTab plugin for my text editing and auto-completion needs. In some vim setups (E.g. Mac OS X) it is configured by default to search included files when completing words. This sounds like a useful feature but it turns out not to be. It has a habit of searching the include files of system libraries and modules, the keywords of which you rarely want. Its also quite a slow operation as it trawls through all the files. The solution is to add the following in your .vimrc file.

set complete=.,w,b,u,t

This is the same set of flags as the default except with the ‘i‘ option removed. See the help for the ‘complete’ option for an explanation of what each flag means.

Randall Munroe proposed the awesomely geeky idea of geohashing via the xkcd comic and blag recently. The idea basically involves using the MD5 hash of a date combined with the opening value of the Dow Jones Index for that date to derive a latitude and longitude relative to a (generally your own) location.

However there is a problem for those of us residing in Australia (and other locations with a time zone significantly different from EST). With the Dow Jones Index operating on US time its not possible to determine a geohashed location in Australia until about 23:00 AEST for a given date. No doubt others have thought of this but I suggest we use the All Ordinaries Index instead. With that out of the way we just need some enterprising sole with some spare time to implement a version of the map based on this.

Update: More info on geohashing in Melbourne on the Visible Procrastinations blog.

Another Update: Using the Dow on the weekend works well though. As over the weekend everyone is more or less synced to the same index.

Final Update: The xkcd blag has a follow up article that clarifies the behaviour for Europe, Asia and Australia. It boils down to using the previous day’s Dow Jones Index.

Can people please stop using the ‘feed:’ URI scheme for links to feeds on web pages. Its annoying and unnecessary.

From what I can tell this URI scheme was proposed around Dec 2003 as an unofficial pre-draft RFC. The reasoning behind the proposal was:

…to provide a straightforward way for end users to subscribe to the data feed for a particular online resource while browsing the World Wide Web. The expectation is that clicking on a hyperlink that points at a “feed” URI will cause the Web browser to invoke the specified handler for the “feed” URI scheme which SHOULD provide the user with information about the data feed as well as the possess the ability to subscribe to the feed.

Fast forward to 2008 and all the major browsers have support for discovery of feeds specified by the link tag and a user interface to access them. Additionally they are able to auto-detect a feed when specified with the normal http URI scheme. With the built in support the browser is able to launch the appropriate feed reader on the system, be it within the browser or an external application; thus removing the need for the URI to be specified with the ‘feed:’ scheme.
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