gille.ws

An interesting map is available on strange maps blog :

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

You can read more on that subject here.

Pentax US has today announced the opening of PentaxPhotoGallery.com a stylish and sophisticated online photo gallery dedicated to photographs taken with Pentax equipment:
Pentax Photo Gallery

Some great photos are there, I recommend you checkout this site even if you are not a Pentax owner (I am not).

Google Code Search goes live.

It will be a tool widely used by developers. People have already found funny things on it, like the algorithm of the Winzip serial.

Great job Google!

The beginning of the Macintosh story:

Funny ads on Windows Live Messenger found on YouTube:

Message in a bottle:

Pigeon Post:

These days, all sites are claiming they are “Web 2.0″.

What does it mean?

Nothing, It is just marketing. If you are using AJAX, you are not automatically a Web 2.0 site.

The word is coming from this article from Tim O’Reilly. It is worth to read it!

If you have a big screen, you certainly have some trouble to find some high resolution wallpapers.

Interfacelift is the solution for you. They have wallpapers up to 2560×1600!

My screen is “only” 1920×1200 and I have found plenty of great wallpapers.

The New York Times (free registration) has an interesting article on how YouTube is used during US elections.

Senator George Allen, the Virginian Republican, has been caught on tape at a campaign calling someone a “macaca”.

This tape has quickly been uploaded on YouTube. Due to the popularity of this YouTube video, CNN has reused the tape.

Loic Le Meur has published a story about a French socialist candidate caught lying in public in his own blog.

Is is interesting to see Internet, and especially blogs, being a new source of information. Unfortunately the source of the information is not often checked and it could be used as a source of propaganda.

It is up to each reader to check the information and I am not sure that everybody is doing that.

Microsoft has released a beta version of Windows Live Writer.

The first goal of the tool is to help people to publish articles into their blogs.

You could think that Microsoft would limit the publication of articles to their blogs. But surprisingly, they have not.

It is easy to setup your blog connection. You are providing the URL of your blog (for me, http://www.gille.ws) and the software will discover the interface to use (I am using WordPress and it has been immediately identified). Then you are providing your username and password and Voilà!

Live Writer is downloading the stylesheet of your blog and is able to display the article using this stylesheet, that is really useful to check how your article will be rendered inside your blog.

You can also include some pictures to your article. By default, the application is adding a shadow border to the picture and is not using the default stylesheet rendering. But you can easily change this setting and its default value. By default, Live Writer is also creating a thumbnail of the picture that you are including and is creating a link to a popup that is containing the original picture. It could be useful, like in this article to include a screenshot.

Windows Live Writer is able to use an FTP account to upload picture. It is also easy to setup.

A spell checker is included but it is not displaying a red line under bad spelled word, like you can have in Word. It would be a good addition to this software.

You cannot define a title for an hyperlink. It is also something that I would like to see in a future version.

In conclusion, it is a good software that has little to improve to be great. I will certainly use it from now to publish articles on my blog.

IP2Nation Plugin for WordPress is a small plugin that is displaying a flag near by a commentator name. It resolves the country from his ip address.

I have just installed it on the blog. Try to comment and you will see your flag (if everything is working fine).