mobrec

So
Gchart is a nice little Google Maps mashup that allows you to input the names of countries or major cities and find out what the local time is as well as international calling codes. Right now it's 10h45 AM (tomorrow morning!) in Wellington, New Zealand — I'd love to be there.

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A new species of lemur has been named for former Monty Python member John Cleese. It is named “avahi cleesei” and as the anthropologist points out, lemurs don't do silly walks, but they do do silly jumps.

So
If you are a total newsfeed and IM junkie, you can combine these to add to your own personal information overload by using immedi.at Using this site, you can be notified via MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ of things of interest in your news feeds. From their site:

Use immedi.at to be notified instantly when:

* news on a certain topic is posted * your competitor does something of interest * something interesting happens with a favorite sports team * your name or company is written about * you receive new email

The second to last bullet seems a tad on the Narcissistic side, but, hey, every one has different needs.

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The Standford University is making available the Sherlock Holmes stories as they originally appeared in Strand magazine. You can subscribe to them via print or receive a notification to download the PDF when it becomes available.

Distribution will start in January of 2006.

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Rummors are flying today that yet-to-be-launched photo recognition site Riya is to be acquired by Google. It would certainly make another fine addition to the Google arsenal.

More as things develop (or don't).

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steptwo has an excellent article enumerating the 10 Principles of Effective Information Management.

I have to agree with lifehack that principle five 'take a journey of a thousand steps' is one of the real keys here. Too often I have seen important strategic changes not put into place because they would never be implemented as their own project. However, they could be just as easily broken down into manageable chunks and implemented along with other projects.

via lifehack.org

So
If you have been even remotely interested in trying out JavaServer Faces, you might want to pick up a (now) free copy of Sun's Java Creator IDE (was $99USD). Versions available for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

If that version of Creator floats your boat, you may want to sign up for the Early Access program for the Creator 2 over at java.sun.com to see what the next generation of tool might be able to do for you.

So
I tend to agree with Mr Bray's WS-Interop posting. Much of what is being created under the guise of standards feels like it is just making real interoperability more and more elusive. From a pure interoperability standpoint, introducing SOAP into an interaction just tags on non-value-added bloat with the 'benefit' of having the interaction be more toolable (and you more dependent on the tools).

WS-* isnÂ’t about standards. ItÂ’s about what Microsoft (there are partners, but itÂ’s mostly Microsoft) chooses to implement while waving the WS-banner and retroactively shaking Standards Fairy Dust over the process. Which is OK, as far as it goes; I get the impression that Indigo WCF is actually some pretty neat software that will be useful to a lot of Microsoft customers, and Sun has a stake in the ground saying weÂ’re going to interoperate with the Microsoft WS-stack. Do I think this stuff is going to Change The World? No. Do I think that this is the real future of Web Services? No.

Standards have their place and certainly serve large corporations to help cut through the sometimes dense forests of (ad hoc) internally adopted technologies. However, on the wild, wild Internet, simple is better. This is not to say that standards have no place; afterall, there wouldn't be a Internet without TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, HTML, etc. In the end, the simplest, most open solution tends to win.

So
Earlier today Google released a version of Google Maps called local for mobile that runs on most Java-enabled mobile phones . I was able to easily download the app onto my Nokia 6620 and start making use of it. The experience was much more seamless when I finally found the setting in Nokia's AppManager to not prompt me every time the app wanted to connect to the web (which was a lot).

One downside that I found is that there is no apparent way to 'bookmark' locations (say, your home, or place of business) to make it easier to zoom to places where you commonly find yourself. For that matter, bookmarking would make it easier to get directions though the service because you would commonly want directions to/from your home or place of work. Bookmarking would be a great addition, as I find that anything that keeps keying and mousing to a minimum on a mobile device makes that app/service all the more valuable.

I found the Google offering much snappier (speed-wise) than the previous app that I was using on my 6620 called MGMaps. MGMaps basically served the same function in delivering Google Maps to mobile devices. It may be that MGMaps may go away altogether now that Google has introduced its own mobile application.

So
Use a Mac and tired of your current browser? (or maybe just have too much time on your hands)? Apparently there are 83 or so browsers to choose from. Some of these are a bit of a stretch calling them browsers (realplayer, netNewsWire) just because they have some rudimentary HTML display capability.

Of course, all of the usual suspects are represented in the form of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Opera. There are also some interesting variants like the 'Eric Shore Baur' browser that in instrumented to measure page load times and allows for playback of web actions.