Well, after about 18 months at Monster.com, it's time for me to move on. Today was my first day at my new gig - Boston.com, part of the Boston Globe Newspaper - primarily focused on BostonWorks, their online job classifieds. So far so good (although I could do with a shorter commute, but what are you gonna do?).

I left Monster on good terms, I was just ready for a change (you know how these things go). One thing I am definitely looking forward to is a smaller, nimbler work environment.

When I stepped off the train this morning (first time I've ever commuted by train), and out of South Station, I was hit by a big welcome blast of cool wind. It's been so humid and hot lately (making me miss Seattle). I took the big cool blast as a good omen, and see this whole move as another new adventure.

 

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You should uninstall your GreaseMonkey Extensions.

Following the thread here, you can see an exploit discovered by Mark Pilgrim that actually allows website programmers to find and use Greasemonkey if it's enabled on the user's browser - including the GM_XMLHttpRequest object - which can GET and POST any URL to any URL with no restrictions - including local files and local directory listings. This is very insecure, and I've uninstalled GM on all of my machines, and advise others to do so as well. I'll be following the Mailing List to see how things develop, hopefully there will be a usable workaround.

 

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A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Rob Hof of BusinessWeek magazine about web mashups, and some of the hacks I've done, and that others have done. The article, Mix, Match, And Mutate, is out now, and I quite like the way he captured the current situation - excitement over the possibilities, some caveats about consequence, and a summation that points out that this is largely in the "tinkertoy" phase of growth.

I think the only issue that wasn't addressed (based on the audience of BusinessWeek) was the ramifications of opening up your data as a business move (especially for startups). I'm sure the folks at Flickr could write a book on the positive and negative aspects of opening an API as a business move.

(Did I really say "It's the Wild West all over again"? Ugh, how cliched.)

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Google Maps has a wonderful new API, officially sanctioning (and encouraging) the hackery that has been going on non-stop since they debuted. My first attempt at a useful hack using their official API is this: Google Maps Transparencies. It's two maps overlayed on top of each other (Map and Satellite view, or vice-versa), with the topmost map being slightly transparent, so you can see the interesting intersections between Google's Road Map data and the real world Satellite imagery.

For the time-being, it's US-centric, since their API doesn't provide a simple interface to their lovely single search box (you have to enter latitude and longitude), and to simplify things, I just included a giant drop-down of US cities. You could always zoom way out and pan to get to the UK (or Canada).

Update [07/06/05]: I've fixed a bug or two, (including Safari not working), added drop-down lists of UK and Canada cities (effectively covering what Google maps covers now), added a way for people to enter their own Lat/Lon, and a way to make a permalink to a page. Whew. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

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(Instructions for PC users)

1. Find a source of chronologically ordered images (webcams are great), like this one of Olavinlinna Castle in Finland
2. Using middle-mouse button (or click-wheel), click on the image links in order (in the example, from the bottom up), opening up each image in a new tab.
3. When you have enough (10 or more) images open in tabs, close the first tab.
4. Hold down the Ctrl+Tab keys - Firefox will cycle swiftly through the tabs: Your very own flipbook animation. (If you want to reverse it, hold down Ctrl+Shift+Tab)

You could probably do the same in Safari or with FF on a Mac, but I have no idea if the flipping speed is decent, nor what the control keys are (for new tabs, and tab-switching)

Whee!

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