Anton Olsen . com

Stop the Auto-Play Madness

I don't care if you are a band, and want to promote your new song.  If I am shopping for music, then odds are very good that I like music, and that I am already listening to something.  Your shit doesn't sound good mixed up with whatever I'm listening to.

Don't set up a player widget to start automatically.  Bonus asshat points if you hide the stop button.  That just makes me leave your site much sooner.

Do put a player widget on the page and make it easy to see.  I promise I'll click play when I'm ready.

Powerset, the Next Google Killer?

Is Powerset set to take on the Google? Somehow I doubt it, but they are getting a lot of marketing buzz today.

Fun with TLDs, .sh

• gilgame.sh
• squeami.sh
• purpli.sh
• aba.sh
• succota.sh

The .sh top level domain (TLD) looks to have a lot of good available names.  Too bad they  cost 60£ (+VAT).  That's about 120 USD.  If the exchange rate improves, which .sh domains would you develop?

http://www.nic.sh/

Google App Engine - Google Code

Google App Engine - Google Code

Run your web applications on Google's infrastructure.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

Try it free with 500 MB persistent storage and enough juice to server up 5 million pages a month. Sounds like a good alternative to EC2 and S3 for those on a budget.

[update]  I applied before I went to sleep last night and had an invite waiting for me this morning.  Now I just need to come up with a cool idea.

Zenoss Google Maps Traffic Monitor

Zenoss can now monitor two kinds of traffic.

By hacking at the javascript in the default zenoss template it is possible to add Google Maps traffic overlays to the Zenoss dashboard.

Submit your own Zenoss tip and get a chance to win an AsusEEE!

The full Google Maps Traffic Report Howto is on the Zenoss Tips and Tricks wiki page or read more for a local copy.

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Google Trends, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python

Henry brings up a good question in the comments on the indeed.com comparison of the languages.  While I don't believe the trends in search terms are a good measure of job possibilities or job growth, they do indicate what people are interested in, or at least what they are having trouble with.

The lines, top to bottom are Java, PHP, Ruby, Python.  Java's popularity is waning and the other 3 seem to be flat lined.  I picked the United States for the last 12 months.  I was hoping this would help reduce the counts of searches for Java Indonesia, but it probably amplified the counts for coffee shops.

Before you get too crazy comparing the graphs here with the indeed.com trends, keep in mind that the indeed graphs show percent of change in postings, not total number of jobs.  The intent is to show which markets are growing the fastest, not which are the biggest.

Read the graph as you will, Java is probably more popular than the other languages but I don't think it is better, nor do I think it is growing.  Java might be all but gone in a decade and we will be looking down on the current agile languages in favor of something better, faster, cheaper and wondering how on earth we put up with the ancient bloated tools like AJAX, Rails, Django, etc.

ruby, python, php, java Job Trends | Indeed.com

ruby, python, php, java Job Trends | Indeed.com

Indeed.com can show some interesting trends about what's hot and not in the job posting world. Here's a chart of the popular web languages vs Java. It appears to me that Java has flat-lined.

Individual charts after the jump:

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GM Reddit

Genetically Modified Reddit is a Greasemonkey script that I wrote to automate the task of voting up and down the things I like.

Get it here: gmreddit.user.js

You will need to install greasemonkey first. Once installed, you can manage user scripts and edit the arrays at the top of the file to include your keywords.

The script checks for down votes first and skips the up vote if it finds any. Adding more keywords might affect performance, but it runs fine on all my machines.