This lab walks you through some different components of the Maps API and JavaScript.

Most websites are built from a combination of HTML (content) and JavaScript (behaviour). We want to focus on programming, so each excercise contains pre-built HTML.

n a two-part post I'm going to show you some tricks you can do with SSH logins. This post covers setting up two-factor SSH authentication with the Google Authenticator app.

I was recently getting some servers in shape so I can pass the Payment Card Industry standards questionnaire and one requirement was two-factor authentication access to the server. I queried whether SSH key + passphrase was acceptable but didn't get a clear answer so I figured I'd explore setting up another authentication factor myself, plus it piqued my interest.

After a bit of research I found it was possible using a PAM module but it doesn't work along with SSH key authentication (only password authentication) and I only use SSH key logins for my servers.

Land Information of New Zealand has made available a great set of 1:50,000 scale Topographic Maps. I downloaded all 455 of the maps covering the main island of New Zealand and coverted them to a seamless Google Earth overlay. The quality and resolution of the source images has been retained, so they might load a bit slow. And it might take 30 seconds to a minute for them to load the first time you use them due to the size of this map overlay.  I could increase the performance, but that would result in lower image quality.  Please let me know if you have any problems as I’m not sure how well this will work on low end computers with slow internet connections.

To load the overlay, click on the Download With Google Earth button at the bottom of this post.  Then zoom in on New Zealand.  The closer you zoom in, the more detailed the map will become.

All together, this overlay is about 10 gigabytes.  The original GeoTIFF files can be downloaded (very slowly) from LINZ.

The maps are Sourced from LINZ and Topo50. Crown Copyright reserved.

Create and view beautifully informative animated maps, for free!

I am constantly telling my friends about the new technology tricks that I learn in my internet travels. I learn a lot, which has caused my friends to ignore around 90% of what I say about technology. I don't mind, because I know that I am a genius(heh) and they will come around some day.

This is exactly what happened with my most recent hacked upon hosting setup. I told my buddy kanno, and he didn't pay attention. Then he started diving in a bit on his own. Once he experienced a taste of the magic, I helped him to the rest of the koolaid and he was hooked. The result was him begging me to do this post to help people understand how awesome this setup is.

Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

Last week, Google enabled two factor authentication for everyone. This article explains how to install and configure Google Authenticator in conjunction with SSH for two factor authentication. Two-factor authentication relies on something you know (a password) and something you have (your phone).
You can use this existing implementation and Google Authenticator application with SSH via an included PAM in the Google Authenticator open source application.

If you use Gmail as your email backend but prefer a good old-fashioned desktop email client for handling your day-to-day email, you're probably aware that many clients—like Outlook or Mail.app—don't play that nice with Gmail. Here's how to fix that.

Generate a map for your site. It is really simple.

Links to examples of various useful things and documentation

Spanning Backup continually backs up Google Calendar, Contacts, and Docs to the cloud. Setup takes about 7 seconds. Then you can rest easy, knowing your most important data is protected.

GoogleCL brings Google services to the command line.

The Viamente Route Planner is a web-based service that processes your list of locations and delivers optimized routes and schedules on-the-fly.

It maximizes the efficiency of your transport resources while cutting down your planning time.

The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.

View font details to get the code needed to embed the font on your web site. Please also visit our quick start guide and FAQ page. For more help and suggestions, use our moderator page

With scripts, you can:
Create your own custom spreadsheet functions
Automate repetitive tasks (e.g. process responses to Google Docs forms)
Link multiple Google products together (e.g. send emails or schedule Calendar events from a list of addresses in a Spreadsheet)
Customize existing Google products (e.g. add custom buttons or menus to run your own scripts)

Spanning Sync, Inc. today announced it has added Spanning Backup for Google Apps to the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google's recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services.

Your visitors may stumble into a 404 "Not found" page on your website for a variety of reasons:
A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake
Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message
Moved or deleted content

How-to: Create Services for Quick Search Box
Written on October 28, 2009 by Bryan Schuetz and 4 people have commented


I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.

One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital bits that limit integration. Luckily, a handy application from Waffle Software called ThisService makes creating proper services that integrate seamlessly with QSB a lot easier than you might think.

Being able to extend the functionality of QSB with OS X services really opens up a lot of possibilities. Grab text or files in QSB and pass them on to your services to do whatever you want with them, like creating a new To Do item in iCal. I’ve been focused recently on replicating functionality that I lost when I made the switch over from Quicksilver and I think that this improved service integration will get me about 90 percent of the way there.

The bad news is that this means I need to whip up a bunch of custom services for myself. The good news is that ThisService makes that task very easy. Just give it a script (AppleScript will do, but if you’re more comfortable with other scripting languages you can use those), define the type and name of your service and click Create Service. ThisService handles all the fiddly Cocoa bits and spits out a completed service into your ~/Library/Services directory where QSB will see it and serve it up as an available action when appropriate.

Actually writing your AppleScript will likely be the most complicated part, which is why ThisServices comes bundled with some handy starter scripts to put you on the right path. They also make a number of example scripts and services available for download from their site. The scripts don’t need to be complicated. For example, here is the one I use for adding To Do items in iCal:

1.
on process(input)
2.
tell application "iCal"
3.
tell calendar "work"
4.
make new todo at end with properties {summary:input}
5.
end tell
6.
end tell
7.
end process
If you wanted to get fancy you could pass additional properties like the due date, priority, etc., but just getting a new item into the list is all I need.

Once you have your service setup accessing them through Quick Search Box is as easy as can be. Because showing seems to be more useful than describing, below is a quick little video clip of the To Do service in action. What kind of services would you like to have? Share your thoughts in the comments.