Google has just released Google Maps streetview for Australia.

Simply awesome.

BuilderAU just released some photos of the new Googleplex under construction in Sydney today.

The new Googleplex campus, to be shared with Accenture

Optus Campus, Macquarie Park. Currently the largest single tenant workplace/corporate move in Australia

You can also check out the office photos thanks to the new Google Maps Street View:

View Larger Map

Let’s compare these two big guns:

It may be small numbers for Google, but you would imagine those figures would grow very quickly.

So I just had to install the Microsoft .NET framework package, because I had some other software that was dependant on it. FAIL!! How funny is this:

Err… Download complete…. Disconnect from the internet… Cancel is my only option?!

Ok, so I love FriendFeed. However, it hasn’t got notifications. At the moment, comments and updates on FriendFeed die out very quickly, as no one is notified of updates etc…I would imagine the guys at FriendFeed are working on this one. So in the meantime, lets get creative!

FriendFeed meet imfeeds. Imfeeds is a service that lets you get instant messages to your chat client of your RSS feeds as they happen. Imfeeds supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk. Wait, before you ask, yes imfeeds is more reliable than twitter.

So I’ve put them both together. Here is you what you need to do once you have signed up to imfeed. Just grab the RSS feed (off FriendFeed) for the person you want to get notifications for and subscribe to them in your chat client. Easy as that!

Do you know of any other ways of getting FriendFeed notifications? Let us know!

Watched a very interesting video today about scaling the Facebook infrastructure. Some very interesting points:

Amazingly crazy stats….

FriendFeed is cool.

What is FriendFeed?
If you haven’t signed up yet you should - its basically an feed aggregation for a lot of services (Eg Twitter, YoutTube, GoogleReader, Last.fm… and many many many other services). It lets you consolidate all your activity in all the third-party services into one feed. People have termed it as ‘twitter’ on steroids. The thing I like the most about it is I can go to one place, and find out what my friends are doing on all their social network services. The guys that developed FriendFeed are ex-Googlers, and have got big plans for it. Read more about FriendFeed here.

FriendFeed API
The FriendFeed API is a RESTfull API. The RESTfull API is available in four main formats JSON, XML, Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0. The full FriendFeed API specification can be found on the FriendFeed Google Code page and is all opensourced.

Tutorial with FriendFeed API and PHP
So I’ve been playing around with the FriendFeed API in PHP. In the examples below I am retrieving all data in JSON format, and then parsing it in PHP. So here is some very basic sample code to get you started:

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include("friendfeed.php");
include("JSON.php");
 
//Connect
$friendfeed = new FriendFeed("yourusername", "yourpassword");
 
//Sample code to post data via the API
$entry = $friendfeed->publish_message("Testing the FriendFeed API");
 
//Sample PHP code to get data for a specific users feed via the FriendFeed API
//The below gets the first 30 entries in that users feed
$feed = $friendfeed->fetch_user_feed("some_random_user_name", 0, 0, 30);
foreach ($feed->entries as $entry) {
  //get the image of the service, and its name (eg twitter, googlereader...)
  $output .= '<img src="' . $entry->service->iconUrl . '" alt="' . $entry->service->name . '" />';
 
  //get the title of the entry and link to it
  $output .= $entry->service->name.'<a href="'.$entry->link.'">'.$entry->title.'</a>';
 
  //get the date of the entry
  $output .= date('Y m d', $entry->published);
 
}
 
echo $output; //prints the entry title, icon and link to the entry
 
//TODO: Continue to write an awesome FriendFeed Application with PHP

The above code should be enough to get you started. Be sure to put in error checks etc when writing your FriendFeed application! To find out what other services are available, check out the FriendFeed API doco.

Have Fun! and see you on my FriendFeed.

I went to Google Developer day last year, it was great (checkout this post). This year I’m at Google Developer Day for 2008 in Sydney. Very cool.

I’ll be microblogging on my twitter stream if anyone is interested.

Key Highlight:
Well there were a few. I think seeing Android on a live demo was pretty sweet.

Key ‘Lowlight’:
Well we had a talk on Google Gears from a guy from MySpace. MySpace are using Google Gears to read and search through people’s personal MySpace messages. Don’t get me wrong - I love Google Gears… but to me, the way MySpace are using it is just a cop-out for them being unable to handle how to search for hundreds of messages. Instead of letting the user do this on the server, they let the user do it on the client, because its really easier to process. That was a downer for me.

Photos
Welcome sign when you are about to walk in…

Speedgeeking… and also had Wii, Xbox 360 and Guitar Hero…

Great setup & nice food…and one of the Sessions

All in all it was a great day - lots to learn with the many awesome Google API’s out there… can’t wait to digg into them!

By default, MySQL has remote connections turned off. So if you want to connect from your local machine to a remote MySQL server - you can’t. To turn this on:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.*
  TO 'remote_user'@'yourlocalhost'
  IDENTIFIED BY 'passwd'
  WITH GRANT OPTION;

-- OR
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.*
  TO 'remote_user'@'%'
  IDENTIFIED BY 'passwd'
  WITH GRANT OPTION;

That’s it - you should now be able to connect to your MySQL database remotely.

If you didn’t know (I just found this out) - transparent PNG’s don’t work in Internet Explorer. Who would have thought, its only the year 2008, and the image transparency is “cutting edge” (*sarcasm*). Thanks to our lovely friends at Microsoft for this one - it works fine in Firefox.

Im currently on a project where I have been doing quite a bit of CSS styling and just found this one out with my PNG icons. So to fix this you pretty much have two options:

1. Convert all your transparent PNG’s to transparent GIF’s
I would recommend this if you are using something like Photoshop, its fairly easy to do - instructions here.

2. Use Microsoft’s AlphaImageLoader to load the transparency
I wouldn’t recommend this unless you have to. Why? Well there is some code you need to chuck in and you have to specify each of your images in a DIV. For example:

...
<body bgColor="blue">
<!-- This DIV is the target container for the image.  -->
<DIV ID="oDiv" STYLE="position:absolute; left:140px; height:400; width:400;
     filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(
     src='myCoolTransparentImage.png', sizingMethod='scale');" >
</DIV>
</body>
...

To do this, there is a great tutorial at the lovely A List Apart blog, or check out the Microsoft KB article for this one.

I recently stumbled across this great video “Wikis in Plain English”. It aims to explain they key benefits for a Wiki to new users or non tech-savvy users.

Its great because it highlights some key benefits to the average user such as reducing emails, coordinating tasks, retaining knowledge and just simply being cool