I've got some spare Gmail invites. Anybody want?

First 4 comments win...

Update: Now I've got 6 again (and I'm sure more will come..) So if you want one just leave a comment...

Update #2: If you want gmail invites, the best way is to use the gmail invite spooler (i'm sending most of my invites that way, as are many others).

Google has redesigned their store, according to this post on google blog. I wasn't aware there even was a store before now, but there you go. Anyways, I would just like to proclaim my deepest respect for a certain item, namely that on the left (click for bigger image).

That's right. official Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" boxers. The ultimate touch of class...

I'll be the first to admit: I have never used Java. I have seen Java code exactly once.

And yet, I have a firm image in my mind that Java is slow, clunky and just generally ugly. Where did this idea come from? I don't know. It's just there. Which is why I was somewhat surprised to see this study of the performance of Java versus C++

Of course, this is by no means definitive. But some duscussion on this exact topic at slashdot certainly raises some interesting questions - specifically the one in the title ;)

Rise Against - Anywhere But Here:

We've been alright up to now
but the air that we breath is about to run out.
We've rehearsed our lines clear and loud
but the cue never came and the lights
they never went out.
So we're passing the time,
while time passes us.
The fast lanes a term never applied to us.
Without a dime to my name,
or a prayer in the world.
I walk out the door.

Destination anywhere but here.
Away from you.

Rise Against have the best lyrics out of all the bands I love. Combine that with their energetic singing and playing, and you have yourself a mighty fine band. I suggest you all do yourselves a favour and get their music into you ASAP...

If you're a web programmer, you most likely want to try out Uniform Server. It's open source server software that includes Apache, Perl and PHP. I have set up all three these programs individually before, and it cost me about a week's worth of headaches.

I installed Uniform Server about ten minutes ago, and it just works straight away - while retaining all those config docs for you to play with if you so desire. There's a start.bat, a stop.bat, and a /www/ folder for you to put your files in. How much simpler could things be?

Ahh, Paul Cowan over at Funkwit always makes me laugh. His latest entry is devoted to culling crap sports from the olympics, in order to make room for us Aussies to win more swimming medals. So much anger in one man, and so humorously vented...

Have a go at this flash recreation of that old 3-cups trick. It's in another language, but just watch the box with the arrow on it and you'll get the hang of it instantly. I managed level 6, level 7 seems to be a mash of twirling movements to me, so good luck getting to level 8...

UPDATE: Tried it again after a good night's sleep, got all the way through it without having to guess. I think maybe it helps to have a lot of programs running so the animation slows down a bit ;)

JobPredictor.com does just what you kinda suspected it might: you tell it your name, it tells you your ideal job. So I casually entered my name and clicked submit. Lo and behold, my future job:

Tim Cuthbertson, Your ideal job is a Emperor of all the world.

Hey, cool! That doesn't sound like too bad a life. I could really get used to the emperor lifestyle I reckon. But wait a minute, what if I use my full name?

Timothy Cuthbertson, Your ideal job is a Gigolo.

Dammit, from now on my first name is oficially just "Tim".

Yay, I've got Braxton Hicks!!! (the new Jebediah album, not the phantom pregnancy contractions). Bought it today, currently loving it to bits.

My favourite song on it is currently "The Seven Signs of Ageing", but that's likely to change...

...and that's all for now.

In a project destined to join the ranks of the O'Reilly Hacks Series, Matt Webb is busy writing a book codenamed Brain Hacks: "100 practical and understandable probes into the design quirks of the brain."

Now I'm not much of a book reader lately, but I'd sure like to read this when it gets finished...

Curious as to exactly what colours Crayola includes in a box of 96 Crayons, and more importantly - what spiderman thinks of them? Me neither, but you can now find out regardless...

The cool thing about "Yellow" is that you always end up needing it a lot more than you anticipate. Nobody ever picks yellow out of the box just for the Hell of it, but once you start coloring in whatever coloring book or colored coloring you colored, there's a 99.9% chance you'll eventually need the yellow for something. In that I cheerfully liken it to bay leaves.

Yep, sure is an interesting read (WITH COOL PICTURES!!)

So, I was bored yesderday and decided to look into creating a calendar to sif on the side of my blog, linking to days where I have posted something. I wrote a static mockup with html and css, and it worked fine in Firefox (IE is another issue, but I can't be bothered dealing with IE right now).

So I moved onto generating the calendar html code automatically with PHP. I first wrote a fairly kludgy script to parse my site's XML feed, until I realised that this only contained my past 5 blog entries, which is pretty useless for a calendar. I then decided to use the Blogger API, using the Blogger Class by Beau Lebens. This worked great, until I realised that the Blogger API doesn't support titles or permalinks, and that the post dates it returned seemed to be all wrong.

So then I got kinda stuck. In the end, I decided to parse my own HTML archive pages that are generated by blogger, and that currently works. It's 100% dependent on the structure of the html, but since that's auto-generated by blogger there shouldn't be any nasty surprises.

If anyone wants to play with my code, feel free. It will have to be customised differently depending on various settings like your archive format, date display format and most importantly your archive page template. I have commented things reasonably well though, so give it a try. If you use any part of my code, please credit me with a link to www.gfxmonk.com.

Oh, and if anyone else knows a better way to get data about previous blogger posts, please leave a comment...

Just noticed in my server logs that the GoogleBot has probed my site. Not all that special, seeing as I submitted the url to google today. But not only is it indexing my main page (and all sub-pages I have linked to), it requested the files index.rdf, atom.xml and rss.xml

Clearly, google is looking for syndication files for my site. I am curious as to why it looked for these files instead of index.xml, which is the feed for this site as shown by the meta-tags placed by blogger. Regardless, google wants in on syndicated content. I can't see feeds on google being terribly useful at the moment (since they're not often human-readable), so I think google is planning to build some sort of feed search similar to Feedster. I'm looking forward to it, if that is indeed the case...