The Return of the Comment(s) / / No Comments In the twenty plus years this blog has been around, I’ve had various different comment systems. Initially, I simply stored them in a database (this blog used to be powered by ColdFusion), but eventually moved to Disqus. I had a pretty huge amount of comments and was generally OK with the service, but eventually, folks simply stopped commenting. I then made the decision to simply kill off the integration. I wrote some scripts to get my data, stored them as flat files, and you can still see the old comments on posts that had them. About a year or so I added in Webmentions, which works ok, but doesn’t really feel the same. After some time thinking about it, I decided maybe its time to... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Comments, Return
The Daily Explorer / / No Comments Oison Carroll’s Travle is a fun daily puzzle which requires players to travel between two different countries on an interactive map in the least possible moves. Every day Travle publishes a new map, which is blank except for two highlighted countries. All you have to do is journey from one of the highlighted countries to the other by typing in the names of the countries you could travel Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Daily, Explorer
Function Calling and GenAI / / No Comments I love when I work on one demo, hit an issue, discover something else and get joyfully distracted into learning something completely different. In this case, it was a suggestion to help with an issue I was having with output from a prompt, and while it wasn’t a good solution for what I was doing, it was an eye-opening look at a really cool feature of Generative AI – Function Calling. Now, I’m new to GenAI, and new to this particular feature having been introduced to it a bit less than twenty-four hours ago. I know it’s supported by Google AI APIs as well as OpenAI and a quick search around other offerings seems to imply it’s a universal thing. I want to give a quick... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Calling, Function, GenAI
My 2023 / / No Comments Happy New Year (well almost) my fabulous readers. Typically at the end of the year, I like to take stock of what I accomplished through the year and share it in one last blog post. I honestly don’t expect anyone to actually read these summaries, but they help me determine what I did well and what I didn’t accomplish over the year while figuring out what I want to adjust for next year. So here’s how I did in 2023. Writing # My goal for the blog is consistent, useful, helpful, and fun posts. My publishing ‘plan’ is one post a week for 52 posts a year. Counting this post, I published 118 posts which I’ll take as a big ole win. My traffic, according to Netlify,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2023
Real-Time 3D Mapping / / No Comments Kaiwen Song and Juyong Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China claim to be “the first to achieve real-time rendering of large-scale scenes” through the use of neural rendering. They have presented their findings to the world in their paper City-on-Web: Real-time Neural Rendering of Large-scale Scenes on the Web (the website of which includes three live demos). Neural Radiance Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Mapping, realtime
Subway Specs – Part III / / No Comments Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station is the world’s busiest train station. Its is used by over 3.5 million passengers every day. To cope with that amount of traffic the station has to be very big. It has 35 platforms, while another 17 platforms can be accessed through hallways to 5 directly connected stations without traveling outside. With over 35 million platforms and over 200 station exits it can be Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: part, Specs, Subway
Where Might I Live? / / No Comments There are 3,143 counties in the USA. One of them is probably perfect for you. But which one?What makes a perfect home can depend on a number of factors. Those factors are likely to be different for every single person. Where Might I Live can find your perfect US home based on your own personal criteria. Tell Where Might I Live what factors are important to you in choosing a home and it will Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: live, might
Destroying People’s Homes in Gaza / / No Comments The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has begun creating interactive 3D models of destroyed homes, hospitals and businesses in order to help convey the devastation that ongoing military conflicts can have on ordinary people’s lives. Using photogrammetry the ICRC has managed to create harrowing 3D models of an apartment block in Gaza destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 2021, a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Destroying, Gaza, home's, People's