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We seem to have been neglecting Rotacoo recently, having posted nothing of worth for the whole of June & July. I shan’t bore you with the usual excuses of work, holidays and commitment to Google Sightseeing.

Some interesting things that I’ve wanted to post somewhere:

• Varnish Cache: The saviour of Google Sightseeing’s load issues, the Varnish “HTTP accelerator” (or reverse-proxy) needs more exposure for Wordpress bloggers outgrowing their hosting platforms.

• On Sunday afternoon I conducted a short poll of those carrying books around the baggage reclaim area of Heathrow airport. The results were 9 Harry Potter to 4 “other” books. No surprise then that it’s already the best selling book of all time.

• Giant rubber duckie: I love oversized things as “art”, and this Rubber Duckie is possibly the best ever. Please someone get an aerial shot for Google Earth.

• Tomorrow is Oxford Geek Night 3 which I’ve been looking forward to since May. As an added bonus the first drink is on Google!

Google Sightseeing has been up and down (mostly down) for the last 24 hours. The cause of the issue hasn’t been fully identified but we’re working on it as best we can.

Edit: It’s all sorted now

On May 31st Google held a Developer Day Conference in 10 cities around the world. I attended the London day and blogged the below text live from the event (with some later clarifications now added).

There were concurrent sessions throughout the day so I had to pick which ones to attend. You can see all the sessions on Youtube.

12.30pm: So, I’ve arrived at Google Developer Day 2007 London, typically late.

Ed Parsons, who is giving the Geo Keynote just said “Some people may be interested in using Google Earth for looking at topless sunbathers, but I prefer looking at planes”. I wonder if he was referring to the Google Sightseeing Top 10?

I was interviewed by a woman for their montage video of the day, but my comments were so heavily laden with plugs for GoogleSightseeing.com that they’ll probably not use me.

Now we’re having lunch ( I only just got here!). Google makes nice sandwiches, and there’s a smoothie bar.

Oh, I got goodies! A t-shirt, a mouse-mat, some “Goo”, a notepad, memory stick, etc. All Google branded of course. Don’t ask me what the Goo is.

My 1st Session: New Features of the Maps API

This talks is mostly going through the basics of the Maps API.

The first interesting tidbit is that you’ll soon be able to embed Adsense within your embedded Google Map. So advertiser’s sponsored placemarks will appear on your map page, and you’ll get revenue, just like any other kind of Adsense.

Google Mapplets look very easy to create, I’ll certainly be creating one of those when I get a chance. Although I do think the various ways of generating and embedding maps and KML are getting very confusing. Would there be much need for Mapplets if everything was indexed KML?

My 2nd Session: Google Earth & The GeoWeb

This talk is mostly just going through KML tags and the things you can do with it. Of course, the speaker is using a Space Navigator to demonstrate Google Earth.

An interesting tidbit: the newly released (yesterday) KML 2.2 has author tags, so you can get attribution on your KML when it’s included in Google searches.

My 3rd Session: Maps API Challenge Thingy

I don’t think I was meant to be in this session but I got lost. Basically, we had to build a maps interface against teams at other Developer Days around the world.

It took up a fair chunk of the day, but I did win myself a SpaceNavigator.

I haven’t noticed it announced anywhere else, but apparently UK geocoding was supposed to be added to the Google Maps API by today. It will apparently be available very soon.

The End: Keynote Speech

We’re watching a live keynote speech which is going on in California. There’s very few people in this room… I wonder if they’ll announce anything.

So, we’re watching the streamed keynote, mostly recaps at the moment. Looks like Frank at Gearthblog is also liveblogging the keynote.

First product announcement: Mashup Editor, which sounds like Yahoo Pipes. He’s showing us how to build such a mashup, but the feed isn’t high resolution enough for me to make out what the code looks like. Sounds simple enough though.

He’s talking about Google Gadgets now. The second announcement is Mapplets, even though they were launched the other day.

He’s talking about Google Gears now, which allows you to use your Google online applications offline. I missed the talk earlier today but I’m told it was very impressive. Gears runs on major browsers (although I read somewhere that for Safari you’ll need a nightly build) and was in a collaboration with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has arrived: “I’ve made loads of money, wohahaha!”. Not really, he was suggesting caution and responsibility when using tools. Or something, I wasn’t really listening.

I think I’m going to stop there, this is starting to turn into a Crazy Apple Rumors keynote live blog (which are always very funny).

Afterwards

After the event Google treated us to Drinks an canopies in a bar across the road, which was nice of them. All in all, a very good day.

Geo-conference Where 2.0 has launched in San Jose, where all the big players in everything geo will be giving presentations and launching new features.

Microsoft seem to be first out the gate with loads of new imagery for Virtual Earth, including Bird’s Eye coverage of London.

Google have also launched new imagery in the form of street level views for 5 U.S. cities. It’s similar to A9’s version, but with a much nicer interface.¹

Culminating with the end of the conference is the Google Developer Day, to be held in ten cities worldwide. Google will surely be launching a few new features at this event, whilst teaching all those in attendance how to best make use of their various APIs.

I’ll be at the London Developer Day, but unfortunately it’s too much of a trek for Alex to make it down from Edinburgh. So, if you are at the event and you see a man in a Google Sightseeing T-shirt please come and say “hi”.

Well the move went well, my wife and I have arrived in Oxfordshire with no major breakages, and starting to adapt to the English way of life.

What I want to know is why does it take so long to get ADSL installed? What are BT doing for those “7 to 10 working days”?

Anyway, if you’re ever looking for wireless in Abingdon, look no further than Cafe Gia’s. They also do good cups of tea.

(Disclaimer: this post should probably be on my personal blog, but I got rid of that after I never posted there. If you’re only reading this site for the Google Sightseeing meta-news then I suggest you stop reading now.)

My wife and I have both lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for our entire lives so it is with some trepidation that this Friday we will be permanently relocating 400 mile south to Oxford, England.

Apart from the stress of moving away from all our family and friends, I was a little worried about employment in Oxford. We are moving for my wife’s new job, so I have given up my position at LEWIS (who are hiring by the way, great people to work with) and, for the time being, I will be unemployed.

Edinburgh seems to be overflowing with design agencies, which means there’s a lot of Web Development work around. To be fair I’ve not exactly been looking until now, but I’d never heard much about Oxford’s design agencies. The last thing I want to do is write software for a bank, so I was worried about job prospects.

I voiced these concerns to a few England-based visitors to last month’s Refresh Edinburgh and they all told me there was loads going on down south and mentioned a few names of folk in the area. I subscribed to a few key blogs and soon discovered Oxford Geek Night, a regular get-together of web geeks in a pub somewhere in Oxford. It’s very comforting to know that there’s enough people in the business down there for them to get together and fill a pub with geekery.

I’ve missed the most recent Geek Night but will be attending the next one, and in the meantime I’ve subscribed to a bunch of job-based RSS feeds and begun updating my CV. Since the last time I was seeking work the percentage of boring .net development jobs seems to be even higher, but it looks like there’s one or two positions doing agency web development.

Of course, with some free time I may even manage to implement a few things from the massive Google Sightseeing to-do list.

Well if you haven’t seen it already, here’s Google Maps being featured on The Simpsons!

In fact, a naked sunbathing Homer? That seems to ring a few bells for some reason…

Mobuzz.tv seem to have spotted the link to Google Sightseeing too (skip to about 1:20), mentioning our mass digging¹ as well as linking to our Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth post.

It would be lovely to think that the writers on The Simpsons had been stealing their ideas from our site!

James and I were both lucky enough to be part of the beta test of Panic software’s new Mac web-authoring application Coda, which was released today.

And I for one am sold, sold, sold¹. Basically you have everything you need for building sites — FTP client, fully-featured text editor, CSS editor, terminal, browser and reference — all in one window. As far as features go, I particularly love the auto highlighting of illegal characters in the html editor, and I know people are going to love the collaborative editing they’ve incorporated from SubEthaEdit, but actually, the whole application is really slick.

Lovin’ it Panic, and looking forward to watching Coda develop!

If you like Google Sightseeing, then why not vote for us in the Blogger’s Choice Awards? We’ve never gotten anywhere in these blog polls before, but maybe that’s because we don’t beg our entire readership to stuff the ballot boxes on our behalf…

Anyway, if you’re a fan, then you can vote for us as the Best Geek Blog, the Best Blog About Stuff, the Best Travel Blog, or even the Best Blog of All Time!

Oh, and feel free to tell your friends of course…

This weekend Edinburgh was graced with Scotland’s first “proper” web conference: The Highland Fling. The speakers were all excellent, and gave me loads of ideas for things I’d like to implement in both my day job and night job. Stand-out talks were Mark Norman Francis on Graded Browser Support and Andy Budd on some of the best features we should be trying out from CSS3. Olly has a good write-up of the day.

The next day the tables were turned, and some of the speakers from The Highland Fling saw what Scotland had to offer at the Refresh Edinburgh conference. Matt Riggott and John Sutherland were the hosts, and Matt’s employers, Line had kindly offered up a fantastic venue. The room promoted a laid-back feel with Tennent’s artwork and a Tuk-tuk in the corner.

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