TimWeb

I’ll raise your demerit with a Letter of Disadulation.

ScrewTurn is an open source wiki engine written in C# .NET 2.0. While it does have many useful features, it is lacking one of the features I find most useful… A syntax highlighter. However, it does have a fairly good plugin system which lets you extend the wiki beyond its standard features. After searching through the forums the only syntax highlighter I could find was one by t_magennis (GeShi Code Highlighting), which uses the PHP GeSHi library, and since ScrewTurn is an ASP.NET application it makes this plugin more of a hack.

After searching around I found a lightweight syntax highlighter by Thomas Johansen and Christian Nordbakk, called Lonwans Highlighter. Although it is not as extensively written as GeSHi, it does perform highlighting and supports 23 languages with the ability to extend the amount of languages through an XML file. This is the basis for the plugin which I created… Syntax Highlighter.

For more information, download and installation instructions, please see the plugin’s software page.

Apple have just recently released Safari 3 beta and with this release they have included an XP and Vista version, for the previously Mac only browser. Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari 3 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (see video here) and showcased some of its features and benefits. Aside from the claims of being “the best browser ever”, Jobs also claims that Safari is 2x faster than IE7 and 1.6x faster than FireFox 2.

Personally I’m not a fan the Mac look and feel, especially that big grey toolbar, however there are a few features which are useful, if not at least intriguing. For example, while tabbed browser, you can drag a tab off the tab toolbar and a new window will be opened with that tabs contents displayed. Another useful feature is the ability to resize text areas, without the need for this to be implemented by the website (of course this is available in FireFox through the use of a Resizeable Form Fields extension by Justin Watt).

Aside the aforementioned features of Safari, it does appear to render HTML quicker than IE7 and FireFox. However, there are a few bugs or unimplemented features which should be included. One notable downfall is the lack of support for the scroll wheel click feature (I’m not sure if this is lack of support for my Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 or if it’s not included at all), which is presumable a direct side affect of the mac mouse having a 360 scroll ball instead of a wheel. Another downfall I noted was that the tab toolbar does not always close once you close all of the tabs (excluding one), but granted it is only a beta I’m sure that bug will be fixed before the final release.

All-in-all I think Safari is just another standard browser really, and I’ll be sticking to FireFox for now. However, if you would like to try out the new Safari you can head to http://www.apple.com/safari/ and download your free beta copy. Or alternatively you can download the real “best browser” from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.

Update June 13^th: Apparently there have already been several vulnerabilities found in Safari.

Although it appears to be 7 months old, I recently stumbled across a useful Google Maps mash-up from News.Com.Au. The ‘News Map’ places 10 articles (they say 10 on their site, but it appears to be a lot more than that) from news.com.au World and National sections on to the Google Map interface, allowing users to see where particular stories are taking place. In order to determine the geographical co-ordinates, Metacarta is used to extract place names from the articles and convert them in to longitudinal and latitudinal references.

Of course this isn’t the only mash-up of its kind, with others providing such Google Map displays with articles from the Associate Press, and news.bbc.co.uk. There are also alternative implementations, such as a map by multi.co.za, which allows uers to click on a country and be presented with a list of articles, from an array of aggregated news sources, which reference the  selected country.

So you enjoy the comical satire of The Chasers, but you don’t get to watch it on Wednesday nights because of other priorities… such as House and/or Prison Break work? The ABC have you covered with their ‘vodcasts’ of The Chasers.

While it is good that the ABC are providing free episode downloads (within Australia) they are only 320×180, which is only good if you want to download a small file to play on your iPod, Zune or other portable media device. However, John Beohm at idents.tv is providing a resource of uncut H264 episodes with a more acceptable resolution of 640×360.

Downloads:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/