XFN stands for XML Friends Network. You basically define human relationships between webpage authors by adding an extra atribute to links.

Well I decded to write a nice XFN crawler/search engine thingy. The crawler part works. I also decided to do a nice graphical representation of the links between sites.

Red is “crush”, blue is “met” and green is “friend” (just three properties I picked at random).

XFN Network

Google are going from strength to strength. Their take over of America is well documented on my old blog, but they the move towards global domination today, releasing UK versions of Google Local and Google Maps. The rest of the world must surely follow.

For those of you who do not believe me and haven’t read my previous posts on the matter, check the following:

• maps.google.com
• maps.google.co.uk
• local.google.com
• local.google.co.uk
• video.google.com
• catalogs.google.com
• froogle.google.com
• froogle.google.co.uk
• froogle.google.de

Google Catalogs is possible the most impressive. Although the fact that Google Maps in America now has (completely free) aerial photo data is cool. One funny thing is to go look at the Whitehouse with the mysteriously edited image erasing it completely (not Google’s doing; in their blog they were just as surprised to find it).

My first exam is in ten days… Galois Theory. Worst one of the lot… but at least I only have seven to do instead of eight.

I’m struggling to find something to write. That’s not to say I don’t have things to write as such I’m just not sure I should share them.

Julia’s letter hasn’t arrived yet…

I’m sure I’ll actually say something interesting next time :P

We impulsively went to Cleethorpes today. By we I mean myself, Ryan and Darren. Not that exciting but still a laugh. We went on lovely illegal imported DDR machines…

On a more personal note (since this is marked personal) I’m awaiting a letter from Julia. Apparently there’s some stuff in it that would be hard to explain by phone. I’m sure it’s not as ominous as it sounds.

Also if you haven’t realised there is a link to the first chapter of a story I’m writing called Reactions on the menu to the right. Go on, have a look (unless you are one of the two people who actually read this regularly in which case you’ve already read it).

Well one can now create an account and login. So far it doesn’t give you anything but it does respect users with regards to what object orders you can perform. i.e. you can’t rename objects that aren’t your own.

It just occurred to me (not strictly true but we’ll let that go) that I may not get the current version of Galaxia finished. This time it really would be a shame since the code in it is actually quite good. So I’ve come with an idea I would like feedback on (which will be an achievement considering the attention this site gets).

I might open up Galaxia at least partially. Nothing fancy like a public CVS, but the generated documentation complete with annotated source listings. This will obviously impact security of the game once it’s available to play but it might be worth it since it opens up lots of possibilities:

• People actually writing stuff for Galaxia. There are lots of places people could write little bits of stuff for me that aren’t hard to do but do take time.
• The very fact that people will be able to see the code will make me write it better and clearer and with better documentation.
• If people are interested I might finally write a tutorial on some MPOG-writing-in-PHP topic which I’ve wanted to do for ages.

Anyway if I by any chance you are reading this and are interested (of course you’re reading this) post a reply…

I thought I’d finished on Galaxia for tonight… But I came up with stars:

Instead of adding truly useful stuff to Galaxia I decided to added a nice cool feature.

The interface will use two maps (so you can look at two places at once). The disadvantage is you need your display set to 1024x768 for it to work properly but that would have been true anyway since there is still the control frame to display under the map that I haven’t done yet.

You can now build colony ships and transfer ships between facilities. The next thing to do is to allow orders to be chained so one is done after another. That way ships can be transfered from the shipyard to the launchpad automatically after being made (as well as lots of other cool things).

Of course the big thing to do is add users to the game since everything I write now needs to be slightly different depending on object ownership.

Read that in a Mario voice, it works better :S

Anyway, Oliver gave me a section on here, which is cool. I’m just admiring the very cool software it is powered by, all these smooth curves and clean lines - very nice!

OrbWars is great by the way. And if Oliver will continue writing bits of it it will become the best! mwuhahahaha!

-Ryan