If you’re looking for data on baby names, or just looking to waste some time with a cool website, then try out BabyNameWizard.com.

Ms. Dewey may not be the best search engine available but it’s by far the sexiest. Hell, I searched things there for about 20 minutes but I never bothered to click on any of the results. Go check it out yourself and you’ll see why.

As a technical note: they did a fantastic job of using alpha layers in their Flash video.

David Gallo give a short - 5 minutes - but entertaining and educational talk at TED.com. His topic is the life under the sea. Specifically the bioluminescence of the deep sea and the camouflaging ability of the cephalopods in the shallow waters.

Overall the article was ho-hum. But the last one definitely gets a LOL.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search made a joint announcement that they are going to all support sitemaps .90 - official site.

And what does that mean?

from AjaxWorld:

How Sitemaps Work
A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

This all sounds like good news, especially for Flash and Ajax developers who have had issues getting their dynamic sites accurately crawled.

What I’d like to know is what safeguards there are to prevent abuse. Guess we’ll find out.

Well, it’s about that time of the decade. A new solar cycle is upon us with all it’s cell phone interfering goodness.

I was really getting annoyed with comment spam here on my blog. I’m using Wordpress so I got Akismet installed. That certainly helped. So far it’s caught over 20,000 comment spams. But a few were still getting through.

So, as a next level of protection I got Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin. It’s been running for about a week now and so far I haven’t gotten any spam.

f you’re using Wordpress I’d highly recommend it.

Here’s a really cool site by Nike.com - (warning: this page will resize your browser)

This is the kind of site that give Flash both a good and bad reputation. It’s amazingly interactive but the usability is, well, challenging to say the least. To be fair, I would put this in the “User Experience” category of Flash sites. Much like a movie website. The object here isn’t for you to buy something but to play around and enjoy the space. Now the onus is on them to make a compelling experience that will motivate someone to discover the usability so that they can experience the site.

What I really question about sites like this is the Return On Investment. No doubt this site cost a chunk of change to design and developer. So does Nike really expect that this site will increase sales enough to pay for itself? From my perspective I’m just glad that work like this is being done. It gives Flash developers some good work and at the same time I’m sure it influences other companies to follow suit.

I’d be interested in what people think of this site and if it’s good or bad for the Flash platform. Please post a comment here if you have an opinion on the subject.

77millionPaintings.com is a work of generative art by Brian Eno, or so he says himself.

It seems like what’s happening here is using Flash to randomly fade between a set of images. I’m not sure this is what I would call generative art but given that the world isn’t black and white and so neither is generative art then I’d say that this is slightly generative art.

The International Astronomical Union is meeting to discuss what constitutes a planet. The usual list of 9 planets in the solar system my increase to 12 and continue to grow as more “planets” are discovered.

If the proposed Resolution is passed, the 12 planets in our Solar System will be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon and 2003 UB313. The name 2003 UB313 is provisional, as a “real” name has not yet been assigned to this object. A decision and announcement of a new name are likely not to be made during the IAU General Assembly in Prague, but at a later time. The naming procedures depend on the outcome of the Resolution vote. There will most likely be more planets announced by the IAU in the future. Currently a dozen “candidate planets” are listed on IAU’s “watchlist” which keeps changing as new objects are found and the physics of the existing candidates becomes better known.