Amazon Mechanical Turk - Welcome

So we've come around full circle. I think this is a break from normal thinking, and it's not too bad, actually. I wonder if you can make a living off of just being human?

Coding up that if/else

Something that really irks me in code is when I see something like this:

if (result == FAILED)
print "failed!\n";
return;
else
// do whatever
end


You don't need the "else"! If the "if" statement evaluated to be true, then there's no reason why it would jump out of it. Therefore, there's no reason that the //do whatever part of the code should be inset! Do this a couple times, and you'll have a nightmare of nested code. Keep your code as shallow as possible. Don't nest if you don't have to.

Sharing places in Google Earth

Google earth's coolest feature (imo) is not the stunning visuals, but rather, the image overlays you can put on it, so you can overlay, subway maps, apartments up for sale, etc.

But in addition, and even cooler than that, is that there's a KML format that you can export from google earth that's an XML file that let's you share and transfer waypoints from inside the app. So if you and I belong to the Stonecutter's secret society, and we need driving directions to our secret meeting place, someone in our group can actually change that waypoint, and we would be updated automatically.

This, I think is in line with their aquisitions in the mobile industry in the last year or so. I think that we'll see some type integration between mobile users, and global knowledge and coordination of places.

Yahoo maps in response to google maps

The yahoo maps beta is significant because it's yahoo's response to google maps. And it chooses to use Flash instead of AJAX, which is receiving a lot of hype right now. So that's something to think about in terms of the choice between the two. The argument I've traditionally heard about not using flash is because it has long load times, user's not guarenteed to have it, and it might be over kills. But the fact that it loaded up fairly quickly makes me think there's something more than meets the eye w/ flash.