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sydney fenced in for APEC summit. friday on the week of "festivities" is delcared a public holiday and the opera house fenced in.

what a load of bull shit. quickly someone vote out the liberal federal government, and the nsw state government for shutting down the sydney economy for a week to let george w bush go on a freaking holiday.

the age reports that of all places that may have a white christmas, tasmania and victoria are getting snow on their ski slopes. for those who don't know, they're having their summer there at the moment. weird!

yes, the world cup is upon us. starting from today, they'll probably be a month of entertaining soccer. i'm lucky enough to be going to germany at the end of next week to watch brazil v australia. that will be awesome and i can't wait.

honestly, that is the first football game i'm going to watch in europe, or pretty much anywhere in the world. i've made it my goal to attend at least one major sporting event while i'm here in europe. i missed out on the olympics and the euro 2004 by being in america, and of all places, who don't appreciate football (or saa-kur.)

although on the flip side of things, some english people here don't appreciate it either. it does not seem like people are as mad as they look like on tv and what the british press would have you believe.

lucky for us here, all the games will be on free-to-air tv, shared between BBC and ITV. timesonline has a schedule of the games and who will get the broadcast it. i believe ITV will take most of the games of the latest stage while BBC will take most of the games in the group stages.

if you're in a country that doesn't have the world cup on free-to-air, you will be able to see it on CCTV-1 on ppstream. basically, that is the mainland china tv channel who has the rights to the world cup. the other channel on ppstream that you can get hold of games is the guangzhou sports channel (广东体育). i talked about how to get ppstream up and running previously, but there's also a bit more information on the net.

who am i supporting?

let's get my allegiances right here. here's who i'll be supporting:

australia - do you really have to ask?
japan - ganbare-nippon!
holland - i love orange!
england - do i have a choice?
brazil - they play beautiful football
sweden - they're scandinavian!
france - well, only just. they have henry and he plays great football.

here are the teams that i won't be supporting

germany - just never liked them tactically, they play boring football
argentina - they're quite a dirty side
italy - a bunch of divers

other teams i'm feeling pretty neutral about.

my predictions

in the group stages, upset with australia going out in group f, argentina going out in group c, and czech going out of group e with on goal difference.

the last four in the finals will be holland, england, spain and brazil.

all this non-scientific and based on a narrow view of the world :)

just when i got really motivated to do work over the weekend, weather turns good in cambridge and puts hay fever season in full swing for me. i've been sneezing and sniffing non-stop today, killing any opportunity to concentrate and do any meaningful work.

so i just ended up watching england thrash jamaica 6-0 in a pre-world cup friendly. its crazy but the world cup is going to start in 6 days time.

other thing that i'm hooked on today is the nelly furtado cover of the gnarls barkley "crazy", featured on bbc radio 1 live lounge. it is a really different interpretation of the song, and i like both the original and the nelly furtado acoustic live version, but if i had to choose, i'd prefer the acoustic version.

and for aussie entertainment, rove from rove live will be filling in at merrick and rosso for next week according to what they said on their thursday podcast. can't wait to hear that. hamish from the hamish and andy show appeared on thank god you're here episode 9 which was hilarious!

"good news everyone", google maps just added street maps for australia and new zealand! maps.google.com.au isn't live yet, but i'm pretty sure that isn't far off now! this is great news for all mapping aussies. so that was only a couple of weeks after google maps europe. not bad at all.

as much as i would like, i'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with my little google maps australia street maps mashup before. i'll still leave the demo online, because maybe it will come in handy as sample code for other places that still do not have street maps and want to employ the same trick.

thanks to peter and james who tipped me off in my blog comments about the exciting news!

last week, i finally swapped my australian drivers licence for a uk drivers licence. previously i was using the fact that i have an australian drivers licence and plus i'm a student, so apparently there's some loophole for me to drive.

but i wanted to swap my nice cleanly designed NSW drivers licence for the pink monstrosity of the UK licence so that i won't have trouble driving in EU countries. turns out the process of getting the licence wasn't bad at all. in fact it took much shorter than the 15 days they said it would take. i sent my application in last tuesday and got the license less than a week later on monday. this is really a record in british efficiency. (it takes a week to open up a bank account here).

what that means is that next time i go back to australia i need to get a new licence, but i suppose i can drive with my british licence in australia too. it does mean that i did have to forgo my aussie gold drivers licence that has its price clearly labelled at the back, AU$118 for 5 years however, compared to the £38 for 45 years, the british licence is a pretty good deal.

last night, someone (i don't know if he wishes to be anon) told me he actually listened to something that i checked out my podcasts i listen to page. we were talking about podcasts and he said that i had really weird taste because he totally didn't get sunday night safran.

so this morning i decided i would go through some of my list to introduce you to things that aren't really mainstream. these are australian podcasts because they form a bulk of what i listen to. i miss aussie radio.

sunday night safran

people who don't know john safran are probably going to freak out why this person who has a weird sense of humour and raspy voice can actually be on radio. i've got a set of dvd's of this series on tv called "safran vs god." it is a very black humour type investigative documentary on all sorts of religion. i haven't even finished watching it yet because it is very hard to convince patricia to sit down and watch it with me. this is mainly because his voice is so irritating.

however, once you get past his chalkboard scratching voice, you'll find that he pokes fun at all sorts of religions, moral and social issues. for instance on his dvd's he sneak into free masons, tries out shinto buddhism for two weeks (very funny), tries to join a cult halluciganic cult where they claim it is against their religion not to get high.

now back to the radio show, it is actually just talk about recent news events that is religion related and he often has controversial guests that disagree with him. one of the most memorable interviews recently is he interviewed some chick who wrote a book about something - but she basically spent the whole interview bagging him out for not reading her book. anyway, it's interesting stuff, but not every episode is excellent, but its always something fun to listen to if you've got nothing to do.

the cage

the cage is a morning breakfast show on a nation-wide radio network in australia. it features are couple of comedians plus an ex-australian team cricketer. the best bits of the show is when they just go off on a tangent about what pisses them off, or JB's internet joke. the podcasts are not an afterthought, they actually go and bother to put an intro and snip out the right bits for you. which is great.

the shebang

the shebang is an afternoon drive show. they rely on listeners to call in with contributions about a particular topic they start. the think their quirky style of amateur radio is very funny, and to think that this is on national radio is even funnier. yet heaps of people listen to it, and it shows because they're not just some fake over the top radio announcer voice. dead air happens alot on the show, but that is what makes it so fun.

hamish and andy

i only discovered these guys on the net, they weren't particularly big when i was in australia. but they really rock. you have to listen to some of the segments. they do some pretty outrageous things, like challenged one of their hosts to get botox on their forehead, call up a guy who has the license plate BONKRZ and test whether he is really bonkers, got a farm boy into new york to gatecrash a coldplay interview and got him to sing a song about mariah carey boobs!

get this/toughlove

another australian radio show. the two male hosts, tony martin and mick molloy, used to do a really hit radio show back in last century called Martin/Molloy show and even won a couple of awards for best comedy albums with names such as "eat your peas" and "the brown album". they've since done all sorts of things from writing, to tv, to movies. and now they're back on radio and as funny as ever.

tony martin is famous for his john howard (our prime minister in australia) impressions. mick molloy is just an all-round crazy typical aussie guy. but they have two separate shows now, which means twice the content!

the sporting life
the sporting life is a three hour marathon of sarcastic commentary on sports. they are the foremost sports satrical comedians. it is very heavy aussie humour, so i would think that most people won't get it. although, when the 2004 olympics was on, i did attempt to get people hooked on to their unique sports commentary on the weightlifting and gymastics by giving each of the contestants back stories such as a user car salesmen, a box packer, etc.

merrick and rosso

these guys are another breakfast radio duo. i think their claim to fame is their interview skills (or lack thereof) and so they manage to ask some ridiculous questions when they interview celebrities. recently the prank called a guy from japan, and they were so impressed with how polite this guy was and ended up sending him a slab of VB (24 cans) and then invited him to sydney for a holiday all expenses paid!

i sent off an email to the folks at google maps mania to tip them off on my google maps mashup, and to my surprise they had a whole bucket load of australia-centric maps mashups! i've heard of the benno.id.au one (mainly because he went to the same uni as i did and obviously feels the same way as i do about the insufficiency of google maps in australia.) it also turns out that i wasn't the only one who had abused street-directory.com.au's tile server.

interesting fact, search for gold coast and you'll find that the maps aren't aligned very well -- more over, there's some sort of satellite picture misalignment there:

there are probably more, but people will never know unless there are bloody street maps ;) oh yeah, i wonder where you can actually report these bugs to google maps.

[Update (18/5/2006): Good news! Google Maps has released street maps for Australia and New Zealand. That renders this little experiment obselete. Thanks everyone for checking this out. Although with that said, Street Directory maps are still better quality ;)]

i have been sitting on this google maps mashup i made for about a month now, not really knowing what to do with it. today, after listening to a podcast about mashups, i thought it was time to show people what the next stage of mashups we should be doing with google maps -- that is combining google map's amazing interface with other map sources.

this creation of mine, i hope, will be useful to australians who wish google will get their act together and add street maps for google maps australia! so here it is -- street maps for australia in google map's style, all in javascript:

i've showed this privately to a few people and at least one of them wished i had done this earlier so he could save hours trying to find a geological structure in perth. the code, for posterity is going to live here at http://mashup.mapmarks.com/aust/maps.js , so grab it while you can. if you have any improvements, i'd be interested to know.

my technique just involves relying on the browser to scale and tile map to compensate for the different in scaling factor between google maps and street-directory.com.au. therefore you'll get artifacts at the joins due to pixel errors. that is purely so the whole mashup is done client side and no images are cached or manipulated on the server and i do not violate anyone's copyright by caching the map tiles. [UPDATE: i'm not a lawyer, so i'm not going to assert that i am not violating any copyright. however, i believe that all i am doing is generating a URL that points to a publicly accessible map tile server. you will notice in the code that i add the copyright information at the bottom of the map when the tiles are in use.]

google maps australia vanilla

this is the reason why i'm did this:

look, there are no street names in google maps australia, not even place names. this is incredibly annoying and uninteresting. i've been waiting over a year for google maps to properly support australia, but i reckon this won't happen any time soon.

application to other places

note that my technique will not work on non-square tile servers such as mapquest, multimap and such. but i've got some ideas on how to get around that, but at the moment, i don't have time to dabble too much into that hack.

i've also played with other map sources, other places where google maps don't have street maps. for instance, china and hong kong. china is an interesting one because google local china already does have street maps, but they don't put it in the google maps format. i'm curious why. and for hong kong, i blogged about this before, it just has no data. hong kong is an odd one because the mapping sites there really suck.

useful?

unfortunately, this is an unofficial hack. but you should be able to take the code and run it on your own server. everything is neatly wrapped up in a GMapType for your taking. the code is public domain.

spread it around and tell all your aussie friends to play with it. the least that i want from this is to show google that there is demand for place and street names to appear on google maps for australia.

this is something i can blog about because my friends don't blog (or at least i can beat his gf to it). my best friend just bought a car. well, he bought a lexus SUV, the RX350. i don't read much about lexus, and mainly because if you search for "lexus rx350" in google, the official site doesn't even come up at all on the first page.

you know what i suspect? australia always gets the left over cars that the rest of the world doesn't want. for instance, australia is the only place i know where there are more two door mitsubishi lancers (google) than anywhere else in the world (notice most of those sites are australian.) there are no two doors in japan nor in hong kong. i didn't manage to see one in the states either. the reason why that happens is because australia is the dumping ground for failed car models. and that is what i think the RX350 is. because if you go to lexus' uk homepage, there is no RX350. there is only RX300 and RX400. so RX350 must be like a failed aborted attempt at RX400 or worse, the bastard offspring of RX300 and RX400.

ok that was a joke, sorry chris :) actually there have been alot of other RX3xx's around, i just never knew about them because i'm not into SUVs, even less interested in lexus SUVs.

for a while he was convinced that he wanted to ugly monstrosity that is the range rover sport. i complained on and on about that car, and he finally got something else. to a certain extent, i would like to take credit for that. but to be honest, i doubt i had anything to do with it. more like it was an impulse buy for him. (btw, i like range rover, just not the sport model, because when i hear the word sport, it means its got sleek lines, looks fast -- not like a box)

of course, i would of preferred if he actually followed through and got a lancer evo x (or whatever mistubishi lancer evolution is up to now, last i heard it was 8.)