Monday 29 March 2010

Publishing a Google Document and losing fixed width?

Two undocumented querystring parameters in the Google Doc API may help :  

pageview - setting this to 1 will maintain the fixed width view you see whist creating the document after publishing (defaults to 100% width)

hgd : set to 1 to exclude google footer

 

Open for Inspection

Found a handy tool for any fellow frustrated apartment seekers in Sydney; Open For Inspection from realestate.com.au. You can quickly see all the inspections aggregated by date for a suburb/city/state, and apply any filters such as price. It would be handy if you could actually see the results on a map, or retrieve it through RSS.. but maybe those features are coming as the product is still Beta. The only way I managed to duplicate this functionality previously, was to search on domain.com.au for all Sydney suburbs, then filter by inpsection time for next 7 days, then sort those by inspection time. Apart from being frustratingly slow, this tended to be error prone as places without any inspection date/time set default to today or some undeterminable point in the future. It is also very easy to access this open for inspection page from a PDA, up till now i've been hacking around with my own google doc spreadsheet which screenscrapes data from domain/realestate.com.au, filters then sorts it, allowing me to quickly get at easy whilst mobile.

In the UK I used the all powerful globrix which already has already been running these features for sometime, great to see the Aussie sites building them too.

Here's the fun i've got lined up for today. If only the agents would actually turn up for the inspection now (2 didn't yesterday).

 

 

Thursday 4 March 2010

Diesel, for successful living


Diesel, for successful living
Originally uploaded by Matt Goodman

A random sign on the way to Vegas caught my eye as we were racing along the Interstate 15. Not to far from Barstow.

Monday 1 March 2010

General Sherman

General Sherman Originally uploaded by Matt Goodman

Spent a couple of days in the Sequoia National Park, south of the Yosemite. The tree pictured here is called "General Sherman", and believed to be between 2300 - 2700 years old. The tree is truly enormous, holding the title for largest in the world. Although somewhat of a mission to get to it, well worth the effort. The national park is stunning at this time of year (end of feb) and free from armies of motorhomes/campers, so had many trails to ourselves.

More pictures here. Now, off to Vegas..