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Sooner or later every individual, business, or organization is challenged to perform repetitive or complex procedures on their computers. Whether the task is renaming numerous files, batch processing images, or building documents using data from multiple sources, the need for powerful automation tools is shared by all computer users. Mac OS X is designed, from the ground up, for automation and offers a variety of integrated tools and technologies to solve your automation challenges.

We're making it easier to generate custom map tiles with your own data. We will be releasing our AWS infrastructure for free in Fall 2009.

The original image is 16,384 x 16,384 pixels, but the javascript on this page requests only the visible 256 x 256 pixel tiles needed to fill the smaller window. As the image is dragged, tiles are repositioned and images re-requested to maintain the illusion of smooth scrolling. In theory (hah!) the original image can be infinite in size. This is the same technique used by Google Maps to render the street and satellite maps, and by Zoomify to speed up image viewing.

The javascript source for this page is available at gsv.js, under a permissive open-source license. Use it! The name "GSV" is a contraction of this page's original joke title, "Giant-Ass Image Viewer." (It's also a nod to one of my favorite authors, Iain M. Banks)

The Python library, PowersOfTwo, (Python Imaging Library required) assists with cutting down large images into square tiles. See the example script, which is used on the command-line like this:

Tile Drawer makes designing and hosting custom maps simple and straightforward. The project lets anyone run their own OpenStreetMap server in the cloud with one-step configuration and zero administration. Tile Drawer is a product of Stamen Design’s Michal Migurski.

You can use the rendered map tiles in a number of ways: with other GIS data in OpenLayers, in a Flash application built on Modest Maps, or layered into a Google Map as a custom map tile overlay.

SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Using the library plus native SVG support you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.

Once dropped in you get partial support for SVG 1.1, SVG Animation (SMIL), Fonts, Video and Audio, DOM and style scripting through JavaScript, and more in about a 60K library. Your SVG content can be embedded directly into normal HTML 5 or through the OBJECT tag. If native SVG support is already present in the browser then that is used, though you can override this and have the SVG Web toolkit handle things instead. No downloads or plugins are necessary other than Flash which is used for the actual rendering, so it's very easy to use and incorporate into an existing web site.

From time to time I need to debug OAuth-protected APIs, checking response headers and examining XML and JSON payloads. curl generally rocks for this sort of thing, but when the APIs in question are protected with OAuth, things break down. Likewise for benchmarking (ab, httperf, etc.) and exploration–isn’t it nice to browse APIs that return XML in Firefox?

PlantUML is a component that allows to quickly write :

* sequence diagram,
* use case diagram,
* class diagram,
* activity diagram,
* component diagram