Pimping my friends: an ODF e-Note and haze.net
A couple of my good friends have had some recent achievements that I clearly should help them blow their trumpets for.
First up, we have Ditesh, who’s an active proponent of ODF, have a little e-Note published on Electronic Document Standards. I got to read it back when it was in an ODF document (*grin*), and not much has changed since all the comments were pushed. Do read it, and consider giving it to upper management to read as well. Its a very well thought out document, and should be making its rounds on the Internet soon enough. Ditesh welcomes comments via email or his blog entry.
Incidentally, this is also one of the first notes that the UNDP/APDIP have published that carry a disclaimer – “The views expressed in this APDIP e-Note are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations, including UNDP, or their Member States.” I thought that was a little soft-cock, but this is the power of lobbying I guess.
Next up, we have Aizat creating haze.net.my, aka the Malaysian Air Pollution Index. Yes, do laugh out loud – Malaysia is very well polluted, and the API readings are pretty high usually, and the government of the day always insists its still safe. Aizat built it using Ruby on Rails, and there’s some active scraping of data (via hpricot), which then all mashes up with Google Maps. The site’s well designed (i.e. its simple), there’s an RSS feed if you’re so inclined to read details that way, and if you’re just interested about a certain area (say, Kuala Lumpur), you can dig deeper, and look at the graphs (via Gruff Graphs) of when it started becoming unhealthy and so on. Exporting it to CSV works too, in case you were using it for a project/paper on the haze.
All in all, a good side-project, very informative for those living in Malaysia or visiting Malaysia. Don’t see a good income stream (ads? pfft.), but definitely very informative. Maybe sell it to a ministry :-)
Technorati Tags: ditesh, aizat, e-note, apdip, undp, electronic document standards, malaysian air pollution index, haze, haze.net, malaysia, ruby, rails
Thanks for the plug! No plans for an income stream, just wanted a nice site for people to learn about the haze in Malaysia :)
Excellent then, in that case. But I’m sure you have to defray hosting costs, et al.
FWIW, James Purser dropped me this link via IRC: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/02/1995217.htm
Its an interesting read, especially from an Australian perspective, where our weather is changing, pretty drastically.