Aggreg8 is a beautiful, simple RSS reading/managing application that runs inside Mozilla-based browsers. It’s a great example of Mozilla software acting as a sort of “cross platform operating system.” [pointer from Scripting News]

At the start of Oliver’s Kindermusik classes there’s a short time of free play with squnchy inflated balls. The end of this period is signified by the singing of the song “Balls Away,” the words to which are as above. It is Oliver’s favourite song (before I took him to Kindermusik myself, I was convinced that he wrote it himself) and is flexible enough to be used for many tasks (“Toys Away,” “Dishes Away,” and so on). Earlier this week I transcribed the melody into GarageBand and emailed the result to my mother; by now I’m sure she’s built a symphony around it.

All of which is a tangential route into a pointer to the newly-redesigned Province of PEI website. This is the first iteration of that site since 1994 that doesn’t bear my design stamp (you can take an archeological dig through earlier designs here, back to 1996).

I feel like a father whose son has gone off to college for the first time: part of me wants to go fetch him right back home; part of me realizes he’s got to fly on his own.

We had a good nine-year run working with the Province, and left the project on good terms (my old YMCA leader Bill Difrancesco told us to “always stop the game when everybody’s still having fun”); the project is now in the hands of a great team working inside Government, and I wish them well as the new design evolves and matures. Having gone through this same process five or six times, I know what a Herculean task it is to redesign such a large and complex site; it’s like repainting an ocean liner while it’s sailing across the Atlantic.

Balls away, Balls Away, Time to Put the Balls Away.

Let me briefly sing the praises of the open source MapServer project. If you’re interesting working with web-based maps, you should give it a look: it’s powerful, well-documented, well-supported and let’s you create very powerful mapping applications.

We’ve used MapServer to built the YankeeMagazine.com Foliage Map, and the Explore PEI tool. I’ve spent the last week building an intranet mapping application for Elections PEI and at every corner I’ve been heartened to find the sort of “hey, they already thought of that” goodness that typifies mature open source efforts.

Having spent many years struggling with closed source, proprietary web-based mapping products, I can’t tell you how great it is to have the hood open and my hands on the engine.

There’s a Canadian angle, by the way: DM Solutions Group is an Ottawa-based company that’s contributed tremendously to MapServer, including maintaining the PHP MapScript module and the ROSA Java applet that is a marvel of functionality and simplicity. Kudos to them for a job well done, and for contributing to the open source ecosystem.

Air Canada has a special on to Maui (in Hawaii): $468 from Halifax. Pay $212 more and you can go from Charlottetown. Oddly, it’s $530 Toronto and Montreal, which, if memory serves, are closer to Maui than Halifax.

Deal expires April 22.

Hewlett-Packard goes after the quilting market. We are a world of a billion niche markets.

A lot of the work we do involves image resizing — taking JPEGs that users submit on a web form, for example, and making a thumbnail.

We’re currently using the convert application, part of ImageMagick, to do this under Linux, but we’re finding that it’s rather slow and processor-intensive.

Perhaps this is simply an inately slow and processor intensive process, but I’m wondering if others can suggest alternative Linux applications or utilities that we should look at.

A little-explored branch of the Reinvented universe is the Reinvented Online Store. Fabulously unsuccessful (we have sold a grand total of nothing in three years!), I nonetheless continue to hold on to the notion that, someday, someone will buy something.

To spur this on, I’ve redesigned all of the products this evening. They now sport the bold headline i am reinvented, with the Reinvented logo riding underneath.

Perfect giftware for friends and family in a rut — “Dear Sis, I know you’ve been feeling down lately, so here’s a lovely lunchbox to cheer you up. Reinvented yourself! Love Bobby.”

There’s TED, the conference. And now there’s Ted, the airline.

The airline is United’s low-cost answer to Delta’a low-cost Song.

The name, apparently comes from United.

This effectively prevents me from starting a low-cost version of Reinvented. Unless I come up with another name. Perhaps Rein. Or Ven.

My family’s roots, on both sides, are in northern Ontario. My mother was born in Cochrane, my father in Fort William (now part of Thunder Bay). While my father’s parents came south in the 1940s, my grandparents on my mother’s side lived in Cochrane all their lives, and when I was young we would drive up Highway 11 to visit them once or twice a year.

Highway 11 is really just Yonge Street in Toronto. It just keeps on going and going and going, through North Bay, up to Cochrane, where it ends.

Along the way, you pass through Cobalt which, in addition to being the home of the band Grievous Angels (here’s a really, really poor fidelity song from their first album) is also home to the Highway Book Shop.

This bookstore formed my original conception of what a bookstore was. It’s where I bought my first book (a biography of Amelia Earhart; my father tore a strip out of me for buying a book that “I could have checked out of the library”). The store is a huge, rambling building. Filled with books. New, used, and ones that they’ve published themselves.

If you are driving by Cobalt — and driving by Cobalt is something every Canadian should do once in their life — you should set aside half a day for a visit to the bookshop.

If you can’t make it to Cobalt, you can buy their books online from ABE.

Hope Paterson blogs about food. Great stuff. [via Robert, her dad]