Julia is going to America next year on an exchange and she needs a student visa obviously (a J-1 if you’re interested). So we had a nice trip to London to the US Embassy this week.

The first problem we faced was finding it. Using Google Maps gives different results depending on whether you use the address or the postcode. I figured the address was right since it at least showed a road with the right name.

Speaking of the road, it’s blocked off. The whole road in front of the embassy is completely blocked to traffic and has armed police patrolling it. For various reasons we needed to find a bank so Julia asked one of the police officers. Somehow feels like misusing resource - asking someone with a gun that big for directions.

Then once Julia was in (I couldn’t get in without an appointment) there was a three hour wait. But they said yes. Even the page full of Arabic in her passport (following a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates) didn’t worry them.

Some adverts for loans appeared recently, probably because I mentioned an interesting deal from Lloyd’s TSB.

So I wondered if I could make more appear by mentioning things likes loans, finance and mortgages. Just mentioning loans once isn’t going to do it so I should mention loans a few times. A stray mention of debt management might also help.

Of course my demographic isn’t really geared towards finance topics like loans or money lending. So just think of this as an experiment.

Using the canvas element with some clever JavaScript, someone has written a basic ray-traced 3D graphics engine that runs in Safari and Firefox.

Okay so “3D gaming” is overstating it slightly, but it’s clever. What’s double clever is that you can get a pure JavaScript implementation of canvas for Internet Explorer from Google Code. Which means technically you can now do 3D graphics using JavaScript and a browser.

The satellite view in Google Maps is obviously made up of many different images. Not all of these images were taken at the same time and not all from the same position. Sometimes this leads to slight inconsistencies. These inconsistencies are most apparent with tall buildings - which is why Manhattan looks so funky.

I recently posted about BackBase, an expensive (for commercial use) AJAX development thingy*. Well Google have produced something similar for free Google Web Toolkit.

Although the end results are the same (as far as the user is concerned) there are important differences. The BackBase software is entirely client side. You write server stuff as normal, output BackBase code and the browser with JavaScript handles everything. The Google system is client and server orientated and odes more work on the server. The server also has to be running Java. It also has better browser support.

This could be a reason for me to learn Java, something I’ve managed to avoid for quite a while now…

* It’s actually an XML based markup language combined with a real time JavaScript processing engine.

I’ve created a clever German flip card gadget for Google homepage. It displays a German word for a few seconds and then shows it’s translation. And then repeats with a new word. The vocabulary is very small at the moment but it will increase by at least one per day.

At the moment it also limits itself to 5 words per viewing. That is after showing five cards it loops (if it didn’t you’d never actually begin to memorise them).

Google Homepage

To use Google personalised homepage, you must have a Google account. When you have one, go to “Personalised Home” (links for that and to create an account are in the top right corner of Google’s homepage).

Adding the Gadget

From your personalised homepage, click “Add Content”, then “Create a Section” and then put the following URL in the box: http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/gadgets/flip.xml . Then just click “Go” and you’re done :)

If anyone is interested I might extend the idea to be more flexible.

Just thought I’d announce the rather funky new tool from Google (yes, another), Google Trends.

It’s lets you see volume of search results against time for search terms. Best of all, you can use it to compare multiple search terms at once.

If you use Google personalised homepage, you can add Google gadgets to them. A Google gadget is just an XML file (or more usually the XML output of some dynamic page) that is displayed. There is a well developed API and you can do quite a lot of nifty stuff with them. But they don’t seem to be that popular (searching for Google gadgets, with Google gets very few relevant results).

There are quite a few in their gadget directory but very little mention of them outside Google…

Google are now offering $1 for anyone you get to install Picasa (their clever photo organisation software thing) as part of their AdSense referral program.

So first, go install Picasa and then come back and go join AdSense so you can benefit yourself. And if you haven’t already, get Firefox: You can get AdWords if you want but I doubt you’ll spend enough to get me anything.

Have a look on my “Reactions (a sci-fi story) page. If you’re quick you might see a Flash advert for Vodafone in the AdSense spot. Quite a high paying client I’d have thought…

And if you haven’t, check out the info how to get yourself some free advertising.