development

Today is a great day for Macintosh users! Magnetk has released ExpanDrive - a tool allowing to mount remote servers as local drives over ssh/sftp. Their press-release promises to add more protocols. I am taking a not-so-wild guess here that S3 will be one of the first protocols to get in.

But back to Magnetk. In the past I have used the Windows version of the same tool they had - SftpDrive and have come to love it. It was actually one of the few things I used to miss from Windows. I remember e-mailing them and asking to give us, Mac users something like that, as well. They promptly e-mailed back saying it was in works. And here we are with ExpanDrive! Magnetk is clearly a company that lives up to its promises.

I have been evaluating ExpanDrive for couple hours now and it is AWESOME!. I am gonna try it for a day or two more and am definitely buying it.

P.S. To be completely fair, we have to mention that there is an open-source tool that aims at solving the same problem and it has been around for a while: MacFuse is its name. I have used it.

Well, quite honestly bare-naked MacFuse is not in the same league, at least for now (I suspect ExpanDrive is using MacFuse at least partially if not in its totality). I am always the first to favor an open-source alternative, but quite honestly, if you are serious about your SFTP needs (like: developing a web application on a remote server), ExpanDrive is well worth its modest price.

I have slowed down on blogging lately. It's not because there is nothing to write about anymore, but because things have been very busy for the past couple of months. One of the projects that has kept us entertained and excited at work went live yesterday.

[ geo.worldbank.org ] is a new, free web product of the World Bank’s that was masterminded by Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski and created by yours truly using Google Maps API. It provides an intuitive, visual view of development information around the world.

You can safely claim that the majority of the Earth's population has heard about the World Bank. Most of them also know that the Bank finances development efforts all around the world. However, that is by far not the only thing the World Bank does. Having been at the center of poverty reduction efforts for decades, the World Bank has accumulated enormous amounts of development data. The World Bank is as much an information bank as it is a financial institution. By creating an easy, visual entry point into its data, the Bank attempts to make the information more accessible to the public and to further its transparency efforts.

Being an entry point, the map is much more light-weight than the underlying data-sets. Different tabs provide snapshot views of country news, World Bank projects, statistical data for countries, and the links to drill-down into more comprehensive portals. Where available, the addresses of the local, brick-and-mortar information centers are given too. Map is equally geared towards general audience and professional researchers.