www.tripadvisor.com

Lately we have been looking around for somewhere to go on honeymoon, and it has been sheer agony. The volume of places that you can go is unbelievable and it is easy to get overwhelmed. The thing I struggled with most was trying to distinguish the good from the bad from the horrible. Most resorts seem to have cave men designing their webpages and you're lucky it they have more than one picture and text that isn't size 72. Finding the official website is also challenging. I eventually found the one place by entering in the postal address into google.

Eventually I found TripAdvisor. There's nothing visually fantastic about this website, but it has reviews and forums. After a little bit of searching I found the ups and downs of a couple of hopefuls and managed to chuck out the bad.

The site is an international one, so I didn't find a couple of the places in SA straight away. Doing a general search however brought up a number of forums with very heplful comments from south africans.

If you don't manage to find the place you looking for there and you have to resort(pun intended) to google, then I would suggest looking for reviews rather than the actual place. That way you can get an opinion of someone who has actually been there rather than a person trying to sell it to you.

Moofx and Script.aculo.us

There’s actually two websites for today. The first is moofx, which is a simple javascript library that allows for cool dynamic html effects. Probably the coolest is the accordion effect, which is really effective. Click on the headings of each section and see how they fold up. Fantastic. I didn’t get round to using it, but it looks really simple and has minimal extra code to use.

http://moofx.mad4milk.net/

The second one is script.aculo.us which is a more hardcore javascript library with some fantastic effects. This one is for the more hardcore web developers, and might require a bit more to get it working with your pages, but it sure is worth it. Be sure to check out the demos page.

http://script.aculo.us/

www.brick.com

Yes, this is the site of Acme brick company, which naturally sells bricks. Not too exciting at all, but also on the site is an architectural tool which allows you to choose the exact brick, brick laying style and even cement colour. The final image can be saved in a number of image formats making it the greatest tool I have come across for generating realistic brick textures.

A fantastic tool for anyone doing 3D architectural models. For more details see the latest blenderart magazine (http://www.blenderart.org/).

Cons:

• Textures are non-repeating - however you can make the textures really large.


• Bandwidth heavy - downloads textures from the net as you need them, so you will need a fairly good connection

XNA

XNA is a game development framework from Microsoft built on the .NET framework to run on both windows and the new xbox 360. It is unfortunately also built on top of directx and does not cater for opengl L. If you can stomach having to stick to Microsoft sponsoring technologies it definitely makes the process of making simple games easier.

Be sure to check out the Game Studio Express (free).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/default.aspx

Gantt Project

Here is a fantastic open source project organizer similar to Microsoft Project. It is cross platform so you can use it on mac (X only L) and linux as well.

http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net/

I have actually known about this for a while, but I saw it in action on the MakeHuman (which is also worth taking a look at) site.

There are also lots of third party tools, which I haven’t played with, so I can’t really say much about them.