There are a lot of good reasons to lambast MySpace, but how many of us have an account on the site in spite of them? With that in mind, I decided to have a little fun with it, and created a cross-browser, alpha-PNG talk bubble, that can be attached to various portraits, auto-generated, and pasted into a MySpace profile page (for example).

MySpace Bubbles – Available Here

After a couple of days searching, including a late-night call to Apple tech support, I have stumbled upon a knowledge base article that refers to something with which I was afflicted, and assumed was a bug. It is not. From Using your built-in iSight camera –

The iMac G5 (iSight) comes with a built-in iSight camera that you can use for several purposes, including participating in video chat sessions over the Internet with a broadband Internet connection. You can’t use the iSight to capture video with iMovie HD, but here are some ways you can use your built-in iSight camera and the images it produces.

I wonder why this is. I imagine it has something to do with the fact that the built-in iSight does not connect via FireWire to wherever it connects, but that’s the limit of my understanding of computer internals. Granted, I wasn’t planning on doing anything serious with it, and this is probably what Apple thinks, too – although I can see creaters of video podcasts finding such a limitation aggravating. But then again, maybe this is Apple trying to save them from themselves.

I awoke to find these three pictures on my otherwise pristine desktop. You can click them to get a closer look.

I must say, I’m taken aback by it’s rather agressive stance toward any other computers I have lying around (I’m not looking forward to what happens when it sees my Gateway Solo in the closet, but hopefully that won’t happen.) Still, bonus points for vigor.

Oh, and to the doubters, PhotoBooth is much more fun and addictive that something so useless should be.

So, can I drop by and take it off your hands, FedEx? You don’t have to drop it off – I’ll save you the trip. C’mon – be a pal!

I realize this post doesn’t have a very creative title, but when you’re writing for Google, it helps to try and summarize the problem in a straightforward way, using keywords others afflicted with the similar problem might use when searching.

So, what is the problem I speak of? This morning, I learned about the Yahoo Maps API, which is very exciting, and which deserves its own post, at a later date. (Ok – one digression: what makes the Yahoo Maps API exciting? One word: geocoding.)

Like the Google Maps API, the Yahoo Maps API allows the placement of marker points. This is basic stuff, but, for some reason I was having difficulty getting the marker points to display. Even when using Yahoo’s basic example code, nothing would display. Undaunted, I decided that perhaps the problem was the website into which I was attempting to integrate the Yahoo map. I started stripping away HTML, CSS, and finally other JavaScript.

And that’s when I found the solution. I am using the very popularity prototype javascript library in this particular web application. Well, for whatever reason – and bonus points for someone with enough time to dig through both libraries and find the cause – loading the prototype library prior to loading the Yahoo Maps API will cause your points not to display. Simple fix? Disable prototype on pages where you’re embedding maps with marker points.

Due to the popularity of the prototype library, and coolness of the Yahoo Maps API, I imagine I won’t be the only one who encounters this problem. Hope this post helps someone else. Oh, and if you want, point to cool examples of your Yahoo maps web apps.