The latest addition on Google Maps: Tiles for Sri Lanka, with the ability to search for any address.

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I have to travel to London next month, and started the usual visa application process. I’ve grown accustomed to filling these out, as I usually go through the visa process of some country every few months. The Schengen visa application is a two-page affair and is not too bad. The US application application isn’t that bad either. But then I filled out the UK online form just now - 93 questions scattered across 27 pages of an online-form!

One section was about “You stated that you had made an application to the Home Office to remain in the UK in the last 10 years. “, and requesting for more information. Under the “Granted or Refused” field, I entered “Granted”, but was then surprised to see that the form refused to proceed, instead marking the “Reason (if refused)” field as a required field. Brilliant.

Other compulsory questions:

• Your total monthly income from all sources of work or employment after tax
• Do you receive income from any other sources‚ including friends or family?
• Do you have savings‚ properties or other income‚ for example‚ from stocks and shares?
• How much of your monthly income is used to support your family member’s?
• How much do you spend each month on living costs?
• You stated that you have savings‚ property or income. Please give details

Then there were the usual “Are you a terrorist” type questions which are also on the US visa and entry forms. The last question in that block: “Have you engaged in any other activities that might indicate that you may not be considered a person of good character?”

Definitely the most intrusive and convoluted visa form I’ve come across.

In my earlier simple attempts at aggregating my online activities, I had set up my blog to cross-post to my Twitter stream, for my Twitter tweets to post back to my blog, and for my del.icio.us bookmarks to do a nightly aggregated post back to my blog too (which would of course also generate a tweet).

With the arrival of FriendFeed, though, all of this cross-linkage was unnecessary. Even more so, it was polluting my FriendFeed stream, with multiple events from different streams, all announcing the same thing.

And so, all the cross-posting is now turned off, and enjoy the simplicity of FriendFeed.

Facebook has a million and one applications. Among them are a number of IQ Test applications. Even to view someone else’s results, you have to install the app, with the corresponding permissions screen as shown below:

Now, maybe I’m not supposed to have the IQ to understand, but why should an IQ Test application need access to “your profile information, your photos, your friends’ info and other content that it requires to work”? Ah - maybe all that information is used to adjust your IQ score… you know, if you’ve used L33T-speak on your profile, that’s a -20 adjustment right there. Are you in a Palin supporters group? -30 for you! Photos of kittens? +5. Photos of dogs? +10!

Naah, quite unlikely. In my opinion, what should happen if you press that “Allow” button is the message: “Your IQ Score: 0″!

You might already have heard about the Freeze at Grand Central Station in NYC, the Freeze in San Francisco, and many others. Here’s my video of the Zürich Freeze:

The beginning of the video is not that great due to the backlighting.

The popularity of social networks can’t be denied, but it was still a surprise to find that the BBC had started adding social-bookmark links at the bottom of their news items. Specifically, they’ve added links to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon. Although the BBC does experiment a lot with new media, this was still quite unexpected. Looks like they aren’t the dinosaur they used to be! And it seems it’s not just the BBC readers/viewers who are exposed to Facebook - it seems that BBC staff and employees are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, with the network having gone viral inside the beeb. Was that the reason these links were added?

I’m wondering what the reaction of people who haven’t yet been part of these networks will think once they see these icons. Will they be tantalising enough for them to go subscribe and start using a social network? Or will they simply be ignored? Would be nice to have access to some kind of stats on it.

Here’s a test to see what happens when you search for රොෂාන් (Roshan) and සෙම්බකුට්ටිආරච්චි (Sembacuttiaratchy) via Google Sri Lanka. Actually, that last search should eventually be a GoogleWhack. If you use Firefox, the pages might not render correctly. Make sure you have a font like Kaputa Unicode installed. If you use any flavour of Linux, you’ll have to follow the instructions from here to enable proper support and rendering.

I’ve just installed the Wordpress Twitter integration plugin, which means my blog post entries will update my Twitter page, and any Tweets posted would update my blog. Here’s a test to see whether it really works!

I’ve finally resurrected my blog, migrated it over to WordPress, and have a consistent theme across the main site, blog, gallery and code sections. Having done that, there’s several developments I have to share:

I’ve moved (again!). To those who know me well, this comes as no surprise as I’ve always had some form of “Gypsy” gene in me, giving me itchy feet if I’m in one place for too long which then causes me to move to a new place. And so it is that I left London after having spent four years there, and am now living and working in Zurich. After having spent several months dealing with interviews and work permit issues, I’m now working for Google in Switzerland.

“Good, fast or cheap. Choose any two.”

And

“Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”.