http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZO4mTDAtM

If you’re interested in playing with the demos yourself, follow along with the slides, and perhaps even take a look at the source code!

With a paper map, you can truly make it your own by getting out a pen or a pencil, and adding your own annotations to it. You could circle all the museums that you want to visit, or trace the route that you will take on your road trip.

Maps API applications can now offer users this sort of tactile interactivity using the new Drawing Library. The Drawing Library provides a toolbox which enables users to draw markers, lines, and shapes on the map, much as they would in any drawing application. The tools can be used for collecting annotations from users, or for selecting regions to search or highlight. Applications can listen for events when overlays are added and respond accordingly, such as issuing the search query or saving the annotations to a database.

Shapes on a map, including shapes users have just drawn using drawing tools, can also be made editable so that users can modify or correct them. For example, the user could change the bounds for a geospatial query with the drag of a mouse. The Polyline, Polygon, Circle, and Rectangle classes have a new editable property, which toggles the visibility of control points on these shapes.

For more information on using the drawing library and editable shapes, please refer to the Maps API documentation. The Maps API forum is a great place to discuss these new features, or raise any other Maps API issues that you may have. We hope that these new features will result in even greater interactivity for applications built on top of the Maps API.

Google’s monkeys are still slaving away at it as I write this. And it looks like it’s just affecting Australia:

For future reference, if you’ve got a box outside Australia with ssh access, you can always quickly set up a proxy like so:

ssh -D 1337 username@example.com


This sets up a SOCKS proxy on localhost (your own computer) at port 1337 (substitute port number to taste) — then simply point your browser at it. With this, I verified that the YouTube outage at the very least didn’t affect the United States, by ssh-ing into nointrigue.com, which is hosted in the US.

Related post from a while ago: Silverhawks: Getting around content restrictions. (Using -D with ssh is easier than the method with Privoxy mentioned in that post, though.)

Happy Australia Day.

Here are the rankings updated, for 2011.

There have been some slight changes in methodology, in an attempt to focus the search results down to the pages that truly matter. Starting with what we used for the 2009 rankings:

"law firm name" law site:.au

this has been supplemented by search terms that remove pages from the law firm’s own web site and from some particular web-based directories (the list of which is arbitrary and could well be improved). For example:

"Allens Arthur Robinson" law site:.au -site:yellowpages.com.au -site:truelocal.com.au -site:findlaw.com.au -site:lawyerlist.com.au -site:hotfrog.com.au -site:aar.com.au

For law firms with an ampersand or a plus sign in their name, additional search terms were inserted to allow for variations in spelling, like so:

("Gilbert + Tobin" OR "Gilbert and Tobin" OR "Gilbert & Tobin" OR "Gilbert Tobin") law site:.au -site:yellowpages.com.au -site:truelocal.com.au -site:findlaw.com.au -site:lawyerlist.com.au -site:hotfrog.com.au -site:gtlaw.com.au

Now, without further ado:

	Law Firm	Pages	Partners1	’09
1	Clayton Utz	78,900	201	6
2	DLA Phillips Fox	72,400	149	10
3	Minter Ellison	66,100	291	4
4	Blake Dawson	57,400	175	8
5	Freehills	48,500	202	1
6	Mallesons Stephen Jaques	46,600	186	2
7	Allens Arthur Robinson	37,900	177	3
8	Corrs Chambers Westgarth	25,700	108	9
9	Maddocks	23,500	53	12
10	Baker & McKenzie	21,200	90	13
11	Norton Rose2	19,800	146	5
12	Middletons	18,900	67	17
13	Sparke Helmore	18,500	49	16
14	Cooper Grace Ward	16,000	24	–	–
15	Holding Redlich	15,600	55	14
16	Henry Davis York	10,100	52	22
17	Gilbert + Tobin	9,470	55	15
18	Piper Alderman	9,170	57	21
19	Hunt & Hunt	7,130	55	7
20	Arnold Bloch Leibler	6,990	29	20	–
21	McCullough Robertson	6,490	46	19
22	HWL Ebsworth	5,320	120	27
23	Kennedy Strang3	4,970	72	31
24	Griffith Hack	4,890	30	–	–
25	Gadens	4,470	125	11
26	TressCox	4,270	35	23
27	Davies Collison Cave	2,990	36	24
28	Hall & Wilcox	1,780	30	28	–
29	Thomsons Lawyers4	1,250	47	30
30	Lander & Rogers	815	47	26
31	Moray & Agnew	596	59	29
32	Macpherson+Kelley	340	51	–	–
33	Colin Biggers & Paisley	324	29	–	–

Notes:
¹ The number of partners is the projected figure for 2 January 2011, as reported by the Australian Financial Review on 10 December 2010, page 47.
² Norton Rose merged with Deacons, which was #5 in the 2009 rankings.
³ Kennedy Strang is a group of law firms (Kemp Strang, Russell Kennedy, Thynne & Macartney, Lynch Meyer). The reported page count is the total count for these law firms.
⁴ Thomsons Lawyers was called Thomson Playford Cutlers at the time of the 2009 rankings.

To get a feel for the “noise” in the page count, that is, the number of pages in the result set that do not actually refer to the law firm in question, I manually examined the top 30 search results for each law firm. For only three firms was 1 out of the 30 pages identified as spurious; the other law firms had no spurious results. This, of course, doesn’t mean the signal-to-noise ratio remains constant as one progresses towards the tail end of the search results; Google’s algorithms, by now, are probably quite good at getting the more relevant pages to appear in earlier search results.

Mandatory reading (for those of you who have read this far and have taken everything seriously): xkcd on using Google to measure things

Now it’s all ruined. Take a look for yourself (click to enlarge):

Yes, this is the new University of Sydney website template. I kid you not. A generous person might call it “functional”. A less generous person might… well, let’s leave this blog G-rated. It’s grotesque. It has all the charm of a late 90s website. It carries none of the personality that the university aims to project, and all of the air of design-by-committee and oh-look-I-learnt-css-in-24-hours. There’s no warmth; the design alienates.

For bonus marks, it even displays in Arial on a Mac.

(For comparison, here’s a screenshot of the website as at 5 January.)