I happened across this while checking out Tippingpoint’s DVLabs Blog. googleDrive allows you to drive a miniature car through Google Maps. googleDrive is some JavaScript magic done by Samuel Birch who runs phatfusion , a site with some great plugins for the mootools JavaScript toolkit. It actually forces you to stay on all the roads as you move your vehicle around the map.

It’s fun just to move around in a big city or try tracing your route to and from work. He’s also working on a racing version of the application using the sattelite view and a dedicated circuit track in some major metro areas.

Give it a spin.

File Under: Edutainment

So here is another update on good podcasts I have found. Jumping Monkeys, a podcast about parenting with a web 2/breaking research prospective. I just listened to one about new research into “why kids lie”. It was a really amazing piece.

This Week in Photography is a podcast about… just what you think it’d be about. Tips on general photography, recent news, software and hardware discussions. They almost always have some industry heavy-hitters on there too, like creative pros and a staff member who works on Photoshop Lightroom from Adobe software. Really informative and they have good contest prizes too!

Both of these can be most easily found by searching the Itunes podcast directory, or by going to www.twipphoto.com and www.jumpingmonkeys.com
-Ken

Over the weekend I ran into a problem with two user’s interactive sessions taking up 100% of the system resources. Usually the 400 is very good at managing run away processes but these particular jobs caused the system to stop responding to all user requests, even for new sign on sessions. The console was still operational and I was able to pull up WRKACTJOB and see the two jobs that were killing the system. I wanted to view the logs before I killed the processes and once I select a 5 to view the job my console also froze. I was dead in the water. After 20 minutes of waiting for the console to do something I caved in and performed a hard shutdown of the system by holding the power button which resulted in 30 damaged data queues that I had to manually recreate once the system came back up.

Lesson learned: put the jobs killing the system on hold before trying to diagnose them.