Chad Things

It’s official, Shayna and I are engaged!  Yee-haw.  Aww Yeah.  Hurray.  We decided over thanksgiving in Athens, Georgia, to get married.  At that time I was not ready to be publicly engaged, but now I am.  Last week we told parents and friends, and now I’m here to share some more info on this major life decision.

We’ve been dating since the fall of 2004 in San Francisco.  We met each other a few times at parties, but the first time I spent some time with shayna was when Tim Lang and I helped her move some art. She was in school at the time,  was looking for help to move some big pieces, so I offered my help and Tim’s van.  After that day I knew I liked her and soon we went on our first dinner date at Axum Cafe, an ethiopian restaurant.    When she graduated from school the following June, our relationship changed from dating to sorta-dating for the next year or so, since she moved away from SF and I stayed in SF.   I did visit her in New York, where she worked in a woman’s art program, as well as in New Orleans, where she was helping after Katrina.  I convinced her to return to SF for Burningman in August 2006 and we were officially dating again.  In Feb 2007, I started a 6 month trip around the world, 3 months of which was with shayna.  When I returned we moved in together.  During my trip around the world, shayna was accepted into grad school in Chicago, but delayed enrollment for a year primarily for me.  So in the spring of 2008 the time came for me to decide if i wanted to give up my home of 10+ years in SF to move to Chicago with Shayna.  I did.  Chicago was a very big transition.  Luckily we found some good friends fairly quickly which made some of the very rough patches in fall 2008 easier to swallow.  The summer and fall of 2009 were really good to us as a couple.  But it wasn’t till she left for Athens a couple weeks before Thanksgiving did i realize she’s the most important thing in my life and that I wanted to be with her forever and ever.

There was no tradtional proposal.  Neither one of us are too fond of traditions purely for the sake of traditions.  We believe in this day and age its more important to enter marriage with eyes wide open with both people knowing exactly what they are getting into. However, I did get down on one knee in our photo shoot in Athens, which I’ve called Engagementland.  A few of these pics were emailed to friends last week.  We also met with an artist from athens who is making us custom wedding rings - you can see pictures  similar to what we’ll have  in the Engagementland set as well.

As soon as we tell people we’re engaged, one of the next questions out of their mouth is “when’s the wedding?”  Well, it looks like this summer - July or August 2010.  Stay tuned for more on this.

What an awesome summer.  My first one in Chicago, and it went by so fast and kept me so busy I didn’t have time to write any blog posts.  ’twas full of chicago biking, sunshine, friends, and music - my favorite things.  I also worked on some good projects, and met many cool people.  Besides Chicago, I took a few roadtrips around the midwest, ventured to NYC by train, Atlanta by plane, and spent almost a month in California and Nevada.

One of the biggest things I did this year was help start a community garden.  Shayna wanted to grow plants for making fiber, and she found a couple other locals, Noah and Margaret, who were looking to start a garden.  With some grant money from Shayna’s school and a lot of hard work, we cleared land, built some beds, and planted many edibles, a few ornamentals (flowers and such), and fibers for making paper.  We busted our ass on the weekends in the beginning, but was definitely worth it.  I enjoyed being outside, working with my hands, meeting neighbors, and of course eating tomatoes, basil, and other herbs and vegetables.  We also made a smaller garden in our backyard, too, with our upstairs neighbor, Andy.  You can read more on the website Shayna and I put together - chadnorwood.comC/a>.

Summer had a cold start this year.  In fact, I think we only turned on the AC once this whole summer.   But that didn’t stop us from having lots of fun.  I already blogged about Indiana Dunes camping, but we also started out in may doing the Chicago critical mass bike ride.  I spent way more time on my bike than in a car, bus, or train .. the way life should be.  Chicago makes it easy - it’s flat and its never too cold at night. We rode to brunch, to the beach, downtown, to bars .. I even rode over 10 miles home at 4am from the south side of Chicago. I also rode crazy bikes at the Tour De Fat festival sponsored by Fat Tire beer.

Speaking of festivals .. Chicago wins.  Every weekend, all summer long, there are several street festivals in various neighborhoods throughout Chicago.  Blues festivals, House music festivals, Irish/Scottish/German/Polish Festivals, Beer Festivals, Ribs Fest, Wings, Taste of Chicago (biggest one ever), and the list goes on.  Chicago city law requires them all to be free, but they usually ask for $5 or $10 donation.  They always have street vendors - food, shirts, art, etc.  They usually have 2-5 stages where bands, djs, or somebody performs.  And the people go nuts if the weather is beautiful - unlike California, rainy days will keep you inside, but that makes the sunny days even more precious.

We also enjoyed many visitors - especially our SF friends !! Juan, Jason, Damian, Ramon, and Monica came out for a weekend making me feel at home.  We showed them the beautiful Millenium Park, the view from the top of the Hancock tower (2nd tallest bldg in chicago), the beach, summer street festivals, and chicago deep dish pizza.  A month or so later Checkoway visited and we had a similar experience - drinks, tall buildings, beach, and enjoying friends.

Shayna and I also loved the scenic and surprisingly comfortable 20 hour train to NYC for a wedding of an old friend, Sarah Bates, to Leo De Alvia .  I’m very happy for them and enjoyed seeing all our friends in NY.  In addition to NY,  I also made it to Atlanta for Fathers Day.  Got to give it up for good ol’ Dad !! And it was nice seeing my sisters families and nieces and nephew.  They grow up so fast. heh.

We had lots of fun with our new Chicago friends - monthly dinner parties, rooftop BBQ on 4th of July, lots of biking around to bars, cubs game, and other summer activities.  Best event with Chicago friends was the camping trip to Oregon IL.  Oh man was that fun. We camped and made s’mores over the fire, told stories and went on hikes.  But the main event was on sunday - the Demolition Derby.  Oregon is the home town of Miss Amanda, and she showed us how they have fun in the midwest - crashing cars.  Booya !!

One of my favorite trips this summer was Lakes of Fire - a regional Burningman in Michigan, about 3 hours from Chicago.  It was about 500 people (instead of the 40,000 at burningman in nevada), and it felt more like home than i could have imagined. I met amazing people, saw some cool art, and had tons of fun.  I especially enjoyed meeting the freakeasy and illmeasures peeps - they throw good parties in chicago for the bman crowd.

Last but not least was our trip to Burningman.  We joined Brasstax (our SF crew) in the Boombox camp.  It was my 10th year at bman, and altho i love it, i love my friends more, so i spent most of my time in the camp.   We flew to SFO on thursday, drove up early (friday before it started) and left 8 days later (sat night as they burned the man).  We assembled the boombox in 4 days and tore it down in 1.  We “burned” it … altho most of it was good wood so it got recycled.  I could go on and on about bman but pics are worth a thousand words.  Anyway, it was great to spend some quality time with my crazy friends.   After that I spent some time in California hanging out, Eumi’s and Lori’s bdays, a day hike at mt. tam, and did another trip to Tahoe for Fritz’s Bachelor Party.  I love tahoe - could be my favorite natural place on the earth.

The summer ended with one final trip to St. Louis for Shayna’s 30th birthday.  The main event was the city museum, which is my favorite man-made place on earth.  If you haven’t been, and you are still part kid, you MUST go.  It was also nice to do a road trip and see friends in another city.

Fall is supposed to be nice in chicago but pretty short .. in less than 2 months it will be cold for a while.  Then spring and summer again !!!  If you want to visit, plan now, cuz it’ll give you something awesome to look fwd to.

Cheers,
Chad

Firefox 3.5 officially came out a few weeks ago, and I decided its time to try it out.  However, google gears does not yet work on 3.5, and I need my gears to have offline access to gmail and google docs.  Time to revisit the question I’ve had many times before -

Can i run different versions of firefox at the same time?  or different instances of the same version?  … Yes.

The solution involves Firefox Profiles.  Profiles are separate from the application itself - it’s where all your customized data is stored, like homepage, history, saved form info, settings, plugins, etc.  In order to run 2 firefoxes at the same time, you need 2 different profiles.  It doesn’t matter which version of firefox is running a profile. For example, you could have 4 profiles like me:

• Firefox3.0 - google gears in here - use this for offline gmail access
• Firefox3.0_heavy - firebug and other add-ons in here
• Firefox3.5 - surf the web from here
• Firefox3.5_Guest - clean empty profile with no history, used in business meetings

Firefox has good instructions on creating profiles, so I’m going to skip that.  Next step is to figure out a way to easily launch your profiles - here is where it gets into MAC only mode, but not much different for Windows.  If you only have one profile for each version of firefox, you can edit the files inside the firefox app directly, like Devon did. (Another way is to create an application bundle). So what happens if you want to run 2 instances of the same firefox version?  Well, expanding on Devon’s way, just create a script (executable text file) in your /Applications folder that calls the firefox version and profile you want.

However, neither Devon’s solution nor the application bundle is perfect - there are still some dock issues.  First, with both solutions, there will be an icon that launches firefox with your favorite profile, and when you click on it, it creates another firefox icon on the doc.  Ideally it should act like finder or any other mac app - the icon you click on the dock is the one that should bounce and start up.  It should also be the one to right click and “Quit”.   Its confusing enough already when there’s 2 firefox apps running, i don’t need extra icons.  Second, I’m also a big fan of switching between my running applications using Command-Tab (like Alt-Tab in Windows), and when I do that I want the names of the different firefoxes to match to profiles and versions if possible.

So my solution is to have a one-to-one mapping of application name to profile name.  For example, given the 4 profiles above, I have 4 copies of firefox in my applications folder

• /Applications/Firefox3.0.app
• /Applications/Firefox3.0_Heavy.app
• /Applications/Firefox3.5.app
• /Applications/Firefox3.5_Guest.app

Each one of these I edited the Contents/MacOS directory, renaming firefox-bin to firefox-bin1 and creating a firefox-bin script (like Devon did).  Each script is uses its own directory and profile. For example, here’s the contents of my /Applications/Firefox3.5.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin file:

/Applications/Firefox3.5.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin1 -P Firefox3.5 &

The last thing I do to make it easy on myself is to create a bookmark on the toolbar, all the way left on each of the 4, where the name of the bookmark is the name of that profile.  That way I can look at the window and know which firefox profile i’m using.

The downside to this is that you waste some disk space (its about 50MB for each firefox installation).  The other thing that kinda sux is that if you rely on firefox to remember password forms, you must remember to always use the same profile/app, but that isn’t hard if you do my bookmark trick.

Update 11/2: Here’s how I handle firefox updates (like from 3.5.3 to 3.5.4).

Basically i reinstall my fix after update.  That is, rename firefox-bin to firefox-bin1, then create firefox-bin script.

However, This used to work but today it no longer does.  Basically if i call firefox-bin1 -P Firefox3.5 from cmd-line, it works.  But the app uses the default profile instead.   My workaround is to create and use “application bundle” method linked above. still testing …

Others attempts (but no mention of my dock issue)

• http://67central.com/bc/2009/02/07/single-purpose-web-dev-browser/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/730748/how-to-change-the-executable-in-an-os-x-application-bundle
• http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2008/08/shortcut_to_lau.html

As previously mentioned in my google maps mashup post, I love maps.  Due to the clean APIs and very fast response, many people have built  cool mashups using the maps API.  I even got paid to do one for landmarkfinder.  But recently I’ve been using google calendar alot, and with all the summer action here in Chicago I wanted an easier way to know where and when to go places. 

Enter my new Google Calendar Maps Mashup. Basically it takes a google calendar and plots all the events on a map.  Well, at least all events that have a valid map address.  The mashup works with any google calendar, as long as its public. Basically you provide the URL of a google calendar XML Feed, my javascript code eats it up and spits out markers on the map and lists them on the right side.  The list is really a table, with sortable columns (sort by day, event name, address). The map acts like a filter - you only see events that occur on the map canvas.  For example, if the map is zoomed in to show downtown Chicago, you might only see events in grant park.  But if you zoom way out you will see events in north chicago or suburbs, too.  This is great when there is a calendar with tons of events going on all over the place.  If you only have a couple events or all the events are the same location, its not too exciting.    Check it out.

I got to know jquery and javascript a little better during this project  - I’m even planning on releasing my code as plugin.  Expect that in a week or two after i’ve cleaned it up and solidified the features and UI.

Last weekend we spent a couple nights camping at the Indiana Dunes, about 90 minutes from Chicago.  It was awesome - the first time I’ve gone camping this year.  Despite it being Memorial Day weekend, it wasn’t too crowded - we snagged a walk-in camping spot friday morning at 10am, which is check-out time.  We chose Dunewood Campground in the National Park over the state park cuz Dunewood was surrounded by trees (and we like the yelp info). The state park is closer to the lake and has RV hookups .. but no trees and you’re basically right next to your neighbor.

The dunes themselves were pretty cool, but mostly it was just a big beach, unlike Pismo Beach in California which is more like a desert going back a mile from the water.  Friday we climbed to the top of Mt Baldy (second highest spot in the area) and watched the sunset, then ate dinner back at the campsite.  Saturday we walked around the Chellberg Farm and Bailly homestead - Joe Bailley was the first in the area in 1822 and traded furs with the native americans.  They had some restored homes and structures that were pretty interesting.  In the afternoon we went to the state park and had lunch, played frisbee, and hung out.  It was warm enough to enjoy the beach but not the water.  Apparently Lake Michigan can have very high bacterial counts - you don’t want to go in the water when that happens. Saturday night we played cards, played with the fire, and ate lots of smores.  Could not have been more relaxing.

Now that we’ve been to Starved Rock and Indiana Dunes -  I want to go camping at Devil’s Lake - do some swimming, hiking, and campfires.  My favorites.  See more on chicago camping.

Last week a book I made and printed using blurb.com arrived.  It’s one of many photo books I’ve made (see qoop books), but my first using blurb.   I liked the control i had when making it - There’s an app for the mac that lets you pick a template for each page and add pictures and text accordingly. It took me a while to figure out what pictures to put in there, plus write text for each one.

I ordered a 7×7 book, 200 pages, Hardcover with image wrap (no dust jacket). It was $48 + $8 shipping. see more blurb prices.

I am quite satisfied, the quality is close to that of regular books. My only complaint is that a couple of my pages didnt’ print - the inside flap - I assume its because i opted for no dust jacket. Sigh. Compare cover to blurb preview, also compare to Qoop Books.

I love my macbook pro, as most mac owners do, but if you develop web sites you need a good way to test IE, since 2/3 of the internet uses it (browser stats).  Since IE doesn’t run on MAC, you’ll need one of the following solutions:

• VMWare Fusion 2 vs Parallels 4
  • Pros: IE running on a real Windows OS (2000, XP, Vista), fast and easy to use IE alongside mac apps (once setup - parallel note).
  • Differences: Both are very similar, Parallels 15% faster than Fusion (src), Fusion better (src2, src3)
  • Cons: Both around $80 (30 days free), You’ll need 2GB+ disk space to install a vmware OS
• VirtualBox 2.2
  • Pros: Free version of VMWare Fusion and Parallels, from trusty Sun.  With “Guest Additions” Installed (instructions in user manual), works almost as well as Fusion 2.
  • Cons: Longer setup, flew glitches (src).
• Bootcamp
  
  • Pros: Restart computer, booting into a real Windows install
  • Cons: must restart computer to test IE
• Xenocode
  • Pros: run different instances of a program (ie6, ie7, and ie8)
  • Cons: only runs on windows, need fusion, parallels, or virtualBox
• ie4osx
  • Pros: free
  • Cons: only intel mac, a little buggy, requires darwine and X11,
• Other
  • Browsershots.org - get snapshots of your website in tons of browsers
  • Alkaline and litmus - get snapshots of your website in tons of browsers
  • TinyXP - optimized version of windows XP, (TinyXP and VirtualBox)

I ended up using VMWare Fusion 2, since I had a copy of XP and liked using vmware in the past. Man, do i love it! Fustion 2 is much better than the older version - Installation was super easy. And once installed, you can run it 2 ways - all windows apps (IE7, Firefox, etc) running in one vmware-windows-xp mac application window, or switch to unity mode which lets windows apps (IE7, firefox) run on their own mac application window. I prefer the Unity way - the first time I ran IE the logo appeared on my mac dock and I chose to “keep on dock” to quickly launch and test in IE. Awesome.

In order to test IE6, IE7, and IE8, you can either create 3 vmware virtual machines (XP only likes one version of IE), or better yet, create one XP virtual machine with one version of IE and launch the other IE versions thru xenocode spoon.net (must download/install spoon plugin, only runs on IE).  Overall IE on the mac this way is kinda slow, but so incredibly easy it makes up for it.

UPDATE: Virtualbox is working smoothly .. not as good as vmware, but good enough to not buy vmware once my free 30 days are finished.

UPDATE 2: Figured out a good way to debug javascript in IE - use Microsoft Visual Web Developer. Setup Instructions: http://axonflux.com/how-to-get-internet-explorer-j - more options: http://notetodogself.blogspot.com/2008/08/debug-javascript-in-ie.html

Happy Testing!

Last week I got back from Coachella, a 3-day music festival in Southern California.  It was my 4th time going, the other years being 2001, 2002, and 2006.  This year, like previous years, was awesome - good friends, good drinks, pimpin’ house and pool, and tons of cool bands and DJs to rock out to.  Here are noteworthy moments followed by details from the whole weekend

• Groove Armada doing superstylin for like 20 minutes, including a few mins of daft punk in the middle.  After “Around the World” they unloaded the superstylin’ drop that totally electrified the crowd.  This was my favorite moment this year - 3rd favorite coachella moment of all time, after daft punk in 2006 and my personal fav squarepusher in 2001.
• The Do Lab giving off a great burningman vibe, sick music, interesting art and decorations, water hose, and central location. My favorite spot. Video. Big UP to Jupiter, Random Rab, Beats Antique, Lucent Dossier, and many more.
• The Dome was another sound location in addition to the Do Lab and the 5 official ones - they provided sound as you entered and left, going till 5am for those in camp city.  LA Riots played sunday night.
• Naked Hippie getting tasered.  3 fat cops using a taser on a dude out of his mind. article.
• Contact solution containers are very useful.
• The Ting Tings singing “Whats my name” (my fav song of 2008)
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs rocking it - love that gold costume, Karen O. video.
• Girl Talk really knows how to rock a party, short-attentions span style. milkshake.
• MIA was good, but Blackstar (her Coachella DJ) went a little crazy with that air horn - could barely hear the songs. Lame.
• Public Enemy doing the entire album of “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”
• The Black Keys got Soul, damnit.  a video.
• Leonard Cohen rocking it at age 74.
• Morrisey left the stage early cuz he smelled burning flesh.  Sigh. Pass the Bacon.
• The Cure did almost 3 hours - including 2 songs after they cut the sound and lights (only saw first hour, tho).
• I heard Paul McCartney, would have been really impressed if i still loved him.
• Wish I saw Etienne De Crecy. Awesome video.
• Wish I saw MSTRKRFT, saw them in 2008.
• Wish I saw Roni Size, The Kills, Atmosphere, M Ward, Crystal Castles, the Orb, etc.
• Out of 166,000 people attending coachella, I ran into my boy Zac (chicago) twice. I ran into tons of other people from California as well. Attendence was second only to 186k in 2007 (src).

It all began with my arrival Thursday night, along with checkoway and kerry, crashing at my friend Rob’s place in Ontario. Friday morning our new best friend Jason picked us up in his super 80’s Van - Our Carpoolchella.  The rumor was that one lucky crew with “Carpoolchella” written on their car/van would win lifetime vip tix to coachella.  No, wed were not that lucky crew.  Anyways, we drove 80 miles to Palm Springs, got supplies, checked into our house for the weekend, and met up with Isabel (not Babs), Jess, and Brian.  We got our drinks on and headed to coachella friday, coming home around 1 or 2 and staying up till 5 in the morning.  2 hours later I’m up for some reason and ready to go.

Saturday started with more drinking, a surprise arrival by Ding Dong, Cake-Oh, and Katheeee.  Yay.  After some pool shenanigans we left the house for the iMeem party - more pool, free-drinks, DJs (A-Trak was there but did not spin), and great people watching.  It ended up being pretty fun, till the Asahi ran dry.  We made it inside the coachellas around 5 or 6 and lasted till about midnight,  then home and more drinks and late nite grilling by Chef Checkoway. Sunday was more of the same, morning cocktails, donger made eggs, pool chillin, a few visitors, and music at coachella from 6 to midnight.  I was planning on leaving sunday night but I aborted that plan due to lack of sleep and desire not to get sick.

Monday we cleaned up and left the house by noon, made it to LA where most of us did more pool side chilling at the roosevelt in hollywood.  Around 6pm everybody left but me and checkoway - he was in LA for biz and my flight didn’t leave for chicago till 6am the next morning.  Lee Williams showed up, instigating round 7, and with the help of Katie Curry we were out drinking till the bars closed.  After some post-bar pizza I took checkoway back to the hotel where i crashed from 3:30am till 4:30am (thats 1 whole hour of sleep for you kids at home), got up and taxied to LAX.  Needless to say i slept the entire plane ride home.

Good times, Good times.

I loved hostmonster.com ever since I signed up with them in September 2007.  They are a dirt cheap web hosting with pretty much unlimited storage, lots of easy to install applications, and ssh access.  SSH is very important for developers like me - I can get in there and do my business cmd-line style, as all hardcore developers like to do it.

But then after 19 months the abuse department gets all up in my business.  Basically they suspended all my sites and removed ssh access without any notification whatsoever.  After several unanswered emails and form submissions, I call and finally get a hold of somebody.   Initially he was cool - he gave me back my ssh access so at least i could get to my files.  But when I tried to get out of him what I needed to do end my account suspension, he kept it vague, telling me I was not allowed to store stuff online.

• First we ended up arguing for almost 20 minutes over the fact that I had 4 versions of my resume on there (all publicly addressable) .. he claimed that was storage.
• Then it became an issue of any file not linked to by my website was storage - what, i can’t put stuff on my site and email a link to it to my friends? I have to publicly link to it from my blog or something?  what type of policy is that?
• The last issue revolved around .tar, .tgz, and .zip files.  First he said they were allowed if it was “software release or something similar”, which makes sense.  But how does that really differ from having my resumes as a .tar file?  Ok, now that i question the policy changes - he refines his statement and says those files are never allowed.  sigh. Again, WTF?
• Over and over I asked the same 2 questions - what do i have to do to remove suspension and what is hostmonster policy.  The answer was always the same subjective “no online storage allowed”.

Sure, they are legally allowed to do that - their Terms Of Service (TOS) state they are not to be used as online storage and can suspend users without notification for violating this rule.  Online storage is a pretty broad term, legally they could suspend any one of their users since its pretty hard NOT to store anything on your website.  But the way they handled me was incredibly rude and disrespectful.  In the back of my mind I wonder if they just wanted to get me to leave since I used so much storage - several GB’s of jpgs (all 35,000+ are now on flickr).

The guy I spoke to was the acting manager of the abuse department the day I called, April 8.  He was childish, immature, and seemed to be on a power trip.  I attempted to get a hold of anyone else in management thru various form submissions, emails, and phone calls, but 36 hours later (almost 3 days since initial suspension) I gave in and signed up with mediatemple.net and started moving my domains over.  The next day I got a voicemail from the real manager of the abuse department, but by then I was behind in work and already moved to mediatemple, so why sink any more time in this?   This post is to just warn people - hostmonster.com sux.

So if you noticed some hiccups a couple weeks ago, this is why.  For that I apologize.

I’ve always loved maps, and when google maps came out they raised the bar.  After they released their maps API and the mashups began.  The first cool one I remember was a craigslist mashup that listed all apartments for rent on a map - that’s huge when you’re new to a city, and invaluable in renting-competitive cities like NY and SF.  Now there are tons of mashups out there, and here’s a few that I’ve found recently.

Random mashups (coolest ones first)

• Craigslist Housing/Rentals Maps - awesome new padmapper.com (iphone) plus mapskreig.com and original housingmaps.com (stale data) (compete)
• Wikimapia.org (10+ Million entries) like wikipedia, but for maps. See My Seward St Slides entry.
• Fastfoodmaps.com shows fast food joints, updates map when you zoom in/out,
• Walkjogrun.net shows good search bar, nice overlays when looking at a route.
• Taxiwiz.com calculates taxi fares between points in major cities. I like how they add points in google maps
• tmeet.me auto-fill a tweet with current time & coordinates
• SeeClickFix identify local issues (pot hole, sign broken), submit, and watch for fix ..
• Dualmaps combines bird’s eye view with street view and maps
• Pizzashare maps meets pizza meets crowdsourcing (seems buggy, but cool idea)
• Beerhunter.ca find places to get beer in Toronto - right now!
• Diaroogle.com find a clean toilet in NYC
• chicago crimes. lots of interesting data from everyblock, including homegrown maps.
• findbyclick - change maps, results not updated, data is 2007, blog seems current
• Performance/Scaling - spacial databox - great if you have millions of data points

Build your own map: (sorted by compete monthly usage 2/2008-2/2009 more)

• Weddingmapper.com - (130K) great UI for novice (ex)
• Platial.com (120k) slick UI, tons of features, not all work (ex, ex2) (faq) iphone (blog)
• Frappr.com (100k) similar to platial.com, more like myspace for maps
• Communitywalk.com (100k) lots of users/examples, issues on firefox 3 (comments at bottom)
• Zeemaps.com (40k) pretty cool (chicago, sf parks)
• YourGmap.com (20k) easiest setup, good for people who’ve never used google maps (ex)
• Mapbuilder.net (20k) easy setup, can control html for each marker (img, links) (ex)
• Tagzania.com (20k) too much non-map stuff on the page
• Wayfaring.com (15k) clean and slick UI, little data (copyright 2007) (ex)
• My Atlas - clean, but not easy for novices (ex)

Find more maps (reference)

• programmableweb.com
• googlemapsmania blog lists many cool maps
• keirclarke.googlepages.com s

What’s your favorite map?