Today the two top open-wheel racing series in the US — the Indy Racing League and the Champ Car World Series — agreed to merge, effective with this coming season. Actually, it’s not so much a merger as it is Champ Car shutting down: After 12 years of bitter rivalry that confused fans, promoted apathy and nearly buried the sport, Champ Car agreed to cease operations, giving the surviving IRL the opportunity to rebuild open-wheel’s lost prestige. Champ Car clearly came out the loser in this deal, but considering they went bankrupt a few years back, they’re probably lucky to…
This past week we finally made a trip to the premier Nascar event — the Daytona 500 — and “experience” is the best way to describe it. Not many sports hold their “super bowl” event on opening weekend, but Nascar sure makes a show out of it. This year was also the 50th running of the race, so the celebrities and celebrations were above and beyond the norm. For the racing itself and the wow factor for being there, I’d give Daytona top marks. Anyone who considers themselves a Nascar fan should attend this race at least once. It’s easily…
The CSS-Tricks site has a cool article this week about using weather data to change your website’s appearance. Of note for Yahoo developers is that they’re using the Yahoo! Weather web service to fetch current conditions. The article has an accompanying sample page which focuses on the CSS and PHP code necessary to swap out the page appearance. The remaining work would be to intelligently identify where the visitor is coming from and fetch their weather automatically. Kind of a neat application for a service that probably doesn’t get a lot of attention.
Joel Spolsky has a great article today regarding the Microsoft release of the Office binary file format specifications. Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty darn quickly. It’s a good summary and Joel raises some good points about how the file format likely got so complicated over time. He’s also…
Earlier I wrote about the apparent lack of website traffic during Super Bowl commercials, but on this site at least, writing about Super Bowl commercials causes a huge (10-fold) jump in traffic (click for larger image):