someone from the yahoo maps team did this last hack day (a month+ ago), but for whatever reason, it hasn’t been released by yahoo yet. very useful feature imho (basically, you can drag and drop on the map to change the route, so if you want to avoid a particular road, you can).
many times, i find myself having to scrape a website for any particular reason. now a days, if i need to do it, i’d probably do it with some version of mechanize (www::mechanize in perl, hpricot in ruby, etc). when i was looking for a bug in one of the scrapers i’d written a long time ago, what took me by surprise was that i’d written a lexer to do it.
i guess this was shortly after i’d taken “languages and interpreters” in college, in which we used [f]lex and yacc/(bison). i just figured it was interesting, after working with a technology, that we try to utilize it. its not necessarily a bad way to do things, i just would do things differently now…
i figured i’d play around with the facebook api today, so i wrote a little facebook quran app for displaying verses from the quran on your profile page. not very polished if i should say so myself, but… it works (at least for me). if you try it, please let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature suggestions.
you can test it here: http://facebook.cafesalam.net/quranapp.