EarthBrowser - Interactive Earth Globe
Maps have really changed since I was a kid. They are becoming important to personal computers for watching the weather, planning trips, finding local places, and so forth.
My earliest memory of
When they did that, ooh, boy - did the maps come out then!
The maps most often used back then, as I recall, were the ones you buy from the gas station. For a fairly low price, you get a map that - when unfolded - completely fills the entire passenger area of the car.
Excellent, does that come in aviation flavor too? No? Well, probably a good thing.
Anyway, those things are dated as heck now. Fine for when you are in the car and have not had time to prepare for your trip using Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, or whatever.
These days, you can also use mapping software to see what the weather is like. I use mine on my desktop computer to do that a lot. It is handy. It also shows volcanoes, quakes, and so on. Sounds crazy, but think about it.
You probably know at least one person who lives somewhat near a volcano that has erupted in recent history. And everyone knows someone who lives near a fault line. Then, there is hurricanes - lots of people on the coasts get treated to those.
The program I use to keep an eye on those is EarthBrowser. It has very high resolution maps. Not insanely high, but just very high from my perspective. So, I can see what storms are rolling into my area - their shape, size, and direction. Which is what I care about. I want to gauge whether they are going to miss me. Ditto for the people I know.
EarthBrowser:
Tonight I took a look at the storm over Florida. Wow, it is big. And the clouds are pretty thick.
I spent the first part of this evening putting together a simple little RSS feed assembled from weather reports and some other RSS feeds. I wanted something that I can watch from any RSS reader application on my desktop.
RSS is so darned flexible. Anyway, it took a few hours but I got it done. I am going to add a few more feeds. I just want one web page that will summarize all the goings on in the world that I keep an eye on regularly.
As it turns out, that is pretty easy. Looks like I did it just in the nick of time. There seems to be a lot going on this week.
I was trying out some languages Sunday that were not really suitable. As it turns out, when I started fresh on it this evening, I decided to code the thing in Ruby.
That proved to be a very good choice. Outstanding, in fact.
I wound up with a really short piece of code that grabs the current conditions for a locale from the NOAA. It is in XML format.
Ah, REXML - very pleasant way to to work with XML. I love working with XSLT, which is a very powerful way to transform or even extract XML data. Using the REXML program gives you a lot of that same power - in terms of the pattern matching facility for the nodes using XPath expressions.
Even better, for information processing, I think. Because you can extract that data and use it right then in the middle of your application. Sweet!
I also wrote an RSS feed aggregator. It took so little code I was pretty stunned. I think this was the first time I had generated an RSS 2.0 feed document. So that made it take a little extra long. Most of it went fast, but I got hung up on what to stick in the guid node. Ultimately, it turned out the RSS API in Ruby wants you to pass it an instance of its Guid class. I did it, and it was happy.
The rest went pretty smoothly.
I want to do a little page scraping to pull in some more data. Looked quickly for something to clean up HTML pages in the standard Ruby library. Did not see any such thing.
I have written them before, so I guess I will write one once more. Kind of a pain, but necessary. The page that has some good info I want to keep an eye on has messy HTML.
It is fun to integrate information into a consolidated presentation that is custom suited to your POV.
My earliest memory of
mapswas when my family would travel across the country by car to see relatives.
When they did that, ooh, boy - did the maps come out then!
The maps most often used back then, as I recall, were the ones you buy from the gas station. For a fairly low price, you get a map that - when unfolded - completely fills the entire passenger area of the car.
Excellent, does that come in aviation flavor too? No? Well, probably a good thing.
Anyway, those things are dated as heck now. Fine for when you are in the car and have not had time to prepare for your trip using Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, or whatever.
These days, you can also use mapping software to see what the weather is like. I use mine on my desktop computer to do that a lot. It is handy. It also shows volcanoes, quakes, and so on. Sounds crazy, but think about it.
You probably know at least one person who lives somewhat near a volcano that has erupted in recent history. And everyone knows someone who lives near a fault line. Then, there is hurricanes - lots of people on the coasts get treated to those.
The program I use to keep an eye on those is EarthBrowser. It has very high resolution maps. Not insanely high, but just very high from my perspective. So, I can see what storms are rolling into my area - their shape, size, and direction. Which is what I care about. I want to gauge whether they are going to miss me. Ditto for the people I know.
EarthBrowser:
EarthBrowser is an amazing resource for information about our world. Go sightseeing, get weather reports or watch the latest clouds. There is always something interesting to see in EarthBrowser.
Tonight I took a look at the storm over Florida. Wow, it is big. And the clouds are pretty thick.
I spent the first part of this evening putting together a simple little RSS feed assembled from weather reports and some other RSS feeds. I wanted something that I can watch from any RSS reader application on my desktop.
RSS is so darned flexible. Anyway, it took a few hours but I got it done. I am going to add a few more feeds. I just want one web page that will summarize all the goings on in the world that I keep an eye on regularly.
As it turns out, that is pretty easy. Looks like I did it just in the nick of time. There seems to be a lot going on this week.
I was trying out some languages Sunday that were not really suitable. As it turns out, when I started fresh on it this evening, I decided to code the thing in Ruby.
That proved to be a very good choice. Outstanding, in fact.
I wound up with a really short piece of code that grabs the current conditions for a locale from the NOAA. It is in XML format.
Ah, REXML - very pleasant way to to work with XML. I love working with XSLT, which is a very powerful way to transform or even extract XML data. Using the REXML program gives you a lot of that same power - in terms of the pattern matching facility for the nodes using XPath expressions.
Even better, for information processing, I think. Because you can extract that data and use it right then in the middle of your application. Sweet!
I also wrote an RSS feed aggregator. It took so little code I was pretty stunned. I think this was the first time I had generated an RSS 2.0 feed document. So that made it take a little extra long. Most of it went fast, but I got hung up on what to stick in the guid node. Ultimately, it turned out the RSS API in Ruby wants you to pass it an instance of its Guid class. I did it, and it was happy.
The rest went pretty smoothly.
I want to do a little page scraping to pull in some more data. Looked quickly for something to clean up HTML pages in the standard Ruby library. Did not see any such thing.
I have written them before, so I guess I will write one once more. Kind of a pain, but necessary. The page that has some good info I want to keep an eye on has messy HTML.
It is fun to integrate information into a consolidated presentation that is custom suited to your POV.
posted by John Collins | 1:14 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home