Bull's Rambles

The Gaea+ team have created a World Wind Java applet which displays the route of the Race across America, as well as the route the applet shows location details on mouse over and competitor locations.

A pretty slick implementation and the first time I have seen a World Wind Java applet that does this, World Wind .Net had a few race plug-ins, but I must admit using an applet in any browser is much more user friendly, I hope we see more of these applets start popping up soon, Atlantic Rowing Race anyone?

I am just about to update wordpress so there may be some breakage, vidahost has automatic off-site backups so if the site breaks I can easily revert it.

Edit: All done.

I don’t use Google Maps much, and streetview even less, but I was surprised to find out just how bad it is for privacy, I like most people assumed that it’s auto blurring technology would be pretty good, otherwise how could they be allowed to take photos of the entire country, surely the UK Information Commissioner’s Office would not have ruled that it didn’t  breach the Data Protection Act if there were peoples faces or licences plates clearly visible.

The images below were captured from streetview when I was looking at the location of a rude word recently found by The Sun, in under three minutes I discovered these, with more time I’m sure I would have found more.

The above images clearly show the faces of two people and a readable license plate, to be fair it did blur the dog so it wouldn’t be recognised.  I would guess that the faces were not blurred because the software has trouble identifying elderly faces, but if there is a problem with Googles software why would they roll out streetview and keep adding new imagery if it wasn’t reliable, especially with the current public concerns, Google have had a long time to get this right since streetview was first released and I am very dissapointed that they obviously still don’t take the public’s privacy seriously.

I know people can ask for images removed, but that really isn’t the point as I have mentioned in previous posts.

First off ISIS has been updated to 3.1.20 and it looks like a few useful features have been added -

The special pixel tool now allows the user to select a background color for viewports. The default background color is black and can be changed the same way special pixel colors can be set.

The stretch tool now has an advanced stretch dialog that allows the user to view and modify more advanced stretches. Stretches that are currently implemented are –

Linear Stretch – Stretch from a minimum value to a maximum value.
Binary Stretch – Map a window of values to 255, and map everything outside of the window to 0.
Sawtooth Stretch – Map across a number of sawtooths.
Manual Stretch – Manually insert stretch pairs.

In order to view and edit the advanced stretches, open the advanced dialog in the stretch tool by clicking on the ‘Advanced’ button. This will open a dialog that shows a graph of the active viewport’s histogram and the current advanced stretch. The user can select different advanced stretches from the drop down menu, and edit these stretches using their respective parameters in the parameters area. There is also a button to ‘flash’ between the current advanced stretch and the global stretch of the viewport. The graph that displays the viewport’s histogram also allows the user to change the range of the histogram by moving the min/max slider or entering a valid min/max.

Check the USGS release thread for more information.

The documentary for which I created a small World Wind video clip, Hooked on the fly, has been commissioned for a season on The Sportsman Channel in the U.S.  and I will be looking forward to working with George to create some more cool looking clips to intro each episode, so watch out for that in early 2010.

I have started to Tweet, I have really been trying hard to avoid twitter, but I have finally succumbed to the inevitable, maybe it will be useful when I don’t feel like making a blog post or for minor World Wind news updates, maybe I’ll get bored of  it, we’ll see.

Lastly I am rather annoyed that the LED light I bought for my Biorb stopped working, and even more annoyed that it is due to poor build quality, it turns out the wire inside the plastic coating of the power lead has corroded (see the image below), now this is an item specifically designed for a fish tank so why wasn’t it tested for water resistance?  The LED light itself fits in the Biorb’s lid with the power cable outside the tank so it can only be getting minor splashes on it, maybe these splashes contain amonia from the fish in the tank, but even so it is designed for an aquarium so that should have been considered, I would suggest anyone considering paying £60 for one of these things to not bother wasting your money.  I did cut the corroded piece of wire out and reconnected it, but I doubt it will last too long.

I received this in the post on Thursday.

Well the vans have finally arrived in Cheltenham, they were first spotted yesterday and today at just after lunchtime they snapped my flat, unfortunately I didn’t get a “Google Sux0rs, World Wind Rulez” poster up in time, but I will be asking the StreetView overlords to remove my home as soon as it’s online.