Bull's Rambles

I have updated the welcome page text and made it the sites entry page, the aim is to make it more friendly and easier to use for new users, the blog posts will now appear at http://www.bullsworld.net/posts/ so current users may want to update their bookmarks, hopefully the RSS feed will automatically update.

Any comments are welcome as always.

I have moved the World Wind video channel across to the new beta channel, or YouTube 2.0 as they call it, I know a lot of people don’t like the new layout but I kind of do, although more customization options would be nice, while I was at it I pruned the World Wind group, some videos had dead links and others weren’t related to World Wind at all. Don’t forget to vote for the videos on the channel, they have some new system for voting where you love or hate a video, and most currently have no rating.

In other YouTube related news, I have made a group for my personal non-World Windy stuff, and uploaded some puppy clips, it’s called Daniel’s Videos, enjoy.

The NASA World Wind Servers will be down for maintenance this weekend, this means unless you have your data cached locally you won’t get any imagery, for .NET you will also experience long load times and possibly no toolbar, for Java apps I’m not quite sure what problems will occur.

The WorldWind Central server will still be up so any data, such as Zoomit!, that is served by us should still work, the Virtual Earth plug-in for .NET should also still work, but Java’s will not.

I just got an email from Patrick Hogan letting me know some NASA World Wind servers will be down between Friday Aug 7th afternoon (PST) and Sunday Aug 9th midnight, this may or may not have any affect on World Wind, but if it goes slow or you get strange errors please be patient.

Thanks to SchoeningJohannes for giving me links to these cool NASA World Wind Java videos, I have added them to the World Wind YouTube group, so have a look and enjoy.

The Risk game is pretty neat, but my favourite is the use of multi touch combined with a Wii fit board for navigation combined with Anaglyph mode I’m sure a lot of people would get motion sickness, it would be great at an amusement arcade.  Most of the videos come from the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster in Germany and they really do put my videos to shame.

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?