Archive for the ‘Nearby’ Category

Int—er—mitt—ent — Ser—vi—ce….

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Owing to the Flash Earth layer thingy published a few days ago, you might notice things a little choppy around here at the moment… my own little corner of the web is not normally this busy. Currently have about 3-4 times the normal traffic levels, which is about 200 visitors at any one time. Just the layer has been downloaded by about 1,200 people and generated about 70,000 hits. So far beating the Cloud and sky layer from a while ago by about x2.

Fortunately I been working on scaling rather a lot lately (on Geograph and a bit at work), so might have to put some things into practice ‘ere.

Google Earth 4.2 + FlashEarth equals…

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

What if the current view in Google Earth was quickly viewable in other maps, such as those made accessible by FlashEarth? Well, now it is. As you move around the globe a little white arrow follows you around, simple click it to get an approximation of the current view in FlashEarth in a popup balloon.

Open in Google Earth

Total credit to Valery35, for the concept (including a screenshot) on the Google Earth Community. (and to all the people made all the bits that could be pieced together in this 15min hack)

Geograph completes its first whole Myriad

Monday, August 27th, 2007

SP Myriad - Geograph Coverage Aug 2007 - (c) Geograph Creative Commons LicencedYesterday Geograph reached a significant milestone, getting photographs for a whole myriad. That’s a whole 100x100km square, or 10,000 squares.

Ok there have been a few smaller myriads complete for a while, but SP is a fully landlocked square so represents a significant achievement.

To celebrate: here is a zoomable flash wotsit to showcase all those glorious squares

Geopress and no maps?

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

Recently I have been playing with YSlow quite a bit, mainly for Geograph. A useful feature is it gives the load time for every page (without doing a full scan) in the status bar and I happened to visit this blog and the results where quite surprising.

Geopress which I have installed for adding GeoRSS to rss feeds and creating kml files, (and geotagging the post itself, which is custom), actually includes it’s javascript on each an every page! So 6kb for the core, 34kb for mapstraction, and then because I had blindly entered a API key for Google and Yahoo, get both of their apis thrown in (about 150kb I think), and no maps for all that effort!
I use a Google map for geocoding the post in the first place, so don’t want to blindly disable the whole lot, so as a quick bodge, I just commented out the following line in geopress.php

add_action(‘wp_head’, array(‘GeoPress’, ‘wp_head’));

leaving the ‘admin_head’, so that it would get included in the admin , which is just me.

If I knew more I would digg in and make it a preference, or better yet just make it auto-detected. But posting this here in the hope it useful to someone.

what I am reading…

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

… I’m a lazy blogger, I don’t bother posting things I find, as I naively think people everybody will have already read it.

I’ve also just started using Google Reader in a bigger way, and as such as a small experiment will start sharing items I think are relevent to this blog, get the feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NearbyIsReading

(its via feedburner to make a nicer url, as well as to get some stats to see if it worth me doing this…)

Tweaking the number of the MGRS layer

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Ever since releasing the MGRS layer for Google Earth, I’ve been asked a number of times (well about 10) about tweaking the numbers on the gridlines, to be more ‘MGRS like’. To be honest havent had a clue what this means, but a recent email made me twig whats going on.

Basically the numbers included the hundreds of KM, but in fact that number is already represented in the Grid Letters so doesnt make sence to include again (it was there because the layer was an almost direct port of the UTM code, which of course needs it).

So the server hosted version has been updated, and also the file inside the zip for the offline version (which are in fact identical code!), and if really interested heres the diff.

Enjoy!

OpenSearch (with Geo) Description File Tester

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

(Very) Simplistic tool for trying out a OpenSearch Description file :

http://www.nearby.org.uk/opensearch/

… includes a Gmap to make defining the lat/long and/or bbox easy. (if the file has geo extensions)

(Just submit the same file again, if you update it. btw don’t submit a definition file you don’t want to become public, but remember it is called ‘open’ ;)

I realised after mentioning we updated the description file on www.geograph.org.uk, that it wasn’t fully tested, (hate testing, but not adverse to spending 2 hours scripting a tester), and in fact this tool highlighted a mistake!

Hope it of interest, feedback welcome,

MGRS Layer for Google Earth – Offline!

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Thanks to help from Mark Ferneau, have finally the MGRS layer packaged up ready for use off-line (and GPL licenced!), an often requested feature.

These instructions assume Windows, and that you don’t have a local webserver running. The zip file should be usable to set it up on any local server capable of running PHP, just don’t forget to edit the link in the network link to the path of your webserver.

Without further ado, the instructions:

  1. Download Appweb web server from: http://www.appwebserver.org/ (Tested with 2.2.0)
  2. Install with the general default options
  3. Save AppWeb.conf file in C:\program files\MBedthis Appweb\, overwriting the default (this just sets up the minimum needed for PHP to run, removing some of the extra stuff)
  4. Copy php5ts.dll from C:\Program Files\Mbedthis Appweb\lib\modules\ to C:\Program Files\Mbedthis Appweb\bin\ (not sure why this step is required but Appweb seems to need it)
  5. Extract grid_mgrs.zip into directory C:\appweb\web\offline_nearby\
  6. Start up the appweb server, using Icon in Start Menu. (if it’s already running, icon in System Tray, exit it)
  7. Open the network link – save it to your My Places :)

If there is interest could possible package up some of the other layers run on a local webserver in a similar fashion.

Finally, use at your own risk, it works for us, but your mileage may vary. We welcome any and all feedback (esp. patches!)

RSS & GeoRSS to KML

Monday, April 30th, 2007

Spured on by comments on Stefan’s Ogle Earth blog, have created this little page as a wrapper to the excellent service provided by geonames.org to automatically convert a RSS feed to KML. It also does RSS->GeoRSS and GeoRSS->KML.

http://www.nearby.org.uk/rss-to-kml.php

Hopefully should make it a bit easier to load a (Geo)RSS feed into Google Earth in the style of a RSS feed – it auto updates.

… really need more to talk about, been kinda quiet of late…

3DConnexion on 2D Google Maps…

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Thanks to Frank for letting us know about the new SDK for the 3DConnexion devices, including the SpaceNavigator, I’ve been waiting for this for a while as wanted to try it for websites like Google Maps. Even nicer is the SDK includes a Javascript demo – so makes developing for Google Maps Easy!

Enough already, I want to see the Demo!

WARNING: Internet Explorer – and you might have to enable ActiveX controls to run. Do so at your own risk! I won’t intentionly do anything bad, but can’t promise that 3DConnexion won’t (but doubtful they would either) – Recommend you add Nearby to your trusted sites and then allow controls to run in the trusted zone.

Or just download the file to your local drive. (right click the above link and select Save As) and run it from a local file – didn’t have to jump thought the hoops to get it to run there!

Todo: The zooming isn’t as slick as it could be (possibly) and would be nicer to have more control of the speed. Also the silly (depending on your point of view!) warnings from IE7, which I wonder if there is a better way of loading the objects to make it more compatible.