Grasshoppermind

This is a neat little trick with Flickr. Erik Kastner has put together this tool to Spell With Flickr. You type in the text that you want spelt out, his code goes and finds the right pictures to match your letters.

A little while ago I asked SRI International what had happened to their Digital Earth project. This project was one of the primary reasons that we now have Google Earth, Worldwind, Virtual Earth, etc., and I was interested in knowing a little more about the history. Well, Aaron Heller, who is a researcher at SRI, responded and pointed out this publications list as well as this bit of background:

SRI’s Digital Earth effort was funded by DARPA under a few different research projects over the course of 10 years from 1992 to 2002. The final report shows just how much of what is Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, NASA Worldwind (and more), was originally done on the Digital Earth project. After 10 years, DARPA felt that their work was done and it was time let NGA take over geospatial research. NGA’s approach to is to support work in setting interoperability standards (as with the Open GIS Consortium) and working with commercial companies to develop products that NGA can license and use (e.g. Keyhole, which became Google Earth).

Some of the numbers from the final report are pretty impressive, for example, their proposed Digital Earth allowed for a scaleable tile based distributed storage system that could cope with color imagery of the planet at 1cm resolution requiring 1 petabyte of storage. This is way more that you currently can see on Google Earth and its rivals, although it probably indicates the kind of capabilities enjoyed by the intelligence agencies even now.

They also envisaged a number of different “Geoweb” Clients:

Text Based: …in addition to entering a search criterion, the user would also enter a location for the search. This could be a latitude/longitude coordinate or, more intuitively, a street address or a feature name that can be translated to a geodetic coordinate by using a gazetteer service…

Map-based:…a client that lets users search over a particular geographic region and return the results as a map image with various icons overlaid…

TerraVision: …allows users to navigate in real time through a 3-D graphical representation of a real landscape created from elevation data and aerial images of that landscape…

Geoster: … lets users index photos from around the world and share these with the rest of the world…this type of client could produce a large interest in geographic search…

You should recognise todays descendents easily.

Following up on the Sony Rootkit story, as predicted there is already significant fallout for Sony. There are Lawsuits filed against them, Virus writers are exploting the cloaking technology that was employed, Sony’s own patch appears to cause stability problems and now the anti-virus vendors are releasing removal tools. All in all this has been no doubt been a very interesting week for Sony’s PR department! If they want to do further damage to their reputation they can press ahead with the release of this copy protection scheme in Europe.

As of the time of writing there is no official press release from Sony about this, you can check here at Sony’s official press release area.

The Isle of Man has received the first commercial HSDPA network in Europe allowing islanders to download at speeds of up to 1.4Mbps. But that is of course just the start as the network is upgradeable and as such they could be seeing speeds of 10Mbps by 2008! [From 0Gravity]

The Isle of Man was also one of the first countries with a 3G network. It’s size and easy access to UK lends itself well to small technology trials of this nature. Let’s hope that the proposed takeover by Telefonica does not stop this from taking place.

There are many reasons that I choose to live on the Isle Of Man. Here’s one of them.

Unemployment has fallen by 14, which brings the jobless total down to 563. [from Isle of Man Online]

Yes you did read that correctly, that’s 563.

Found at Mobiledia, Google have released yet another beta.

Combining directions, maps, and satellite imagery, Google Local for mobile is a free download that lets you find local hangouts and businesses across town or across the country — right from your phone.

Google Local for mobile works with most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones. You don’t need a GPS enabled phone! The downside (for me at least) is that it’s a US only service at present.

Google are really getting into this location thing aren’t they…

I wonder whatever happened to SRI International’s Digital Earth project? Now that ESRI, Worldwind and Google Earth are up and running, is the project dead?

Jonathan Stott has created this Location Finder for finding the Latitude and Longitude of any place. Navigate to the location you are interested in via a Google Maps interface, double click on the map to place the cross hairs, then click on the Location button. Lat and Long are displayed, along with the OS reference for good measure. Easy.

Jonathan has also created a couple of related services you should check out as well.
The Height Finder: Displays the hight of the location selected.
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Does exactly what it says on the tin…

Finally, Jonathan is also working on a PHP coordinate conversion utility called PHPcoord:

PHPcoord contains the following features:

* Calculate distance between a pair of latitudes and longitudes
* Convert between an OSGB grid reference and latitude and longitude using either the OSGB36 or WGS84 data
* Convert between UTM reference and latitude and longitude

Mark Russinovich who runs Sysinternals has posted an outstanding example of computer forensics. After discovering a Rootkit on one of his own computers, he set out to determine how it got there. The cause of his problem? He played a copy protected CD (from Sony) in his computer. It turns out that Sony’s implementation of the DRM copy protection scheme breaks computer misuse laws in several countries! I suspect that the fallout from this story is going to cause a huge problem now for Sony. Go and have a read of the comments on his post and you’ll see what I mean.

With Google of course! Here’s a quick tip from Mark McLaren’s weblog. When Mark first wrote this post on July 23rd 2005 there were only 5290 KML files found, as of today there are 165000. That’s an amazing growth rate.