People continue to find new ways to explore Google Map’s public API. Today, I came across this site:
http://www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/
It lets you measure the walking (or cycling) distance between any two points in the city, simply by double-clicking all the significant direction changes along the router. Simple, but effective.
A friend referred me to this website today:
http://www.mackers.com/projects/dartmaps/
It’s a very cool Google Maps hack that scrapes realtime DART position info from Irish Rail’s website and plots it on a Google Map of Dublin.
Be sure to zoom in – you can actually see the trains moving in realtime. Click on a train to find out its destination.
Amazing what you can do with a bit of XML, scripting and some ingenuity…
New Scientist has an interesting article about a new robot with a knack for finding its feet.
While there have previously been some impressive demonstration videos of robots from Toyota, Honda and Sony, this is the first robot I’ve seen that actually mimicked human like movement patterns.
You can download the 13 MB demo video here; it’s rather unsettling to watch.
I just hope they have a good team working on the software…
I came across this article about RAID systems under Linux, and some of the problems that can occur.
It’s interesting reading, especially the explanation as to why a single drive failure in a Linux RAID system is often also followed by a second failure before the array has had a chance to rebuild … rather concerning, since that can effectively negate the redundancy benefit of having a RAID in the first place.
Let’s hope my MegaRaid SATA150-6 controller doesn’t suffer from similar problems…
Also of interest: drive manufacturers appear to be routinely making minor adjustments to the size of discs, even when the model number remains the same – this can cause problems when swapping out a dead drive, if the replacement is slightly smaller. Might be an idea to stockpile a few spare drives to have on hand which are from the same batch as your original set.
I noticed this on a discussion board today:
One of my favorite little bits of history is the way the king of Denmark, when Denmark encompassed at least the southern parts of Sweden, assessed taxes on ships passing through the waterways between the North and Baltic Seas. Captains of ships passing through were allowed to declare the value of ship and cargo without any recourse by the taxing authorities. On the other hand, the taxing collectors were authorized to purchase said ship and cargo at the declared value if they thought it would be profitable.
I like it!
Those clever folks at sysinternals.com have a blog entry up describing how to run Windows with no services whatsoever enabled — a very neat trick.
The article is here and is well worth a read if you like to know what goes on under the hood on your Windows system.
How does the eye perceive colour? Probably a little differently than you thought. Context is everything, as the following link shows:
http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/colourPerception/colourPerception.html
This may no longer be available from September 2005, so I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it here:
The centre section of each structure is exactly the same colour, even though one looks grey and one looks yellow. If you don’t believe me, copy the image to your favourite paint program and check out the RGB values.
If you use external firewire disks with your PC, you may have seen at one time or another the dreaded “Delayed Write Failure”. Why does this happen?
Apparently, it’s because various Firewire enclosures have problems supporting more than 128 KB in a single transfer. Depending on the Windows application software, this may or may not cause problems for you.
There is a convenient Filter driver that overcomes this problem, by telling Windows to limit transfers for a particular device to 128 KB; you can find it on the Max 128K Filter Page.
That same page also references another very useful resource, the busTRACE free utilities page. This includes a utility called 1394test which will show you whether your Firewire enclosure suffers from this problem or not, as well as other useful related utilities. The 1394test page also includes extended discussion of the whole Delayed Write issue.
Note: apparently Windows XP Service Pack 2 also includes code to limit the maximum transfer size to 128 KB — so if you are running Service Pack 2, you may not have the problem at all.
(Thanks to Steve for pointing me towards these.)
Not content with playing with World Wind (referenced in an earlier post), I see now that Keyhole are offering a commercial version of the same technology – or at least very similar technology. Google bought Keyhole last year, so they now have some mighty computing resources behind them.
Keyhole wins on ease of use (faster, less interruptions while pulling down map data, usually faster downloads courtesy of Google’s impressive servers) and scope (more aerial maps of more cities) but loses a bit on general detail – planet-level maps are only down to a resolution of 1 Km or so, while World Wind gets down to 30m outside the big cities.
Also, the interface for moving around the globe seems slightly more refined with World Wind – I kept finding Ireland was upsidedown when I rotated the globe in Keyhole, and rarely had that problem with World Wind.
Keyhole is $30/year subscription (7 day free trial) and given that the maps are being continually updated, this is probably good value. Worth a look at the very least…
Update: It looks like Google have re-branded this now as Google Earth, free for personal use!
Here’s a useful link from a friend (thanks, Kevin!)
http://www.grynx.com/index.php/projects/laptop-on-the-wall-walltop/
A nice look at the steps needed to convert that old laptop into a neat wall-mounted photo/art display.
