Blog MOVED please update your links

http://bullsworld.net

I have noticed this blog still gets a lot of hits, this site is no longer updated, I have moved it to http://bullsworld.net and the new RSS feed is now http://bullsworld2007.wordpress.com/feed

All the posts from this site have been imported so please move along.

Switched to WordPress

After days of trying to get a post to submit on blogger I have finally given up, I decided to set up a free WordPress blog instead, I may at some point host it on my own server, but for now I’ll use wordpress.com.

Please update any links you have to http://bullsworld2007.wordpress.com and subscribe to the new RSS feed.

The only downside is I lose adsense, but I have yet to make my first $100 anyway, I may add a paypal donate button instead (is that allowed on wordpress?), my only concern is people may think they are donating to WorldWind Central or FEF.

First World Wind bounty

The first bounty has appeared on the World Wind forums, started by What_nick a long time developer and community member -

Hi All,

I am running out of time to complete this due to other commitments at work:
http://forum.worldwindcentral.com/sh...80&postcount=7

If anyone is interested in getting the ideas presented in the thread please let me know. I can offer upto AUD 100 and some free tutorials on coding World Wind and let you pester me endlessly.

Cheers,

what_nick

So if you want to earn some extra cash, or offer more incentives for this project, reply on this thread.

Offtopic - Life on Mars

Well last nights episode was great as always, I was a bit sad to read the official story from the writers that Sam did die, but it works well, I think I will always stick with this guys interpretation in my heart though

My own personal view was that he was mad, he had gone back in time and he was in a coma...all three!
In a Quantum Leap type way after the crash that 2006 Sam had his soul (for want of a better word) was sent back in time took hold of the 1973 Sam Williams who was just about to start his undercover work. Perhaps this done by some higher power to both save Tyler's brain, save Williams' body and save Gene and the rest of the team. If this is the case Gene did and possibly still does, exist and always did. Maybe the way that the audience see's the Sam as 2006 Sam would see himself but to everyone else he looks nothing like this and actually looks like Sam Williams.

What do you reckon?

Posted by: John

Hmm just realised that in both life on mars and quantum leap the main characters were called Sam, another coincidence?

Anyway thanks to the BBC, Matthew Graham, Ashley Pharoah, Tony Jordan, John Simm, Philip Glenister and of course Liz White for a great ride. I'll be interested to see how the US version goes, hopefully they wont destroy it like so many other UK->US conversions, a Hollywood style ending would just be sad.

World Wind development bounties

In a move to encourage World Wind development, as currently we have no full time developers, we have created a bounty section on World Wind's forums.

The idea of this section is for people to offer cash, or other incentives, to developers for specific tasks they want to see implemented or improved in World Wind.

From the wiki -

The Developer bounties section on the World Wind forums are a place where FEF/WWC and other interested parties offer interested developers cash or other bounties in addition to the fame of being a World Wind programmer to speed up the implementation of the numerous grand ideas we have.

This section of the forum will carry details related to the specific features that need to be implemented.

The bounties are offered in good faith and we trust the developers taking up the challenge to put in their best effort. The bounty payer's decision is final on the best implementation and level of completion of a task and we will not enter any contract disputes and legal proceedings. If you are not satisfied with these terms please do not participate.

Please remember development on the .NET version of World Wind has no funding from NASA, and is done purely by the World Wind open source community, WWC/FEF rely purely on donations and advertisements to pay for our servers and hosting.

on-the-fly image tiling and reprojection nearly ready

What_nick is busy adding new functionality in SVN which will allow dragging and dropping of georeferenced imagery into World Wind, and even reproject the imagery if it isn't WGS84, this could be an extremely useful new feature and will place World Wind way ahead of the competition in GIS functionality and ease of use.

You can find more information on the confused life.

So what is Googles policy for enforcing it's EULA?

Ok I'm going to get flamed for this, but I just don't get GE'S EULA/ToS, as far as I can tell it states personal use only, but most of the uses I see on the net are not for personal use, is everyone buying the pro version? Or are Google turning a blind eye? Also the way it reads unless you get a broadcast license you shouldn't be sharing videos or screenshots of GE, now practically every blog and video community has GE videos or screenshots, is this classed as fair use, IANAL so I just don't understand.

On the subject of applications using GM or GE data Google seems pretty clear, it's a no no, they shot down GAIA and the Google maps plug-in for World Wind, but what about these -

FSF

Develop a free compatible client for Google Earth. (The Google Earth client is non-free specifically in order to impose Digital Restrictions Management.)

GMID

Google Maps Images Downloader is a cute tool that help you to get small tile images from Google Maps. All downloaded small images are saved on the disk. You can view downloaded maps by MapViewer.exe Or you can combine them into a big BMP map by Combine.exe.

GoogleMV

a wonderful tool that lets you cut maps of the world based on those available on maps.google.com with automatic calibration for OziExplorer. It's just a matter of selecting the area you're interested in and selecting the zoom level. You'll get a .jpg file and its companion .map file ready to use in OziExplorer

Now before you say Google hasn't noticed them yet, remember it's googles job to index the web and they have a huge team of well paid lawyers looking out for this kind of stuff. so are they sticking to their "Do no evil motto"? Or just waiting to pounce?

New Birds Eye Imagery in Virtual Earth

I read this post on the virtual earth blog -

A major imagery release just went online at Live Maps and the Virtual Earth platform - 3.8 terabytes worth.

So decided to check it out, I figured Hastings castle might be covered, as I was born in Hastings I took a look, and there it was, great, now I moved around a bit expecting the imagery to only cover a small patch, but nope, I could even see my old house!


Ok cool, but my current town of Cheltenham wouldn't be covered, there is no castle here, but what the heck I zoomed over clicked the birds eye view and w00t!,there it was.


Viewed in World Winds internal browser with the VE plugin active
Here is another image of GCHQ, England's communication monitoring site (spying HQ), looks pretty cool.


So in summary a great update from Microsoft, especially for UK users.

Offtopic - fishy

Can you tell what it is yet?
Here are two photos of my new plec, although it looks more like a face hugger from Alien, also in the first photo are my goldfish Sian (not my choice of name) and Persephone.


Here's Yoda!

Another preview kml from Apogee

Here's another cool image from Apogee, which I turned into a kml (yay me!), it takes a while to load especially on a slow connection, so be patient when World Wind seems to have frozen.

World Wind meeting roundup

There was another community meeting today here's a round-up of the key points -

* Development guidelines established.

* SVN cleanup - open source devs who are no longer active will be removed from SVN.

* Tentative release date for 1.4.1 Beta set for May.

* Selar proposed a "documentation party" to get the code's public methods / api's documented and maybe even an automated msdn-doc generator. More info will be posted on the dev list.

So things are slowly moving along, I'll start poking people more from now on and try to get some momentum going.