geo2web.com

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Hi. This is Craig Johnston and Brian Hull of Sudjam, LLC, the company hosting and developing the new online presence for the band Nine Inch Nails. This guest blog entry will cover how we went about creating a Google Earth representation of downloads for NIN’s latest album, the slip.

We started out with about the first 1.4 million downloads logged (ironically just a subset of the total downloads), and wanted to end up with a dramatic representation of the data set, suitable for the exacting stylistic demands of NIN. Something along these lines:

We first needed to generate lat/longs, which we did by running the IP addresses logged for each download through the GeoIP^® database. The process yielded a high precision set of locations, yet too many to represent as a single data set in Google Earth (we tried). We solved this by grouping the data into histogram-like bins, which we accomplished simply by dropping the precision of the lat/longs when we retrieved them. This took us down to a more acceptable ~40,000 Placemarks, each with a total number of downloads.

The next step was to represent the data in a dramatic fashion… or in Google Earth terms, extruding a polygon into space in proportion to the total downloads. We accomplished this easily enough, but then also wanted the download totals for each column to be clickable. We used a solution we found in Jason Birch’s blog which involved embedding a point with the polygon section of the Placemark and wrapping them in a MultiGeometry tag, which ended up looking like this:

 <Placemark> <description>17875 downloads.</description> <styleUrl>#base</styleUrl> <MultiGeometry> <Point> <coordinates>-118.2,34.0,0</coordinates> </Point> <Polygon> <extrude>1</extrude> <altitudeMode>relativeToGround</altitudeMode> <outerBoundaryIs> <LinearRing> <coordinates> -118.1,34.1,12512500 -118.3,34.1,12512500 -118.3,33.9,12512500 -118.1,33.9,12512500 -118.1,34.1,12512500 </coordinates> </LinearRing> </outerBoundaryIs> </Polygon> </MultiGeometry> </Placemark>

To avoid the icon clutter, we substituted a 1×1-pixel transparent PNG icon placed in the center of the polygon’s base. Finally, we added in a watermark logo and some instructional text using <ScreenOverlay>, and it was complete. The final result is available for download from the NIN website.

Fans of the band can also follow its upcoming tour directly in Google Earth — their performance page lets you subscribe to tour updates as a KML file, with all the tour stops in sequence and time-tagged. Because the tour data is implemented behind a <NetworkLink>, it’s always up-to-date, even when users save it to their My Places in Google Earth.

We had a lot of fun doing these visualizations, and are grateful to have a client like Trent Reznor who understands and appreciates a cool little side project such as this enough to not only promote it but to put his name behind it. And thanks to Topspin Media for providing the original idea.

Posted by Michael Weiss-Malik, Nine Inch Nails fan

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We have the first named storm in the Atlantic for the 2008 season: Tropical Storm Bertha (it’s near Africa and not threatening land in the near term). Google Earth is a great tool for tracking storms and following the weather around the entire world.

One of Google Earth’s most powerful features is the ability to pull in real-time information from other sites and overlay the information for visualization (thanks to the network link). Weather data is one of my favorite applications in Google Earth of this ability. Imagine pulling in the latest satellite photos, radar animations, hurricane tracking, live web cams on the ground, sea surface temperature analysis, etc. Well, you can do all that with the set of the very best weather tools for Google Earth which GEB has bundled together into this: the weather and storm tracking tools collection . Simply drag this network link into your Places folder to keep it handy. It won’t take up space until you turn it on. It first loads several folders of weather tools you can explore. You may want to turn only one layer on at a time - these layers weren’t designed to all be turned on at once. Although, some of the layers are complimentary (like current lightning strikes with clouds or storms turned on).

Right now the collection includes: two global hurricane tracking tools, global cloud maps, current global lightning strikes animation (from GuiWeather.com, zoomable GOES weather satellite imagery, severe weather warning data and radar data from NOAA for the US, a large collection of weather image overlays from TropicalAtlantic, weather observations for the US from WeatherBonk, a real-time day/night viewing tool, and the global annual lightning flash rate map from NASA.

Turn on the first layer Hurricanes - Live Positions link to see the latest storms around the world. You will see the storms’ tracks, forecasted paths, current positions, and the red dots are nearby web cams. The position of the storms, when a hurricane, will show it’s storm strength (level 1, 2, etc.). You can also turn on Google Earth’s built-in Weather->Clouds layer which is the best tool for viewing the current positions of clouds around the world.

These tools were put together by a variety of people (some are weather professionals, others are weather hobbyists). But, these are the best. GEB will continue to add more storm and weather tools to the network link periodically, but if you save this network link, you will automatically see them added.

Here are more details about the weather tools in the collection:

• Hurricanes - Live positions
• Current Global Lightning Animation from GuiWeather.com
• Global Cloud Map
• NOAA Severe Weather
• Weather Bonk - For Google Maps, but GE file available
• Real-Time Day and Night Earth
• Annual Lightning Flash Rate

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ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 6 - Announcement

So you just got 9.3?
Now you can fix you 9.2 with Service Pack 6.

Confused? Users are.
Which is the most up-to-date? Which is the more Stable?

ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 6 is planned to be available for download later in July, 2008

Might be worth the wait until 9.3 SP1 if some of these are missed in the released version.

9.2 SP 6 fixes - Mapperz quick pick

NIM006823 - When zooming in and using the Identify tool during a redraw, the values returned are NoDATA.

NIM007248 - ArcMap hangs when adding a field to a shapefile after using the Select by Attributes dialog box and leaving the dialog box open

NIM007810 - Construct Features tool fails with error message “Failed to construct features” when attempting to construct polygons from lines

NIM011023 - Deleting or renaming a Cartographic Representation from a feature class causes ArcMap to crash when opening a .mxd

NIM032774 - Group elements in the data frame and in annotation may disappear when editing is projected on the fly.

NIM033517 - When using Select By Location to process a large dataset, the following error may display: An unexpected error occurred in the Select By Location command

NIM034793 - ArcMap crashes when tracing around a large dataset.

NIM035777 - Features disappear when selecting features with the Select Features tool from a layer (shapefile or geodatabase)

NIM034395 - A JPEG with a non-standard header does not display correctly at 9.2.

Windows Vista Woes

NIM032480 - Windows Vista only: Viewing metadata in ArcCatalog and exporting metadata using the Export Metadata dialog box in ArcCatalog fails with Vista SP1

NIM032629 - Windows Vista only: Unable to delete more than two fields from a shapefile in the same ArcMap session. The shapefile is locked after the second field is deleted.

NIM033840 - Windows Vista only: Using the ESC key to cancel drawing of large datasets in ArcMap can render the application unresponsive until the drawing is complete

Careful connecting to 9.3 geo-databases

NIM034190 - An Upgrade message still appears in ArcCatalog when connecting from a 9.2 client to a 9.3 geodatabase. When a 9.2 client dismisses the message box, the next time a 9.3 client connects, the geodatabase must be upgraded

Built-in Help
NIM034715 - Updated help files to fix typos, broken links, and software changes.

http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=downloads.patchesServicePacks.viewPatch&PID=17&MetaID=1406

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Another big day for Virtual Earth in the portal space. Granted, it’s our own search portals but it’s great to see the platform getting more use and exposure worldwide. Live Search Maps China has expanded it’s offering (just in time for the Olympics). Live Search Maps Australia just launched (shortly after we added Bird’s Eye coverage for Australia).

The Live Search Maps China site (or DITU) has the following additions and improvements:

• Real-time Traffic in Beijing
• Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
• Transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic).
• Expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities.
• Geocoding and Local Search
• Data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues.
• Support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage.
• Olympic query relevance improvement
• Local search category refinement
• Map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.
• Expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now.

The Live Search Maps Australia site is new and includes data from Virtual Earth, NineMSN and Yellow (Pages). If you get redirected to Live Search Maps (US) you can access the Australian site via Ninemsn.com.au, click “maps” above the search box and search for an Australian city or place.

Oddly, I couldn’t find “vegemite” in “Sydney” so I’m starting to think this sandwich that Men At Work sang about doesn’t exist. I might be down under for Tech Ed Australia in September to find out for myself. Stay tuned.

CP

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MVP developer Chris Pietschmann posted some nice javascript code for determining if a coordinate is in a polygon. Chris started with code from this MSDN tutorial and focused on simplifying the polygon case. Both articles together should give you everything you need to know for drawing shapes and testing for containment in your client code. for the full spec on drawing with Virtual Earth, steal some code from the interactive SDK.

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A big update to http://ditu.live.com/ went out yesterday featuring real time traffic information in Beijing and a free Send to Mobile feature for local search results and transit information. Transit info is now available in 31 cities and many new subway lines have been added for existing areas. Other improvements since V1 include lots more geocoding coverage and refreshed map tiles representing the latest vector street data. click the image below to try it out -

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GPS Business News reports that Bloomberg reports that the company is looking for an injection of capital or a takeover. I guess having both the Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ acquisitions go through did not play out for the smaller data company.

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Unsuspecting criminals with GPS devices are sharing far more than they may think in their satnav devices. Deleted data, it turns out, is not deleted in some cases, meaning detectives can track past destinations. Further, if used in conjunction with a cell phones, the devices may store old phone records of incoming and outgoing calls. TomTom was not aware of London’s Metropolitan Police reporting on the use of devices in crime investigation in a scholarly journal (Digital Investigation). The company states they only turn over data with a court order.

Also of note: Met detectives learned the tricks of the trade from GPS wikis that detail how to share POIs and the like.

- New Scientist

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