Well, not Simon and Garfunkle, that’s for sure. Today the site was down. I use Joomla to manage the content and somewhere along the line the whole thing just hiccuped. Fortunately the Joomla crowd had the answer on the forum. One of the top dogs answered my post for help, suggested that the site problem only looked like a) but was really b) and lead me to the answer. Sweet.
I had to mess with the site configuration files but hopefully it won’t happen again, Mom, I swear!
Yeah, like I really know what I’m doing or why it happened. Just one of those things, man. S*#@ Happens.
Well, in the continuing search for an ever cooler desktop, I thought I would try to add Cruise Ships to the list of things that are now available for tracking. Well, there are a lot of cruise ships. Unless you zoom in, you really can’t make them out; the names all pile up. I might try later without the names, but it’s a lot more fun with the names. I zoomed in on the Caribbean Sea and now you can see the various ships.
Orange ships are underway and brown ones are in port. I was trying to make it look like they were lit up (busy) or dark (not busy). I guess it works okay. I might play with the colors some more. Right now, I just get the cruise ship data once a day and plot it on the earth desktop. I’m collecting the ship locations over time so that I can try and create a sense of where they’ve been (and how fast they move). We’ll see how that goes.
Oh, here’s an updated pic - you can see that Mexico is still largely in daylight, but most of the Caribbean is in darkness. The night terminator is just past Houston.Â
I have to offer my sincere thanks to the Perl Monks; truly without them, I would not have gotten this done. Thank you.
I found this item on Woot today - I thought it was amusing news of the weird…
“Put on your bib and get ready to chow down on my world-famous hot ‘n’ spicy honey-roasted hickory-smoked beer-infused St. Louis-style links:
Four O’Clock Flash: OK, maybe calling something “best geography game on the web” is like saying is the nicest-smelling employee at the slaughterhouse. But Lufthansa’s Virtual Pilot really is worth a few minutes of your time. Be ready to be humbled, though…my first game ranked me something like 55,000th out of 255,000 players. (Thanks, Josephus!)”
By this point, I have progressed the cool desktop project into, well, I don’t know what. It’s getting larger all the time. I feel like I did when we remodeled the house. Of course, we only started to remodel a couple of bathrooms, but then it just sort of kept on going. Anyway,…
I’ve got a bunch of things working now - earthquakes, storms, volcanoes, satellites - all of these come via Michael Dear at Wizabit; his Totalmarker project is just a godsend. I’ve added some other scripts, tracking sea turtles in the Pacific, etc. One of my favorite sub-projects has been the fire data.
The University of Maryland obtains and processes IR data from one of the overhead satellites and makes it available for ftp download. I wasn’t very good at Perl (well, I’m still not good at Perl) so I wrote a batch file script that downloads the data via ftp. It was a little more complicated than that - you have to navigate to the right directory and find the correct file by name, so you have to build all that information in advance. After downloading, I process it according to temperature and build a marker file; all that’s in Perl. But it looks pretty cool.
The next project is to grab the data about Cruise Ships and their locations. I’ve got the Perl script for the web page scraping working so far; now to build up the database sections and the reformating. I could probably do this better in regex and so I’ll have to look into building that skill.
I would not have been able to get this far without the good people at www.perlmonks.org. The Perl Monks have been very generous with their time and wisdom and for that, I thank them.
Pictures to come soon.
