Author Archive for Matt

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24
Mar

Cruising my desktop

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Desktop and XPlanet

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.

Cruise Ships in the Caribbean
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. 

Cruise ships in the Caribbean

I have to offer my sincere thanks to the Perl Monks; truly without them, I would not have gotten this done. Thank you.

19
Mar

Wired? No, Weird.

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized and Web destinations

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!)”

17
Mar

The cool desktop continues to grow

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: XPlanet

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.

17
Jan

what’s on your list?

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: adventure and vacation

Things I have to do before I die:

  1. Stand on all seven continents. I have 5 down, 2 to go. Australia should be easy but so far it is proving to be elusive. Antarctica will be really cool. I mean, where else can I see a 700 foot cliff of ice?
  2. Make love under the Northern Lights

Things I have scratched off the list already:

  1. Eat at a Brazilian churrascuria - First time actually was in Houston, but the one in Rio was really nice.
  2. Jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Since I went through jump school with the Army I’ve already done this one.  Recently I went with a friend of mine to a place called SkyVenture, where you can sky dive in a wind tunnel. That was so much fun. They’ve opened one near my home; I hope to get the kids to try it with me.
15
Sep

Happy Birthday

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Family and Food

Celebrated Sandy’s birthday on Thursday. Took everyone to a fabulous meal at Foreign Cinema, in the market district of the city. I really like that place. A great concept: dinner and a movie.

The guys at work were quizzing me about it and that started an expanded conversation that Foreign Cinema offers a brunch and that it’s really worth trying. I guess I’ll have to put that on on the list of things to do.

07
Sep

A Proper Fish & Chips Shop

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Food, Work, adventure and dining

Well, my pal Steve Skidmore (”Skids”) and I were on our own for dinner last week in London. I had a real jones for a true British fish and chips meal. Since we were staying in Kensington (a London neighborhood) we asked the concierge for a recommendation. “Earl’s Court”, they said. It was also a shwarma place but good fish and chips.

When Skids and I got there we weren’t thrilled so we started to wander. We came across two Bobbies and thought, “Eureka! Surely they will know of a good fish and chips place”. The answer to the question, however, was the start of the great dinner adventure.

“There’s no proper fish and chips around here”, said the first cop. “You know, they are disappearing from all over Britain”, said the second.

The first cop went on to say, “If you want a proper [he pronounced it as "prawper", of course] fish and chips, it’s pretty far; about 15 minutes from here. You’d have to take the number 74 or 430 nightbus. But that’s a proper fish and chips shop, which is a dying breed here. You go down two blocks to the light, turn to the right and take the 74 or 430 bus through two roundabouts to the third stop. The shop is called The Anchor and it’s a proper fish and chips, all right. Just next to the toy store”.

So off we went, down the street to find the nightbus. I had a vision of the Harry Potter movie in my head, of course. But the traffic was heavy, so the real bus wasn’t going very fast. We were clearly off the tourist map and in a residential area of London. After a bit, we weren’t sure if we had passed it or what, so we asked if anyone on the upper deck with us knew of The Anchor - no one had. But they knew the toy store, and that was the next stop, so we clambered down and jumped off at the next stop.

The Anchor, pictured here:

The Anchor is a nice place run by Maurice and his wife Maurice and his wife at 131 Lillie Road, Fulham, London, SW6 7SX. And we had a fantastic meal.

IMG00061.jpg IMG00062.jpg IMG00060.jpg

30
Aug

Hype, hype, hype

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Enterprise 2.0 and Work

Maybe I just need a longer vacation. Right now, I would just settle for an epiphany. I’m working on project about Enterprise 2.0 (who isn’t, in the software business these days?) and I’m still confused. After all, what is Enterprise 2.0?

One school of thought is that it is just the Web 2.0 (and what is that, you ask?) just slapped into the corporate enterprise. Man, I know it’s more than that. The problem here is that corporations are not the internet. Most of the collaboration that occurs on the internet is because groups of like-minded people got together and wanted to work on something. My work environment is not the same thing at all.

So I thought I would just nose around and see what other people think about Enterprise 2.0. I am underwhelmed. Or overwhelmed. Why? Because most of what’s out this is a lot of hype. One discussion topic seemed pretty useful so I’ll list it here and that’s from the JackBe guys.

I like their discussion so I’m going to let it lead me for a while. My sense of the overall issue is that most people think they can just slap Web 2.0 technologies together in the corporate business place and collaboration will occur. I doubt it will be quite that easy. Not everyone in a corporation is trying to collaborate - most people are just trying to get their work done so they can go home. Trying to add value to the corporations’ knowledge base is not in most people’s quarterly bonus objectives. And management teams are not trained to support people to foster this kind of environment. IT staff will worry about how to control the information.  That sort of thing.
The issue here is that we are dealing with people, not technology.

I know the technology is cool, but that’s not the problem. People have to want to do this. And that’s the primary difference between the web environment and the enterprise.

From another site:Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 you can see a pretty good list of what I’m talking about. I’ll quote it here:

“What are some of the questions that organizational leaders are apt to be asking and any vendor who hopes to succeed will need to answer. This is by no means a comprehensive list and I welcome your additions and thoughts.

Technological Barriers

1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?

3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgrunted employees or managers?

4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?

5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Cultural Barriers

6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?”

Well, I’ll have to continue this tomorrow.

08
Aug

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: vacation

We got up wicked early (4am) and drove 50 miles to see the sunrise over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Just tremendous.

Oh, the colors! Sunrise Sunrise at Grand Canyon north rim
Then we drove back and had a huge pancake breakfast. Nice. All before 9am.

05
Jul

Playing with XPlanet

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Desktop, Work and XPlanet
After a while, I found that the some of the configuration files to make this project go are available from a gent named Michael Dear via a program/offering called Totalmarker. Totalmarker is a result of some perl scripts that create the cloud overlay; pull the volcano, earthquake, and storm data from the national sites; and also pulls the data from NORAD about the ephemeris for the Space Station and the Shuttle (when it up). This makes everything much easier. However, I quickly got tired of pulling the files every so often so I decided to see if I could script this somehow.It turns out that volcano data (for example) is only updated once a week, so there is not point in pulling it more often than that. Cloud data is updated about every 6 hours, so I could pull the cloud image every 6 hours. I needed something that I could schedule and windows scheduler was just too clumsy for me to figure out. So I did it the hard way, of course.The search for yet another capability led me to a new software program called nncron (lite), which acts as a cron service for windows. A cron service, if you don’t know, is something that runs in the background and checks to see if there is something it needs to do (like watching a folder for new files or emails that have been posted and then moving them to the appropriate location). I built a configuration file for nncron that schedules the various data pulls according to the frequency of their updates. (This is called a cron.tab file). Mine read like this attached file:
If you don’t speak ‘cron’, don’t worry. I didn’t either. I spent a lot of time on the website and with the documentation and figured it all out. All the lines above say is to download the appropriate configuration file (quake, cloud, etc.) at the times listed above. There isn’t much point in downloading more often, the files don’t change. So for example, the cloud file is built 4x a day. Downloading it more often than that wasn’t going to do me any good.So I loaded this up and, after a lot of testing, got it to work.
03
Jul

Search for a cool desktop

By Matt 0 Comments
Categories: Desktop and XPlanet
I’ve been working on a new desktop background. I wanted something similar to those Geocron clocks that show you the time anywhere in the world and whether it was daytime or nighttime. I started browsing around the internet to see what I could find.I came across something pretty cool, called XPlanet. It allows you to display the earth from any viewpoint and time. If you cause it to update, you can actually get a realistic idea of what is going on around the earth. I could change the projection to mimic the Geocron clocks if I wanted, but the default projection (the “Blue Marble” view if you follow NASA much) was really neat.

XPlanet screenshot

XPlanet is pretty cool but everything is driven by command line or config files, which slowed me down at first because of the learning curve. Some folks working around XPlanet have developed a front end for it called XPlanetControl (developed and maintained by Mario Franzbonenkamp) which shortens the setup time immensely and gets you going pretty quickly.

So, to start,

Xplanet can be found at: http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/

XplanetControl can be found at: http://www.xplanetcontrol.de/

What I really like about this is that it is a real-time representation of the earth, including the day-night terminator; the current weather and clouds; storms, if any; earthquakes in the past 20 minutes or so; and even active volcanoes. You can download some basic satellites even, like the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Being a space groupie, I like that. More on the downloads later.

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