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.
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.
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.
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 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.
