I have recently learned about an upcoming OGC standard that looks interesting: The Table Joining Service (formerly known as the Geographic Linkage Service or GLS). It standardizes a solution to the very common problem of mapping statistical data that is geographically related but maintained outside a GIS. To do that, the service uses a key (for example, a country or zip code) common to the statistical dataset and a geographic dataset providing the geometries.
I had been trying to get into iPhone / iPod Touch application development for some time, but I was just too lazy until I bought a few weeks ago an iPod Touch (which I really like - I am playing the Sudoku game from Mighty Mighty Good Games all the time).
The new version has been released a few days ago. There does not seem to be anything earth-shattering in the update, according to the release notes and my own experience with it. Just a few corrections here and there and more samples in the documentation. I have been using version 1.0 of the API since it got out of beta in October last year and I have enjoyed it very much. It may also have something to do with the fact Flex can be much less frustrating to work with than the HTML + JavaScript combo.
This tutorial will show how to use version 3.1 of the Calais API to identify geographic references in a text and display them on an OpenLayers map. I am going to use the Calais API with JSON output (which is a new feature of version 3.1), so that all the processing can be done easily in JavaScript entirely inside a web browser.
Street Views have now been added to some French cities, including Paris. The coverage there is pretty good, with parts of the suburbs as well as the main Paris city currently visible. The other cities include Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Nice and Toulouse.
Above, the Panthéon, in Paris.
From the Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC) project.
Spore has just been released! Actually it is just a demo of the creature creation part for now so the gameplay is really limited. Still I like how the different creatures are handled gracefully, from the classic 2 leg/2 arm creatures to the 8 leg monstrosities.
Google has recently released a Flash version of the Google Maps API. The goal is to give developers and designers more freedom in the presentation and graphical effects of their maps. Google is certainly not the first provider of a Flash mapping API (see the Yahoo! Maps AS3 API for example) but as one of the original proponents of Ajax web mapping tools, it marks an interesting change of direction (although the original Google Maps API is probably not going away anytime soon). One interesting aspect of using Flash is also a boost in vector graphics rendering speed, which I am going to demonstrate here, with a tutorial showing how to display a chloropleth map with this new API. Here is a link to the final application. It has to be noted that I am definitely not a Flex/ActionScript guru (just a few evenings of experience) so there are probably better ways of doing things than what I am showing here.
I am currently in the process of evaluating Palo for a personal project. The Palo server is an opensource (GPL) in-memory multidimensional database management system, well suited for OLAP. Jedox, the German makers of Palo, market it as a data store for Excel, but it should work well outside this specific usage scenario. They offer pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux but not for Mac OS X, so I set out to make one, which was not very hard. I outline the steps here. A downloadable package for Leopard is at the end of the post.
Muxtape is a website that lets users share mixtapes online, which is pretty cool, as is their minimalistic design. This Ruby tutorial will show how to use Mechanize (together with Hpricot) and rb-appscript to scrape the site, download the mp3’s and add them automatically to an iTunes playlist. The last part will only work on Mac OS X (because of rb-appscript).