wanderingken.com

I’m here!

I’ve apparently got a valid visa and Australian customs let me through without even a question, so all’s well on the entry front.

After a couple days in Sydney, Meaghan and I have settled into Melbourne for a month or so while we await the arrival of our belongings (currently sailing on the good ship ‘Granville Bridge’) and so that I can make friends at the main Lonely Planet office. Then, it’s back to Sydney to set up home and office there.

The coffee is great, the wine better, and it’s 15 degrees on the good side of zero in the middle of winter - I like it here already.

It’s official. I’m moving. The fine folks at Lonely Planet have convinced me to abandon good old Edmonton and join their innovation lab in Sydney, Australia.

I’ve been working remotely with Lonely Planet for 18 months now, helping geo-tag their vast array of travel content and building a platform for expressing this content in spatial ways. You can see it already at work on lonelyplanet.tv, Hotels & Hostels, the lonelyplanet.com world guide, and our facebook app. As of June, I’ll be joining them on-site as digital mapping manager and looking to push this work to maturity as well as finding new and interesting ways to provide location-based services for Lonely Planet’s intrepid traveler community.

As for Spatial North, it’s going into a bit of hibernation but I’ll be leaving enough lights on to keep Quikmaps ticking, so if you’re a fan, don’t worry, keep doodling!

Wow, I like TwittEarth. I’m not big on the monster icons, but, hey, the experience is still very cool.

TwitterVision has a 3D live tweet map too, using Poly9’s (great studio in Quebec City) FreeEarth application.

I’d love to see a trip animated in FreeEarth. Perhaps a mashup with Dopplr? It would seem easily possible.

Update - Turns out panoIds are only unique to a session, and so my example is broken and no longer useful. Unfortunate, really.

Let the fun begin! Street view support is baked into the latest (unofficial, 2.103) version of the Google Maps API. Check out Google Maps Mania and Mapperz for some good coverage and a couple examples. If you’re a developer, Mike Williams, as always, has dug through the code and produced some speculative documentation.

Street view support is essentially comprised of 3 classes: GStreetviewOverlay, which creates a tile layer overlay for areas having street views, GStreetviewClient, to look up panoramas by lat/lng, etc.., and GStreetviewPanorama, which inserts a flash movie into the DOM and manages points of view.

I can imagine plenty of applications for this (walking tours anyone? Can we make this work with GDirections?), but here’s a simple one for now - since a street view panorama is simply a flash movie initialized via flashvars, you can actually set up a panorama without a map, like so:

Getting your hands on the right parameters is rather cumbersome, so I’ve written up a quick little app that’ll permalink a view for you, similar to maps.google.com, plus give you some iframe code to embed. Check it out. (Disclaimer: You may encounter intermittent JavaScript errors on info windows in IE. Sadly, I can’t hack it because the bug is in code dynamically served by Google.)

A little heads up on how the example works, since I had to go off the radar a little: A view is defined by panorama id, yaw (rotation in degrees around vertical axis), pitch (rotation in degrees around horizontal axis), and zoom level. If you’ve got these parameters, you can set the view using streetviewclient.getPanoramaById and panorama.setLocationAndPOVFromServerResponse. The API has a routine to grab yaw, pitch, and zoom (getPOV), so that part’s easy, but there’s no routine to grab the current panorama id. It’s stored on an exposed object, though, so this little hack does the trick, at least until v2.104:

Enjoy!

Remember those magic eye posters from 10-15 years ago? The ones where you make yourself cross-eyed to reveal the hidden 3D dinosaur, Eiffel tower, city, landscape, solar system, or whatever, and then proceed to describe it in painstaking detail for your unfortunate buddy who can’t see anything but a bad collage?

Well, they’re called autostereograms and they really do involve brain trickery. Even more tricky is that you can make an autostereogram using nothing but ascii characters.

Even cooler is that you can make a a moving ascii autostereogram - check out Julius Kammerl’s example. It’s a bouncing ball, but I didn’t tell you.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client - it’s free, it’s simple, and it works on both my PC and MacBook, making it easy to transfer account settings back and forth. Heck, it’s even open source, to make me warm and fuzzy inside.

One drawback, however, is that Thunderbird doesn’t automatically support iCalendar attachments of the sort sent by Outlook and others, and if inline attachments aren’t turned on (and they aren’t by default), your messages appear as if the attachment didn’t exist. I’d had a nagging suspicion that I was getting invites I hadn’t seen, and it was confirmed when I missed a meeting folks thought I should know about…

Thankfully, there’s a nice solution to this problem, but it wasn’t completely straightforward and it required an adventure through google-land, forums and such, so I thought I’d document it here.

First, install the Mozilla Lightning plugin. You’ll have to download it to your local machine, navigate to tools / add ons in Thunderbird, select the plugin from your local directory, install it, and then restart Thunderbird. This will build a calendar app into your Thunderbird environment (notice the calendar button on the bottom left) and .ics (iCalendar) attachments should now appear as message attachments.

The next step is to get these attachments into the calendar. If you’ve already displaying attachments inline, great, otherwise, navigate to Tools / Options / General and click on Config Editor. Then, find the preference called ‘mail.inline_attachments’, and set it to true (dbl-click should do).

Now, if you open a message with an iCalendar attachment, Lightning will nicely ask you if you want to accept or decline the event. Perfect!

They’re here. In truth, they’ve been here for a few weeks now, but Meaghan and I didn’t exactly want to share them with the world yet, because, well, we like them and they’re OURS. However, in the interest in keeping all of you, friends, family, and random wanderers to this humble blog, happy, I hereby submit a selection of photos from our wedding.

They’re hosted on Flickr, but you can browse through them via the Photos above, or sit back and watch the slideshow below. I’ve pulled a selection of approximately 130 from our set of 450, which cover the event from wedding rehearsal the night before to closing fireworks.

A big thank-you (and photo credit!) goes out our photographer Karen Doherty and her assistant / fiance James Dean from Pure Photo Group, for their fantastic artistry, skill, and willingness to hand over digital files for me to print, post, and otherwise fiddle with and share.

I had the good fortune of addressing the Minnesota GIS / LIS Consortium today at their 2007 conference, pontificating on matters I termed ‘GIS 2.0? Neogeography and the Social Mapping Movement.’

As promised to those of you in attendance, and for those of you who weren’t in attendance but would like to see the presentation materials anyway, here’s the link.

Enjoy!

… is launched! I’ve been working with the fine folks at Lonely Planet on the application for a while, and it’s great to see our little baby toddle out the door. If you’re wanting to check it out (and you should be!), here’s the link. Better yet, add it to your Facebook account.

We’ve built lots of ways for you to explore the world of travel, all based on a Google map, including travel videos, destination info, flight prices / booking, hotel / hostel reservations, places to eat, drink, and see, and, finally, new to the facebook app, trips. Click on the trips tab, or on ‘Create a new trip’, and you can create your dream trip, report on a trip you’ve already done, or document a trip in progress. Your trip will be visible to anyone exploring Lonely Planet’s maps on Facebook and elsewhere, and will be especially highlighted for all your Facebook friends. As an added bonus, you can query where all your travel buddies are today, have been, or want to go.

We’ve included all the regular Facebook application goodies, including a box for your profile (where am I now? Where have I been?), updates to news feeds, and a little link either under your profile photo or on the left-hand applications list.

Anyway, that’s enough of my wordy descriptions - go add the application for yourself!

Those of you who know me well will, of course, know that I was recently married (September 8th) to a wonderful woman by the name of Meaghan. Since I’m not generally well-known, nor am I in the habit of posting many personal details / events, those of you who simply wander by this humble blog will have had no idea. Not that it really matters, then, but, in that case, please allow this post to be the public announcement.

Now, all announcements complete, let me proceed to the real reason for this post: photos! Meaghan and I spent our honeymoon in Cuba - a week eating, drinking, swimming, and generally getting fat, bored, and pampered in an all-inclusive resort, and a week driving the remote eastern Cuba countryside. Sadly, though we tried valiantly, we were not able to sneak a peak of the US Navy’s Guantanamo Bay naval base. However, I have posted a series of photos to give you a sense of those places we did see. You can find them via the Photos link above, or access the same set on Flickr. Since I’ve got my fingers in way too many projects at once, you may, if you like, find similar sets of photos on Facebook and Zyozy.

In what I suppose has become my tradition for posts of this sort, I hereby offer my favourite, a nighttime shot of Santiago de Cuba, taken from the roof of Graham Greene’s former hangout, the Hotel Casa Granda. Enjoy!