The Earth Is Square

SciFi Channel is showing Ghost Hunters Live from 11pm to 5am EST...

Be interesting to see how it comes out... has to be better than that POS known as "Most Haunted Live".. people talk how they call Ghost Hunters "fake" .. it is nothing on how fake Most Haunted looks.. but Most Haunted is good for a laugh.

Happy Halloween all!

what_nick just doesn't know what the meaning of vacation is I guess. The last thing he has done before heading off on vacation for a few weeks is to get the Virtual Earth plug-in working in the 1.4 code of World Wind.

It looks like Microsoft has got a better deal with its satellite data vendor - GeoEye that Google - Digital Globe and Microsoft lawyers are allowing non-commercial, again strictly non-commercial usage of the plug in in World wind to show off Virtual Earth until the wonderful people at Redmond come up with their own virtual world repositioning any of the plethora of bits of code they have lying around, be it Mappoint, be it Flight Sim X.

Ok... so really it was the 28th of last month when I really started going.  But at least I am close enough.

Things can only get better as we move forward.

Ok, this never even blipped on the radar till Ogle Earth posted about it. The forum, mailing list and IRC channel were silent of anyone doing this.

This probably didn't get noticed because instead of being a PSP Fanboy.. I laugh at the PSP  But here is the related blog post with the youtube video of a PSP controlling NASA World Wind. Interesting from what I saw.

Ok, here is some more information for you.

After the 1.3.6 and 1.4 releases of World Wind, NASA development of the .Net version of World Wind will stop for now and all efforts will be towards the Java version of World Wind which has a "hard deadline" of December for a release.  This will most likely be an Alpha release of the Java code.

Why no more future .Net development?  Mainly customer demands on development and a lack of getting support from a "Fortune 100 company".  Does this mean no more WW.Net?  No.  I have been talking with the people at NASA about the community becoming the primary developers leading the WW.Net advancement (WW.Net needs to be supported for at least 2 more years).  This doesn't mean that NASA is out of the WW.Net development picture, we would still work closely with this in development.  This will be worked out more after the 1.4 release.

Ok, so what about WW Java then?  For the time being it is a closed development cycle.  You can download the source, compile it, play with what is there, make changes.. but that is it.  You can't submit you're changes back in to the SVN.  Because of the client for development, more control of the source development is needed.  This is also understandable and can work the same way that the Linux kernel development does.  The closed tree is controlled by NASA and there can be an OS tree of the SVN that developers can make changes too and submit their code.  Then the NASA developers can check and bring what OS Tree code works back into the NASA tree of development.  This is also still in the "hey we could do this" category.

There is no reason both of the above couldn't / wouldn't happen.  No one is pressuring anyone right now on this (other than the "When will the 1.3.6 and 1.4 beta's come out?" questions) and it would likely be December before any of this would happen.

As more information comes to light, I will pass it on.

What_Nick has been busy.  He now has much improved WMS support in the World Wind development tree.  Check out his post and a screen shot here.

I have some more interesting news on WW.Net and WWJava but I am still gathering some notes up on the sujects.  More later.