The Earth Is Square

Well.. last night after installing VMWare Workstation on my notebook and doing a reboot.. I had a strange crash, had another crash after I tried restarting.. and now when I turn on I can hear the CD drive.. I can hear the HDs spinning... but I have a blank, black screen staring back at me..

After a year and 3/4's, it seems my computer has crumpled under the pressure.  So, all that remains now is doing a HD-ectomy and dumping all the data onto my other data drives and then seeing if maybe, just maybe there is some life left in the old girl.  But I have a feeling she is down for the count.

So, anyone have a spare computer to donate?  Maybe a powerbook pro? ;)   Luckily, I don't have any conferences or presentations looming.. and I have my desktop I can work on (I just hate sitting at my desk.. I prefer my patio).

Curious as to what this year's hurricane season has in store?

xkcd has the answer:

Looking through the local paper for pictures from last night's parade in town, I can across an article entitled

Sex offenders may be tracked by GPS

HARRISBURG (AP) — Sex offenders who are released from prison should be monitored more widely by global positioning satellite technology so law enforcement officers do not lose track of them as often, Pennsylvania's auditor general said Tuesday.

Auditor General Jack Wagner urged state lawmakers to require at least five years of GPS monitoring for sex offenders who do not comply with Megan's Law, requiring them to register their address with State Police upon their release from prison.

The last part is kind of funny, because it is not the initial releasase from prison where they loose track of people.. it is the subsuquent moves they do after the fact.  I am all for "release from prison, get tracked right off the bat".

Taking things into his own hands, so to speak, guil from the WorldWind forums has been working on an updated version of the Virtual Earth plug-in and has posted his results for testing.  You can download the new plug-in from here.

Fixes/Updates:

• Corrected some bugs concerning column and row wrap-around (tiles from south pole appearing in north pole, tiles with negative row or column indexes)
• Removed the need for proj 4, by encoding directly the Mercator projection and simplified some code managing the projection. It should improve slightly the performances
• Also added a transparent border/road/name layer
• Main modifications concern the optimisation of the mesh creation algorithm. I worked in radian instead of degrees to reduce angle conversions. I also changed the way it reprojects. The overhead due to Mercator reprojection is now linear in Meshpointcount instead of quadratic previously. This could significantly improve performances when using large Meshpointcount
• Fixed bug that causes crashes when downloading large numbers of tiles

I have mentioned before about exporting KML/KMZ files from WWJava, now Chris Maxwell, the lead developer at Intelesense Technologies has posted some code and a demo of a KML importer for WWJava.

This is just a basic implelementation of KML support for WWJava, but that is how everything starts out.

nigel from the WorldWind forum has posted a screen shot of a Naval Game he has been developing.  He didn't post much in the way of details, other than he has asked to open source the .net code since they have moved to WWJava for the base code.