Nixta Sinks

New glasses, sir?

Google today launched Google Street Maps. A technological advance, but little more, other than perhaps a reply to Microsoft's offering (though I haven't tried that out yet because I'm too lazy to click on some links, but then again I'm so lazy I want to have decent images of where I could otherwise walk or drive so that I can recognise where on the FDR I currently am).

It's actually a neat idea, of course. People navigate by landmarks and features, not by numbers on a street. It's a method of navigation that's scalable and applicable, and instantly recognisable. It doesn't depend on the owner of the property nailing up numbers in the same place, or trees being trimmed to see the numbers, or the numbers being painted a distinctive colour or even displayed in a readable typeface (Die, Comic Sans! Die!).

However, it does rely on the landmarks being visible, and there not being "stretch-marks". In the above image, two problems are immediately apparent. The first, a compound problem: Quality of the picture. Focus and exposure. There's no way to tell that this is Circa Now on East 6th Street. The second: In order that the photography can be collected cheaply, it's good not to have traffic. You pay for fewer hours. But sadly that means that you're driving around early morning when the shops are closed (and, incidentally, the lighting in the city is bad). As an experiment, it's of course acceptable, but as a useful navigational or reference tool, it's rendered (if you'll excuse the unintented pun) utterly useless.

At last, a drunk driving simulator.

Looking at the above image of my street in Stuyvesant Town, you can see that the shutter-speed on the camera (again, probably down to the time of day and the lighting available) is not high enough. Objectively, there's no point in that image at all. Utterly useless. Perhaps worse than useless.

Of course, it will improve.

What may be interesting would be trawling through the various images available now and building up a map of better focused, better exposed imagery. Essentially a spatial representation of where imagery is useful. Could take a long time.

Much less time though will be taken before people build hacks and mashups that overlay better imagery and advertisements on the map. Perhaps a real picture of Nicole's store...

Labels: gis, google

I mentioned yesterday in passing that I'd travelled "to a few faraway places". I was conscious at the time that this could easily be misconstrued to mean that I've travelled all over the place, but was at a loss to succinctly describe exactly how.

By coincidence, I looked today at Pete Batty's Flickr profile and noticed a nice map of where he's been (Pete has a superb new blog, by the way, although it may only be of passing interest to those not in the GIS industry).

So, I filled my Visited Countries form in (itself an embarrassingly quick exercise), and here's the map that says all that I wanted to say yesterday, but which my words failed in helping me to do.

I've been around, but now you see that I haven't really "travelled"...

Labels: gis, travel

Look at that ass

Do any of my loyal and dwindled readership (that's me basically, but I have no internal monologue) know of a way to track ships? There are web-sites for tracking aircraft (though they seem to work well only in the US, which makes tracking international flights a wee bit pointless), and you can follow your kids around these days thanks to the GPS units you surreptitiously attach to their skulls (or in the case of residents of Orange County, Aspen, and Westchester, to their fleet of cars).

But how about international cargo ships? Specifically the California Luna? I'm very shortly getting delivered to me my collection of belongings that I pack-ratted together and which The Doc didn't take off my hands, and apparently it's on the California Luna arriving soon in New York (that photo wasn't taken this morning, though it's a similar day and that's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for). A quick search doesn't indicate any obvious way to track Atlantic shipping, though there appear to be plenty of web-sites dedicated to ship-spotters. I'd call them the Anoraks of the sea, but an Anorak is singularly sensible at or near large water, so I'll refer to them as boat-perverts. These funnel-fuckers seem to have a good many sightings of my precious California Lunar in various states of undress. There are Dutch sites, American sites, Latvian sites (albeit without pictures, but those cut-off dates give me the horn - oh baaaaby), oh and even my shippers.

Don't confuse it with the 78-year-old grandmother's tribute site. I suppose with a family name of Luna you are more likely than most to name your daughter California, but why she died at a Cemetery is beyond me, the old freak.

Now, if we could take something like Microsoft Photosynth (thanks Pete) - you'll need Win XP SP2 or Vista, but it's worth taking a look. If we could combine that with GPS based tracking (all ships have GPS and charts and such - even my uncles barnacled runaround has all that jazz), web-cam video, and Google Earth or Microsoft Live Maps (again, XPSP2), we might be onto something. Imagine the freak-out power of calling your kids up to describe to them their view as they're knocking back another buttload of crack on the waterfront.

Labels: boats, gis, perverts, tracking