This is a great user-generated map, showing minority groups across Europe:
Sadly enough some of our politicians see the diversity of this continent as threat rather than as potential and I bet they would love to ethnically “clean house” if only they could. [via Google LatLong]
I find it pretty impressing – considering the non-mainstream touch of last.fm – that the old Modern Talking videos constantly show up on last.fm’s weekly top videos.
What an eighties classic!
Good news for all German Virtual Earth mash-ups: Microsoft finished an imagery update for entire Germany, based on data delivered by Intergraph (and GeoContent). According to Intergraph’s press release the new maps provide an accuracy of up to 1m in rural and 50cm in urban areas. Additionally, Microsoft’s fantastic Bird’s eye view is now available for 80 German cities.
GoYellow, based on Endoxon (which was partly acquired by Google), seems to be using the same imagery, but somehow the softer coloring and cartography do look better in Virtual Earth.
Theresienwiese in Munich in Virtual Earth:
and in GoYellow:
Same imagery, different visualization. [via Geobranchen.de]
I hope Austria will follow soon. Next year the Euro 2008 is happening here and the main stadium in Vienna still looks a bit fuzzy. Some parts of Austria are well covered by Herold maps (the Austrian yellow pages company), but they don’t provide an API, so no luck for external applications.
Still one month to go and the attendees list holds already over 60 entries, the maybe attendees are more than 40 by today. Not bad!
It’s planned to be a two day event this time, held at the Microsoft office on 29th and 30th September in Vienna (and no, it’s not going to be a Microsoft assessment center!).
There are several places where Barcamp attendees gather online (XING event, Facebook group, Facebook event, Upcoming event) but if you would like to come, make the organizers life easier by adding your name to the main attendees list.
See you there!
Naturfreunde published over 900 Austrian hiking, bike, ski, etc. routes as GPS data on their recently launched Tourenportal. In addition to the GPS tracks they provide some more information such as best season to go, an elevation profile, route length, descriptions, etc. about the routes. A KML file lets you nicely preview each tour in Google Earth. The project is a cooperation with Garmin, who is hosting the GPS routes as service too.
The GPS device is no problem, but if I only had the right shoes to do a hike I’d give that service a try. Maybe somebody should come up with a more urban tourportal…
[via kartentisch]
Tragedies like the fires in Greece show the importance of programs such as GMES, an European initiative for Global Monitoring for Environment and Security. One aim of those efforts is immediate deployment of valid and high quality earth observation data in case of environmental disasters to support crisis management (e.g. ESA satellite imagery of the fires in Greece). But what’s worth the best data when there are no authorities to address with… [via heise]
Usually the German blogosphere isn’t getting tired of complaining about the lack of revenue opportunities on the German market compared to the US blogosphere.
But some German blogs definitely must generate some considerable income: I just saw an ad on TV for BILDblog.de, a watchblog about the infamous German newspaper BILD Zeitung.
I really don’t know how much the production and broadcasting of a 50sec TV spot can be, but I would suppose it’s slightly more than running an AdWords campaign.
If more TV spots would be of that quality, ad watching could actually be much more entertaining!
Google now makes it very easy to embed customized Google Maps on any website you want, without signing up for a Google Maps API key: just copy&paste the provided HTML-code, provided under the “Link to this page”-link on the Google Maps interface.
On the map below you can see our yesterday’s late afternoon Flickr photo tour through Stuwerviertel here in Vienna:
One little problem:
The Google Maps iframe somehow doesn’t play very nice with WordPress’ Rich Text Editor. I wasn’t able to re-open that post because the Rich Text Editor was enabled by default. Once I had it disabled, everything worked fine again.
Update
Since most of the pictures taken at the Flickr meet-up are now online I added the Flickr-KML-link as network link to the my KML-file shown in the map above. In order to view only the pictures taken at the meet-up I had to manually limit the date to the day (add &min_taken_date=2007-08-21&max_taken_date=2007-08-22 to the KML-link).
CNET has an article about virtualization solutions for running Windows on a Mac and posted some benchmark results for the most popular applications: VMware Fusion 1.1 and Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (aff links).
I’m using Parallels Desktop mainly for working with ArcGIS on my MacBook, which works quite well (more info on that). For completing heavy tasks, where I could use some extra spice, I usually restart into BootCamp.
So I found it interesting that Fusion significantly outperforms Parallels. Taking a closer look at the article, things became clearer: Fusion makes use of multiple cores while Parallels only uses one single CPU core. The benchmark limited to only one core shows very similar results.
I suppose Parallels will catch up on that issue and won’t try Fusion, since I think both of them are not quite compatible and I’m really not in the mood of setting up Windows again if something breaks (never change a running system!).
If you’re setting up a new environment for using ArcGIS on a Mac, I’d recommend giving VMware’s Fusion a try.