Month: September 2007

libkml

Google will be releasing an open-source KML library in C++ that implements and tracks the standard as it progresses. By providing a reference library it allows developers to more easily keep up to date with KML without having to maintain their own library and track standards changes.

likely apache licensed. i’ll hold off for that to come out to do more gdata experiments.

Our hope is that libkml will reduce the need for everyone to re-invent the wheel with a custom parser or serializer, by providing a single re-usable library that implements KML’s semantics. This first release is focused primarily on the low-level details of the KML DOM itself, but it’s our intent to enhance the library in the future by implementing more sophisticated operations like style resolution and balloon text templating.

Municipal Photographer

In 1999, Michael Lorenzini, the senior photographer for the New York City Municipal Archives, was spooling through microfilm of the city’s vast Department of Bridges photography collection when he realized that many of the images shared a distinct and sophisticated aesthetic. They also had numbers scratched into the negatives. “It just kind of hit me: this is one guy; this is a great photographer”. But who was he? It took many months and uncounted hours of trolling through archives storerooms, the Social Security index, Census reports and city records on births, deaths and employment to find the answer: the photographer was Eugene de Salignac, a municipal worker who took 20K photographs of modern Manhattan in the making. “It felt like a real discovery”.

KML Astronomy

In an ideal world all such observational astronomical data would exist in a machine-readable markup format, and I’m willing to venture it soon will. Just as it took the geospatial web 1 year or 2 to reorient itself towards making its data available in a format compatible with KML, the astronomical web will take a while to provide its data in a similar format.

lets hope this speeds up astronomical discoveries

The reinvention of air travel

It didn’t take very long to figure out that if you replace one $25M plane with 25 $1M planes, it fixes a lot of problems. And if you couple that with doing it by the seat instead of by the plane, that lets you interleave packets, or payloads, and increases the efficiency even more. So it became very clear that we needed to build a large, self-optimizing network that would take a lot of other factors into consideration, like the physics of the airplane, the temperature, the loads. The beauty of aviation is that it’s like physics meets business, right? How much you can carry depends on temperatures, altitudes, runway lengths — and safety is all expressed in terms of parameters that the optimizer has to take into account as it starts shuffling around customers. It’s not a straight optimization, it has to be done in real time, and it has an incredible number of constraints.

fighting the NP-complete fight to give passengers on-demand routing. no more sucky hubs, yay for small airports.

Virtual AI Training

Virtual worlds also solved the problem of giving an AI a relatively unsophisticated environment in which it could live and learn. “I’m one of many AI theorists who believe that embodiment is important. Typing stuff back and forth does not give the AI much to go on in terms of understanding the world around it, or itself or its place in that world.”

ben goertzel’s pets come to second life

RegEx Content Processor

Tarari’s RegEx-CP-v3 protects your network and enhances overall performance. It breaks through all network bottlenecks with high throughput and fast response time. This next-generation Network Security product keeps gigabit network traffic on the move. Regular expressions are processed simultaneously.

this reminds me of the time i thought the xml coprocessor was a joke. then i met brian del vecchio of datapower systems.