Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3506 mails)

["PerfectReign" <suse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, September 11, 2006 11:13 am, Per Jessen wrote:
> John Andersen wrote:
>
>> On Monday 11 September 2006 04:23, Daniel Bauer wrote:
>>> although I am *very* disappointed by the
>>> quality and actuality of the pictures and don't understand the hype
>>> that is (or was) made about it. Never looked at it again, except
>>> now

<snip>

>
> I have to agree with Daniel - google earth is pretty piss poor.  I've
> also ever only used it once, then ditched it.

I'll probably get flamed for this, but I'd like to put a good word in
for the program.

Google bought Keyhole Corp, a well-regarded name in GIS mapping, about
the same time it bought Picasa. Though more an amusement on ths
surface, the beauty of the application comes into play when you load
your own GIS data into the system and start cross-populating it with
such information as precint boundries for elections, assessor parcel
information for property tax valuations, ownership information for
demographics and so on.  It is there where you see the application
really shine.

The nice thing about Google Earth is the fact that it integrates well
with Arc/GIS and other ERSI software apps using KML (Keyhole Markup
Langugage), which is very similar to HTML/XML in style. Here's an
example of me taking phone data from a GPS-enabled Nextel phone,
overlaying into our Google Earth Server and coming up with a webpage.

http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/kai_gps_home_zoom.jpg

http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/kai_gps_home.jpg

What you are seeing are the green points showing the location of the
GPS phone integrated into the Keyhole satelite image of my house. The
phone was actually sitting on a desk during the sampling, but shows
some variation in location due to the wobble of satellites in orbit
taking the readings.  This is just a small example of what can be done
- and done easily - with Google Earth.

I was very impressed with Google that they ported it over to Linux,
and use it often on my laptops to show what can be done in Linux on
SUSE. Fortuntely for us, the Keyhole app was written with the superior
Qt toolkit, so it is cross-platform and looks nice.


/soapbox

-- 
Kai Ponte
www.perfectreign.com || www.4thedadz.com

remember - a turn signal is a statement, not a request