A small but solid update for Google Earth 4.0 beta is out for Mac (4.0.1658), PC (4.0.1657) and likely Linux too (build date: July 5). Download from the usual place. Google Earth blog has the scoop. As the Mac version does not contain the updated release notes, I’m posting the complete changelog below the fold.

Continue reading Google Earth 4.0 beta update →

Dr. Mark Mulligan, of the Environmental Monitoring and Modelling Research Group at King’s College, London, writes:

Some of your readers may be interested in the Google Earth topographic overlays that I have generated for the globe (at 90m resolution) from the NASA Space Shuttle Topography Mission data, processed by http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org.

The previews (and access to the raw CSI-processed data) are available at http://www.ambiotek.com/topoview. Activate the elevation folder, then click the placemark for the tile you want to view, then click the green box in the balloon that appears.

It works very well for me, and it’s great fun in the mountains. Remember, you can play with the opacity slider. (Note, green box = the one with “WWW network link” on it. On a Mac, you will need to grab it quickly before it disappears.)

• Simple, but very useful: Overlay map of Pompei, circa 79 AD.
• If you have Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 there is no reason not to try FS Earth, an add-on that shows your flight in Google Earth. Free demo, $13 to keep it, and version 3, just out, has lots of new features.
• I think this is the geekiest Google Earth post yet: Calculating GE Altitude from GIS Scale, by Matt Priour : Dot Net Without a Net.

Brian Flood’s post on Friday about superimposing Google Maps tiles onto ArcMap reminded me of the early hacks by Dan Catt and Bernhard Sterzbach that superimposed those tiles onto Google Earth. (BTW, Bernhard’s hack still works!). This in turn led me to wonder whether it is possible to write a network link that overlays Géoportail tiles onto Google Earth. I think it should be very possible, technically. I’m not a programmer, though, so it’s beyond me. Perhaps somebody else…?

IGN might not like it, but that would just drive home the point that data and delivery are two very different pursuits, and that trying to tie specific data to a specific delivery mechanism is just silly in this age of open standards.

I think Géoportail’s tiles on top of Google Earth would give me and every French citizen the best of both worlds, (literally, ha). It would even allow us to watch the Tour de France on top of IGN data. And who could be against that? :-)

Meanwhile, now that I’ve actually been in and tested Géoportail, I cannot say I’m impressed. I think it is very much a second-rate implementation of the 2D mapping genre:

• Many of the overseas territories, such as French Guyana and St. Pierre & Miquelon, do not have any imagery whatsoever, just scans of maps or relief maps. As for French Polynesia, you can click on it, but then you get the message that there is no data at all available for it. So much for that much-vaunted consistency.
• I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to zoom in on a farm in the French Pyrenees where I spent many summers growing up. The darn tile just refused to load. Often, it feels like you’re navigating a chess board instead of France.
• In Firefox on a Mac, i regularly get told off for unresponsive scripts, followed by the announcement that Géoportail has encountered an unexpected error and needs to close. Remember, this is not beta.

(And lest anybody think I’m anti-French, I’ll be rooting for Zidane and his team in the finals.)

India Daily has the shocking headline: Maoists in India using Internet, Google Earth and Hi-tech telescopes to locate the Indian security forces and their preferred targets. Only problem: There is no further mention of the internet or Google Earth in the article. Regardless, perhaps we should ban telescopes, just to be safe.

In related news, the chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief G. Madhavan Nair has now articulated his concern about Google Earth in a manner that leads this blog to wonder where Nair’s been this past year. “I think our defence agencies should be worried about it,” he says among other things, which is ironic, given that India’s defence agencies definitely are not. Only politicians and their appointees seem to have a deep-seated need to protect the Indian people from Google Earth.

Two great innovations in one network link. A developer at Australia’s Water Resources Observation Network (WRON) has made a visualization of stream flow data for the Murray-Darling river basin. Here’s what’s so great about it:

• Stream flow data is shown via height.
• The network link returns a self-updating time-sequence of monthly data. Effectively, you get animated data on demand.

How does the on-demand animation work? It looks like the original downloaded file contains a dynamically generated random unique ID in the network link’s query URL, which allows the server to keep tabs on who’s been shown what. If you stop the automatic refreshing, the server resets itself after a while, discarding your unique ID. The next time the same network link queries the server, your “new” ID is presented to the server, and the animation starts from scratch.

One way to improve the visuals would be for the polynomials to follow the rivers more closely — with height data interpolated from the nearest actual data points. Still, this is a lovely, creative effort.

• Shape2Earth, Tim Beerman’s .NET application that converts shapefiles to KML, now has a (draft) manual.
• Hundreds of Swiss webcams, in Google Maps and on Google Earth.
• On a decidedly inside-baseball note, have you noticed how James Fee’s blog has been on a roll recently? I think the new design is very clean, the best yet, and he’s had plenty of ESRI exclusives of late — including the ArcGIS Explorer teasers, and then the news that we shouldn’t expect it anytime soon. But I do want to needle him about one thing: In September 2005, in a post entitled Why I hate Advertisers, James wrote:
  

  I don’t like ads on websites (I block most of them using FireFox anyway) so I’ll never have them here in any capacity.

  I wonder what’s changed? :-) I’m guessing that he’s come round to the conclusion there is nothing wrong with a hobby also being a source of income. BTW, notice that James places his ads at the ends of articles. I’ve found this to be the best spot as well, as it is the moment where you, the reader, wonder what to do next. See?