Monday, February 18. 2008

CSC Has LOFTy Idea; Tracks Tour of California Bike Race

CSC is launching their Location Object Field Tracking (LOFT) technology, designed for military and defense applications, at the Amgen Tour of California this week. According to an article in Washington Technology CSC Chief Technologist Dan Munyan says, "LOFT delivers a four-dimension, contextual, Web 2.0 interface through combining the bird’s eye view perspective of GPS with associated historical attributes and the context of real-time information on location, motion and status." The LOFT Tracker for the bike tour shows a map-based, real time route track of the participants. The CSC website is employing a Google Maps interface while the Amgen Tour of California website is showing the race using a Yahoo!Maps interface. Hmm.

Oblique Aerials Support Tornado-affected Areas

Marty Sellers of Sellers Photography provided the following information:

Rob Perrin of Jackson, TN has vertically photographed the tornado track through Jackson TN, stitched the images and created a movie on his website where viewers can follow along the path.


http://www.mountup.us/Copyright.htm

Quote of the Week

"Since GIS tends to be related to critical infrastructure, its data tend to be of impeccable quality, better than what are available with Google Earth or Microsoft Visual Earth, which are more of geo-browsers and dependent on satellite imagery."

- Anivrvan Ghosh describing why GIS is a profitable business, specifically in medical response, for India-based Rolta in the India Times

Mountaineering Museum Opens in Colorado

The Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum opened this week in Golden, Colorado. Said to be the the first museum in the country dedicated to the history of mountaineering. It
features a true-to-scale 3D foam map of Mount Everest, a climbing wall that's open to the public, and historic artifacts from famous mountain climbers around the globe. The museum honors mountaineer and cartographer, Bradford Washburn. He grew up in the Boston area and founded the well-regarded Boston Museum of Science. He died last year. (obit)

- Daily Camera (Boulder)

Windows Enterprise Launch Feb 27; SQL Server Late

Microsoft has planned the launch of Visual Studio (VS) 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 for Feb 27th. One thing to note: SQL Server 2008, the version geo folks have been waiting for, due to its geospatial support, will be late.

SQL Server was set to ship later than Windows Server or Visual Studio, but the target date has now slipped by a full quarter, according to a Jan. 26 blog post by Francois Ajenstat, director of SQL Server product management. Ajenstat insists the delay won't detract from this month's launch event.

The next Customer Technology Preview (this will be #6) may well be released on Feb 27. This CTP is expected to have 99% of the full final technology.
- Redmond Developer News

Create KML Via Spreadsheet

It's a tool for "the rest of us" to easily create KML.

- Wired