Thursday, March 16, 2006

Rank Speculation Gregor pointed me to Google's @Last aquisition, and it reminded me of a recent conversation with a friend who does lots of government GIS work. He said that there was a $billion+ RFP out for a firm to do a 3D modelling of the United States... although he didn't know the sponsor, he said only the search engines would have the kind of $$$ to underwrite this project. I was struggling to think of the immediate uses of this information. Once you have a 3D model of all building in the country, and have added another tab to your online mapping application, and maybe a FPS-style walk-by mode, well.... then what? In this context, the @Last aquisition makes a bit more sense. Imagine if Google kick-started user-contributed 3D content by providing: wireframes of every building in the US and a tool to add interior detail to these buildings and locate search-able things within them Then it would be easy to extend local.google.com or google base to allow folks to place searchable items within the world. Hmmm. This sounds an awful lot like Second Life, doesn't it? 10:08:10 AM      comment []  trackback []

Perl Best Practices "If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some." -Alan Perlis ROFL. This quote is from Damian Conway's new book Perl Best Practices. I'm reading it intermittently on O'Reilly's Safari, and am enjoying it alot. After a couple chapters, I'm proud to say I've been familiar with the ideas he presents, but Damian is the kind of author that : know's his topic so well you're still likely to learn something new when covering familiar ground and is so entertaining that you won't mind if you don't. Although there's some overlap with the kind of language-agnostic best practices in Code Complete, the Perl specific stuff is unsurprisingly really worthwhile. Recommended. 9:50:55 AM      comment []  trackback []