Improved Mapping Imagery

A recent post on the Google Blog mentioned that the satellite imagery for the UK had been updated, so I thought I would try it out!

I am pretty impressed with the quality of the new imagery. Although it's not up to date (I reckon about 4-5 years old for my area) the level of detail is much improved.

Check out the London Eye for example - it now fills the whole screen.

There are still some areas of the country that don't have this level of detail (is there anyway of getting a coverage map?), but if you are ever interested in finding out about an area (eg moving house) this would be well worth checking out!

On a related note, someone left a comment in one of my previous posts, linking to Bird's Eye Tourist. This is a similar site to Google Sightseeing, but provides examples of the very impressive Bird's Eye imagery available in Windows Live Local.

This doesn't yet cover any of the UK, but I do like some of the pictures, especially the theme park ones! :)

Blog Name Change

I signed up to Google Adsense a while ago, but have been noticing that the ads displayed have not really matched the content of my posts. Instead they have all been about blog hosting!

Someone mentioned recently that this could be because my blog title had the word 'blog' in it, causing this to take precedence over the post content.

Therefore I have copied my boss, and changed the name of this blog 'Gerard's Thoughts' to see if it makes a difference.

I may change this name if I think of something better, but I'm not to good at that sort of thing.....

Linux Wi-Fi woes

I mentioned in my last post that pretty much all I had to do to get my MVP working properly was to update the wireless card to an 11g one, but unfortunately this isn't seeming too easy! :(

I bought a Belkin PCI Wi-Fi card(F5D7000uk) that is based on the Ralink rt2500 chipset. This is the 11g version of the 2400 chipset I've been using for over a year without a single problem so I thought it would be relatively easy to set up, but no such luck!

There are two types of open source drivers available for this chipset, either the standard rt2500 ones, or the newer rt2x00 version. However I have problems with both: the rt2500 drivers don't work with SMP enabled which is apparently turned on in the KnoppMyth kernel, where as the rt2x00 drivers require a kernel version 2.6.13 or higher where as I have 2.6.11 from KnoppMyth RA16.

Given that I couldn't use the open source drivers, I noticed that this card seems to be supported by ndiswrapper, so I thought I would give this a go.
After downloading and installing (using the A-Link windows drivers mentioned) it seemed to be working fine, but it doesn't last long!!
With all the different versions of ndiswrapper/drivers I've tried, none seem to stay up for more than a day or so!! :(

So it looks like I'm left with either recompiling my kernel to disable SMP support (I'm running an AMD Sempron so don't need it!) or upgrading to either a newer kernel or a newer KnoppMyth version.

I don't really like the sound of any of these options, as I don't want to break my otherwise working setup!
The other problem is finding some time when there's not something on TV I want to record! :)

MVPMC

I got a new TV for Christmas (a Philips 17PF4310 if you're interested) to go in the bedroom, and so have been looking around for a good Myth frontend to use with it.

I decided to buy a hauppauge MediaMVP as you can get it for less than £50, but by using the MVPMC software it provides access to LiveTV and recordings via my Myth backend.

So far I've been pretty impressed with the mvpmc software. Install was very easy (just a shame I've had to change my DHCP server from my router to the Linux box), and it was displaying my recordings almost pretty much straight away!

Now I've just got to upgrade the Wi-Fi card in my myth box (11b just isn't fast enough!), and sort out some time issues (the program times aren't appearing right on screen) and I'll be all set :)

Looking forward to Windows Vista

I've being looking forward to Vista (and Office 12) for a while now, and the reviews coming out from the December CTP are just enforcing this.

Paul Thurrott provides a good review here if you're interested. I think the fact that he has gone from famously calling it a possible 'train wreck' to giving the current release 5 stars shows how much progress has been made. Add in another 9 months of development and I'm sure it will be a great system.

Now to start saving up for my new PC..... :)

Windows Live Local

I'm a bit behind the times here, but Microsoft released the beta of Windows Live Local (WLL), which is the rebranding of Virtual Earth into Microsoft's 'live' portal, about a month ago.

Anyway, I've been checking it out lately and thought I'd post some of my thoughts! (I wrote about VE when it was first launched, and all the good points mentioned there still stand!)

This release provides some of the features that were talked about when VE was initially announced, in particular the bird's eye view imagery.
As usual, this only covers the US, and only a few cities at that, but it does provide quite an impressive view. This example from the VE blog shows it off pretty well, providing 10 different locations to look at.

But for me, the biggest improvement in this release is that it now provides some information for the UK!!!
There are no aerial images, or local information (eg searching for pizza wont work!) but you can get maps and also integrated driving directions!
I really like the way they have implemented the driving directions, especially when it comes to printing them. It lets you print the detail diagrams for every stage, but gives control over which ones you want to print, so you can skip the ones you don't need, and also allows you to add any custom comments you want to the directions.

I'm finding that I'm using this in conjunction with Google Maps at the moment, but if WLL adds better support for the UK it may become my favourite.
The two needed features are:

• Better support for entering UK addresses, eg not needing to add ', UK' after a postcode.
• Integrated local searching

Adding satellite imagery would be nice, but I would like the birds eye views even more. I think these do actually become useful for finding your way around, where as satellite imagery isn't really that useful.

I think the interface is also crying out for the ability to move and resize the overlay windows, in particular the directions, scratchpad and search results.

Being able to add multiple stops in the driving directions (as offered by yahoo) would also be nice.

So yes, there's still lots that can be done to improve it, but I think WLL is shaping up nicely! :)