Running Magik Remotely from Google Talk

Bhimesh over at the Magik Fun blog has posted a video of how he uses the XMPP protocol to send/retrieve standard input/output from Magik. It kind of reminds me of the remote_cli class in Magik.

You can view the blog post here.

Viewing Hurricane Track in Smallworld using FME and SOMs

I realized today that I have customers and friends in the track of Hurricane Ike.


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So I was thinking... what would it take to view hurricane track information in Smallworld?

Here is what I came up with...

1. Figure out which Smallworld SOMs (Spatial Object Managers) you have licensed.
2. Create a FME workspace that reads hurricane data from a provider (eg., Google has http://mw1.google.com/mw-weather/tropical/kml/all_hurricanes.kmz) and converts it into a format that your SOMs are licensed for.   You can download the workspace file here (right-click and Save As... the link)
3. Create a .bat file that calls your FME workspace and can be scheduled using a task scheduler.
   fme.exe %~dp0Hurricane_KML2MapInfoTab.fmw --SourceDataset_KML21 http://mw1.google.com/mw-weather/tropical/kml/all_hurricanes.kmz --DestDataset_MITAB %~dp0
   
4. Create Smallworld SOM configuration that reads the regularly-updated SOM data.
5. Create Smallworld ACE and Style changes that render the storm data on Smallworld.

I have tried this preliminarily with MapInfo and it seems to work.  What is not clear to me yet is if the MapInfo SOM will refresh the data on Smallworld each time the underlying MapInfo data is refreshed.  Anyone interested in trying this?

[UPDATE: It seems that once a MapInfo SOM is connected to a MapInfo file, then that file is locked for other processes.  Ie., FME won't be able to update it.  So that is likely not a very good idea.  We could use the WMS SOM but then we would need to set up a WMS server.  You can definitely do that with FME Server but I am willing to bet that most Smallworld customers do not have FME Server set up yet.  Maybe another option would be to modify the FME Workspace to write out to a text (or XML) file that could then be read by a Smallworld post-render-set plugin that would then dynamically draw the storm track information each time the map is refreshed.]

Anyone doing something else with tracking storms in Smallworld?

Stay safe and dry.

[slightly off topic] Google Maps of Boulder Bike Paths

This is not Smallworld-related but is of interest to me. Every since I moved to Boulder (Colorado, USA) in March, I have been amazed by the number of bicycle paths in the city. Apparently the city will even plow the snow off the paths after a snow storm.

As a new resident of this fair city, I have often wondered how I can get to my destination using the available bike path network. The city provides some great paper and pdf network maps and even plans to create a bike-route-finding website (aka on-the-fly directions for cyclists) later this year. But I think there is still a need for integrating the network maps with a web search engine like Google Maps. Well, Google has recently implemented Google My Maps and I have started using that freely-available tool to start building an overlay on Google Map search results. You can read about it and see the current state of the project at the Cycling in Boulder blog.

If you are interested in contributing to the data in Boulder, please let me know. And if you are interested in doing something for a bike path network in your town that would be great, too! I have two ultimate goals:

• get people onto their bikes
• have a large enough interest in something like this that Google takes note and introduces searchable/traceable bike path networks into their Google Maps data.