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Twitxr - a cool location enabled photoblog

Reading the title I guess you figure out what Twitxr is about.

What I like most is:

- Really simple, clean and easy (i.e using it regularly won't suck your time)

- Location aware by guessing where you are (no need of GPS capabilities in your mobile device) this feature advances interesting features to come

- Keeps your Twitter or Facebook account on sync

Neat!

Two books we all should read

Continuing with my trend to recommend books :) the two thought provoking books below in my opinion are essential. I'm convinced that if everyone in the 'first world' read them once in a life time (the sooner the better) we would all probably live in a much better and long lasting World.

The first is "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan.



And once we re-think on from where we come from and what's our place in the Universe, then we may concentrate locally in our still beautiful planet by reading "The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations, and Ecological Decline" and hopefully take some action.


And there's a DVD edition of Cosmos too No excuses :)

Book for GIS programmers

I've been busy lately working in new ways to speed up the wikiloc's KML feed for Google Earth. Designing efficient 'Orthogonal Range Searching' algorithms like Kd-Trees, Range Trees or Fractional Cascading is not a trivial task, and having a decent book with proofs, exercises and some pseudocode helps a lot and makes the process much more fun and productive.

So for those of you that work in geospatial apps, I recommend to take a look at it:


Authors page


--Jordi

How to speed up Firefox (in 30 seconds)

If you thought Firefox was fast before, try it after this tweak:

1 - Open Firefox (really, required)
2 - Open URL: about:config
3 - Find (CTRL + F): network.http.pipelining. Double click on it so it changes to true
4 - Find: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Double click on it and change it from 4 to 100 or so

That's it. This makes FF use more threads to each page. You'll realize the difference on sites that use Google Maps like Wikiloc :-)

Enjoy

Tracking a Ferrari with Google Maps

As a sample of a dynamic path using Google Maps, Wikiloc user Ruben has sent me the following link of a video of two guys driving a Ferrari 275 GTB around downtown Paris at an -insane speed-. They apparently requested permission to close streets but obviously the authorities denied their request, so they decided to do it just the same... Luckily the driver is/was (the video is from the seventies) a Formula 1 professional pilot.

I suggest to watch it with headphones, the sound of the Ferrari's engine being pushed at its limits is the best of the video :)

http://bhendrix.com/wall/Gmaps_GVideo_Mashup_Rendezvous.html

A sequoia has born

I bought a redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) burl in Muir Woods National Monument park near San Francisco a few weeks ago. The burl is basically a piece of redwood with mother cells within. I was skeptic to hear that a huge redwood can born from that apparently sterile piece of wood.


After some weeks of humidity and watering the burl, the green sprouts are starting to grow up. Unlike most other trees, the redwoods can reproduce not only from seed but also directly from their own burl growth. Even redwood logs that lay on the forest floor can sprout long after the parent tree has fallen.

This little guy can live for +1500 years from now on. It's amazing. I wonder if I'll be around to write a post with a picture of the first pine cone...