Some new photos posted

Check out my photos on the Case Screensaver site. I posted a few pleasant ones tonight. And if you're at Case, enjoy your first day of class tomorrow! (And I'll see you if you're taking Dr. Mohseni's EECS 600 class).

Case Crime Map

I was speaking to Brian Beck the other day and asked what he's been working on. It turns out, he's writing a web application that uses Google Maps to display locations of crime incidents on the Case campus. He parses the information on the campus security website and pulls down geocoded GPS information from the Case Wiki. It turns out that he spent the better part of a day recently logging the GPS location of the center of every parking lot on campus. Well, somebody has to do it!

What are the nitty gritties? Here's what Brian has to say:

First it tries to grab the wiki page by the location name. This is desirable over grabbing markers.php because the location is often abbreviated (the BRB, for example) and our wiki has lots of redirects for such abbreviations.

If the wiki page doesn't exist or isn't geocoded, it uses a regular expression to search for a street address (or even just a street name). If found, it queries Google's geocoder and only uses the return value if it's an exact match.

So there are a lot of locations missing coordinates from these two methods. I'm going to geocode more locations on the wiki, and probably manually do the rest (things that wouldn't be useful as wiki pages). Or let users give coordinates to the missing ones.

So, there you have it!

SoaP Fun

On Friday night, I saw Snakes on a Plane. I would call it the polar opposite of a "chick flick." My favorite line?

-Remember the first thing you told me?
-What the $#!@ does that have to do with anything?!

Yeah, can't beat that. Plus we all got free posters in exchange for them taking our picture with them. I wonder where those pictures will end up...

It's funny that it only made $13.8M in the box office this weekend. The movie had great Internet hype... but only Internet hype. It was definitely pure fanservice for the 16-30 year old male audience. It was almost as good as Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter.

Going to WWDC!

This weekend, I am heading off to San Francisco with Kara to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for the second year in a row. I've been fortunate enough to receive a scholarship from Apple to attend. I'm looking forward to unlimited geek-out moments, a glimpse of Apple's new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and hopefully some new Apple hardware (Core-derivative Xeon processors on high-end machines, and possibly Core 2 Duo (Merom) upgrades for iMac or PowerBook. I'm crossing my fingers for built-in virtualization in Leopard, but I will be at least satisfied if Apple finishes its Windows drivers and adds NTFS read/write for Mac OS.

Anyway, wish me safe travels...