Is it better to burn out, or to fade away?
Last week we, the Mapbuilder PSC, have decided to gracefully terminate Mapbuilder. We found that other webmapping projects (notably OpenLayers) had passed us in userbase, developbase and finally also in features. We decided that the answer of the ageold question is to burn out. We’ve sent out an announcement that we have reached the end of life of Mapbuilder. It is a sad day…
Dark skies are looming over me
But in general I think this is a good thing and OpenLayers will grow even faster, it is a great package after all.
Wii-mote readings
We are asked to develop a short game which is controlled with the Wii-controller. Since it is expensive and not too easy to develop for the Wii itself (you require a SDK from Nintendo and permissions once the game is finished) we decided to develop it on the PC. It is possible to connect your Wii-mote with the PC using bluetooth. There are multiple libraries to do so.
I was curious what kind of feedback you get from the Wii-mote and where it fails (in light of the news about the Wii motion plus). There are some issues around getting your Wii-mote connected to a PC by bluetooth, not every stack is good, nor areall bluetooth chipsets, however the MacBook supports the Wii-mote out of the box. So I connected the Wii-mote to my MacBook instead and used the DarwiinRemote application to get a reading from the sensors.
DarwiinRemote sensor readings.
The wii-mote is equiped with an accelerometer, which does not record the position of the wii-mote. What is does is that it records the different forces (accelerations) that are applied to the controller. So in rest it will record a force of 1G down (z= -1). If you hold the controller upside down it will record a force of 1G up (z = 1) (seen from the point of view of the controller). If you hold it on its side the reading will be x=1 or x=-1 or y=1 or y= -1, depending on the side. The other axis will be 0 in rest. Actually since in rest the only force acting on the controller is earth gravitation, which is 1, the absolute sum of the forces on x, y and z will be 1.
Wii sensor reading in three orientations.
With this knowledge you can deduce the orientation of the Wii-mote from the readings above. In the beginning the Wii-mote is held horizontal pointing forward (blue line at -1). Then the Wii-mote is rotated along its body, the left side is pointing up (red line at 1). Finally the Wii-mote is pointing downward (green line at 1). Note that we do not know how the Wii-mote is pointing downwards (whether the buttons facing forward or sideways). When you start moving the Wii-mote the forces applied on the Wii-mote easily surpass the 1G and when that happens it is much more difficult to deduce the orientation. The new Wii-motion Plus extension is supposed to solve this problem. From what I’ve seen and read it most likely will use a gyroscope to calculate the orientation of the Wii-mote regardless of the forces applied to it.
Using blend
For various projects I’ve been using Microsoft Expression Blend to do the interface design while Paul and/or Van Exel were coding. Blend is part of a bigger set of tools, called Microsoft Expression Studio. As the experienced Visual Studio people can see, it is using the same .sln files as Visual Studio. However, there’s a major bug in Blend involving multiple projects within a solution. It automatically takes the first project in the solution file as the startup project, regardless whether or not you set that as startup project in VS.
‘Onderwater scherm’ of the PlectraeMenu
Opening up my leg
Cycling in Amsterdam, however common, is dangerous. Every year a few cyclists get killed by trucks turning right; the so called ‘blind spot incidents’. Luckily most of the (other) bicycle-accidents don’t end up with dead people, just injuries. According to an ambulance brother I once spoke the most common injury where they are called in for are head traumas. Most of which could be prevented if the cyclists wear helmets. Currently the dutch pride and self esteem ‘forbids’ helmets. Apparently it’s such a non-issue that the dutch wikipedia merely acknowledges the fact that they exist without any further discussion or information (unlike the english one)
Obviously since there are a tens of thousands cyclists in Amsterdam, so injuries are bound to happen, even deadly ones. I’m not sure of the statistics involved: whether everyone buying and wearing a helmet would have a big impact in the total population of cyclists. However if one ignores statistics I’d argue for compulsory shin-protection as well.
As it happens, this morning I was cycling to my work, managing all the busy intersections with trams, trucks, road construction etc without any incident. Just before I arrived at the office, I cycled through a quiet little street, here, where a van was parked in the middle of the street. To avoid the van I had to squeeze my self between the van and the underground garbage containers at the sidewalk. However one of those was mysteriously not totally underground leaving a sharp metal plate at shin level. It happened to be able to slice both through my pants and my leg. Resulting in this very nice gap in my shin (gore-warning!). Right now I’ve got 7 stitches and am pretty much immobilized by a non-functioning right leg 
I built a planet
At work we decided that it would be nice to have a blog which would inform the world of what we’re up to. However we quickly realized that having yet another blog wouldn’t work, especially if people already have their own blog. Still a central page which shows our blogs would be nice. Luckily there are planets which aggregate multiple blogs. A quick search gave me venus, which takes a bit of work to get it going under windows but once it runs it’s easy to configure.
I’ve added the current 4 blogs of colleagues and I’m waiting for a company server to put the planet on.