Here comes my obsession with hacking different things together again.

I have put together a video driver for MPlayer using the MatrixView screensaver from rss-glx.sf.net. This driver renders videos on the fly in Matrix code style view.

Find more about it at the MPlayer + Matrixview page.

Now we can all see what Neo sees in the dream world…

After once jokingly mentioned about doing this, I have actually done it.

Ejs is a JavaScript implementation of a subset of APIs from Evas and Ecore – core libraries in E – Enlightenment window manager.

Along with that I’ve ported the Evas test app to JavaScript, ready to run inside your browser. There’s also an interactive playground where you could try out the API inside an interpreter-like environment.

Maybe one day this would become a full blown toolkit and utilities for fancy web development… we shall see…

Evas test running in the browser

After a couple of weeks of night coding, FGMap navaids stuff has finally reached the state where I could release it for people to test.

At the moment you can either search for a navaid (airport, VOR, NDB, FIX) by its code/name, or you can have it showing you all navaids in the current map view.

All navaids data are from FlightGear, which uses X-Plane’s data. I have stored the data in a database, which FGMap talks to via AJAX.

There are a few things that i haven’t done yet. That includes proper ILS/OM/MM/IM/GS drawing, heliport, airway, etc. I might also add real time metar reports to airports later.

Anyway, feel free to play with it, and leave me some feedbacks.

Here are two screenshots of FGMap navaids in action.

Over KOAK – Metropolitan Oakland Intl

Over VHHH – Hong Kong Intl

So I was porting FGMap to GMap API v2 from v1.

At the same time I did some “sightseeing” around, and checking out one of my favorite buildings, currently the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101. Then I noticed the difference (pretty obvious) between the satellite images from GMap v1 and v2. The one from v1 is in fact newer than v2. The one in v2 is still being built!

GMap v1

GMap v2

After seeing lots useful and cool stuff people have been doing using the Google Map API, I was inspired to write something perhaps to plot buildings/models I have been/will be doing for FlightGear. While trying the API out a bit, an idea striked my head. What about a real time map for the FlightGear multiplay server air traffic map?

And so I started off doing it. It’s heaps of fun, not to mention finding out all those bugs with IE. M$ is very kind, they always do things that make people laugh. This always gives me a chance to revise a lot with Javascript.

I also ended up writing my own routines for map overlays displaying plane markers and info, instead of using the GMAPI’s GMarker. A bit more flexible, and it does exactly what I want.

There is time when Javascript is useful, and there is time where it’s just overkill. IMHO, Javascript is useful for writing “web app”. Same as using Flash, or Java applet. But btw this does NOT mean every website should be bloody web app!!

And there you go, the FlightGear server online map. A couple of FlightGearers have been using it as a flying map and as a simple ATC radar. If it’s the right time you’ll see us flying!

I’ve got plans to add more features, like airports/navids lookup. And of course, improving the usability and UI is always on the plate. Comments are also welcomed…

Also thanks to everyone who has helped me with testing and giving suggestions to the page. (ampere, AJ, thorben, vivian, gorilla, Surge, johnh51, MasseR, etc)

… is *NOT* out yet. However, here is a list of changes/features/bug fixes that have been done/are being done/might be done:

- porting to gtk2/gkrellm2
- kernel 2.5 support
- different colors/species of fishes for in and out network traffic
- configurable interface for network traffic
- SMP ducks
- include/exclude nice time from CPU usage
- some bug fixes for memory/swap and network traffic
- APM…?
- clouds and birds…?
- transparent background/sky…?
- even more monitoring…?