Blog This...

Labels: star wars

There was a presentation on the Free Wheelchair Mission at church last week - pretty impressive from a technology POV.

For 50 bucks(!) you can get someone in need off the ground. Please check it out, consider making a donation, and pass it on. Would make a great gift.

Labels: charity

Recently, my folks were looking for some things to do during a quick stopover in New Orleans. I'd visited a few times, and wanted to send them pointers to a few quick sites - so I cooked up a quick Google "My Maps", and shared it with them.

Shortly afterwards, I was surfing around in Virtual Earth, and realized New Orleans is one of the cities Microsoft has modeled in 3D - plus, it has Birds Eye View imagery. Cool! Now I wanted to see that "My Maps" data in Virtual Earth... but how?

I could take all those details and copy them into a new Microsoft Live Collection, but that seems like a lot of work; Google has my all my info already. So I went looking around to see if anybody had a quick solution for me - a way to take a My Maps and turn it into a VE Collection. Nothing turned up, so I started thinking about ways to solve this myself.

Hmm...

• Sometimes, Google's "My Maps" provides a link to download a KML file containing the "My Maps" details


• Virtual Earth has added support for KML files!

Putting all those pieces together... the data's there, just have to get it in the right place. So, I took an evening learned a few new things I could do in PHP, and cooked up this page: http://www.ringthis.com/maps/mymaps2ve.php

It takes the name of the Google My Maps-provided KML file, massages the link a bit, sucks down the KML data and hands it to Virtual Earth.

It's so much more satisfying to be able to fly around a modeled city! The script has worked on most of the collections I've tried, though YMMV. If you find a KML that doesn't work, please send me a quick mail and I'll try to fix it.

Labels: maps