Mike's Page

The Great Backyard Bird Count is coming up in a couple weeks. I've been a participant for several years now. It's easy! Just watch the birds in your area for an hour or two and note what you see. Then go to the website and record your count.

It's fun to browse the maps and data and see where the different species are. Last year during the count, there were several dozen cedar waxwings in my neighborhood, and normally there are none...they only appear for a short time in the late winter/early spring around here.

Get yourself some binoculars and a field guide and join in!

From my stack of unfinished projects. I was learning Spanish and Palm OS programming at about the same time, and thought it would be cool to port the GPL project Compjugador to the Palm. It's basically a program that conjugates thousands of Spanish verbs.

The original project seems dead. Due to lack of time, my Palm version pretty much is too. I had the basics running...it would handle the regular verbs. I never got to the irregulars, but I think it was mainly matter of converting the original code to Palm stuff.

I had to convert the original project's GDB data storage to the Palm's PDB. I did a more-or-less straight conversion, resulting in ~9400 data records. I later found out that the Palm is really slow in transferring PDBs with lots of data rows.

From my to-do list on the project:

• Clean up interface
• Work with irregular verbs
• Reflexive verbs
• Group records by categories for faster searching
• Combine records into groups for faster data upload
• Use compression or some other data reorganization to make the PDB smaller
• Allow the user to switch between English verb tense names and Spanish (both compjugador-original and 501 Verbs terminology)
• Compound tenses using haber as from 501 Verbs

If anyone is interested in seeing my code or finishing the project, contact me.

Update 2004-02-27: I found the web verb conjugator, but the SourceForge version still looks dead.

A paddling friend told me about USAPhotoMap. It downloads aerial photos from Microsoft's Terraserver, plots GPS data on top of it, and displays it on your screen. I used it to build an aerial map of my Capers Island trip fairly quickly, unlike my hand-made topo map which took a while. USAPhotoMap is supposed to do topo mapping too, but I couldn't get it to work properly. It also takes some getting used to its funky interface. There are no scrollbars, and clicking on some menu items doesn't do anything but pop up a box telling you to use the keyboard instead. It doesn't really have an intuitive, native Windows-app feel.

There's a decent tutorial here.

It's free software, so I won't complain. Too bad you can't technically publish the finished images, since Terraserver's usage agreement basically prohibits doing anything interesting with the data.*

Anyone care to build a website where I can upload GPS track data and waypoints, annotate it, plot it on a topo or aerial map, and legally publish the result on my website? If I had the time I'd build it myself. USGS topo image data is public domain, but it's near impossible to get without paying someone a hefty fee. I have an idea about that which I'll publish later.

* Update 2004-03-13: It turns out that you can use the Terraserver images after all! At the bottom of the Terraserver page is a Terms of Use link that points to Microsoft's site, and it basically prohibits everything. That's what I saw originally and figured the data was unusable. However, the Terraserver FAQ states this:

Are there any restrictions on what I can do with the images that I download?

The images from the U.S. Geological Survey, and are freely available for you to download, use and re-distribute. The TerraServer team and the USGS appreciate credit for their work on this project by displaying the message "Image courtesy of the USGS".

Start mapping!

I have finally posted my paddling trip story for Capers Island. This was a weekend kayaking and camping trip on the South Carolina coast. I took my time and put together a photo album and a topo map including our GPS track. Hopefully it was worth the wait!

Growing up in Ohio, it was called "pop" and no one disputed this. Later I was exposed to friends and relatives from the east who called it "soda." Now I live in the South and it's "coke." Where do you draw the lines between these words for the same thing?

There's a cool interactive website here, and they have a nice detailed map here.

Ohio and a good bit of the midwest own "pop" but I find the "soda" enclaves of St. Louis and Milwaukee interesting. I guess "soda" is more of the sophisticated big city term.

I'll stick with "pop."

My first entry. Happy 2004!

I was glad to see it get started with Ohio State winning the Fiesta Bowl.

Hope to be adding lots of cool stuff to the website this year. We'll see if I accomplish half of what I have in mind!