Around You

Good news, your favourite virtual globe Marble now is your virtual explorer!

In parallel with the world domination plan, Dennis is porting Marble to Plasma Active and as my Season of KDE project, I am trying to help him as much as I can. To help users to find the places around them, I created Explore activity, an activity that displays popular places on the map and allows you to get additional information about these places. It uses Foursquare’s rich venue data powered by its users. Here is a screencast about it:

You can test it out by downloading and compiling Marble’s git branch sok-2012-plasma-active. Any suggestions? Write a comment below.

My Kindhearted Assassin

Not a long time ago, when I was surfing through my spam box, I saw the most interesting spam mail sent to me. Here it is:

Good Day,

I want you to read this message very carefully and keep the secret with you till further notice. You have no need of knowing who i am, where am from, till i make out a space for us to see, i have being paid $25,000.00 in advance to terminate you with some reasons listed to me by my employer, it’s one i believe you call a friend, i have followed you closely for one week and three days now and have seen that you are innocent of the accusation. Do not contact the police or F.B.I or try to send a copy of this to them because if you do i will know, and might be pushed to do what i have being paid to do, beside this is the first time i turned out to be a betrayer in my job.

Now listen, i will arrange for us to see face to face but before that i need the amount of $50,000.00 and you will have nothing to be afraid of. I will be coming to see you in your office or home determine where you wish we meet, do not set any camera to cover us or set up any tape to record our conversation, my employer is in my control now. You will need to pay $20,000.00 to the account i will provide for you, before we will set our first meeting after you have make the first advance payment to the account, i will give you the tape that contains his request for me to terminate you, which will be enough evidence for you to take him to court (if you wish to), then the balance will be paid later.

You don’t need my phone contact for now till am assured you are ready to comply good.

Lucky You.
Andrew Hell Sniper.
International Assassin!

Google Code-in, Marble and I

Tomorrow, Google Code-in will end. I spent nearly all of my month by participating to it and it has been one of my great experiences. Thanks to the contest, I’ve learnt a lot of things, met with people from different projects and communities and became a KDE developer.

At the moment, I have completed 21 tasks and 20 of them is Marble’s, my favorite virtual globe. I have created two online service plugins, a map creation wizard and DGML tag writers for it. And in case you wonder, my other task was a Plasma task, I’ve created three activity templates and improved an existing one.

The online service plugins which I have created are earthquake and OpenDesktop community plugins. Earthquake plugin shows recent earthquakes and their magnitudes on the globe. Each magnitude range is shown in different colors.

Earthquake Plugin in action

And OpenDesktop Community plugin shows OpenDesktop community members’ avatars on the map.

OpenDesktop plugin showing users

The wizard which I mentioned helps users to create new maps easily. It can create three kinds of maps,

1. Static image map (a bitmap of whole world)
2. Static URL map (maps like OpenStreetMap and Google Maps)
3. WMS maps (maps of Web Map Service providers)

Step 1: Map provider selection

Step 2: Map provider's details

Step 3: Your map's information (name, desc. etc.)

Being part of Marble community was a great adventure for me; getting help from people when I stuck, showing off my work, commiting my code to KDE’s SVN repositories and more.

If you want to get involved and contribute, visit Marble’s webpage. You can get involved with coding, documentation, artwork and promotion of Marble.

Special thanks to Torsten Rahn, Dennis Nienhüser, Thibaut Gridel and Bernhard Beschow I couldn’t do anything without your help.