I've was looking for an interesting project to get my hands on live maps API. Just to get the hang of developing cool application on top of Live maps.

I've started this Olympics Medal Count + Community Contributed Data + Live Maps Mashup

And It's almost complete.

Take a look at this Beijing 2008 Medals Count on Live Maps

If you want to help complete the picture, make your contribution to this wiki page

Want to get a grip on the Live Earth SDK as well, here is your starting point [Live Earth SDK]

This is still work in progress , since this countries list is not completed yet. But I'd thought I'd share the work so far.

Live maps with its extendible API/SDK allows you to do cool things. Here is one, taking the countries 2008 Olympic games medal counts, asking the community to help with getting countries coordinates, and mashing it all up with javascript to create a cool representation of nations of the worlds map with their Beijing 2008 medals count.

Here is what's ready so far.

Beijing 2008 Medals Count on Live Maps

Want to help to complete the picture, add your country coordinates to this wikipedia countries gps coordinates page

No fancy ASP.Net stuff was used to build this, just a bunch of ye-olde-regex magic procedures.

Here are a few examples that you can probably relate to as an analogy to your latest Software Development Project

In case your Windows Server 2008 machine doesn't include a windows authentication scheme (see image below), do the following

Open up Server Manager (one way to do this is by right clicking the computer node from within the start menu and choosing  Manage). Expend the Roles node. Right click the Web Server (IIS) and choose Add Role Services. You'll get the following wizard, just scroll down a bit and check Windows Authentication under the security node.

If you've done everything right , you should also get the following option in IIS authentication pane

Here is how to do this on Vista
Adding Windows Authentication provider into IIS 7 on Vista

I had an idea for a cool mashup that included a map , countries coordinates and another secret ingredient.  But to my surprise, I couldn't find a free Country to  gps coordinates Database. which means that even though Columbus discovered America more than 5 centuries ago there are still some uncharted lands in the virtual world.

Sure, there are some interesting GPS information Databases about Airports , Hotels and other special interests but I just couldn't find a very basic type of I'll give you the country name and I'll get a GPS coordinates (somewhere in the middle of the country) in return.

So I've started this wikipedia page, it is basically just a list of countries and an empty place to enter a longitude, latitude coordinates.

How can you help you ask ? One simple way is to go to any maps services such as Google maps or Live's maps service, zoom in to a center location of your favorite country, extract the GPS coordinates of that point and paste them in the wikipedia page for all to use freely .

Here is a very short tutorial on how to extract the coordinates from Google maps , the same similar technic can be used for Live's maps service as well

3 states are already tagged with their coordinates, just 254 to go !
let's see how long it takes for the whole list to get completely filled with would countries coordinates.  

In one of my previous posts , I provided an example of embedding GPS coordinates into a JPEG image. I had a bug!. It only took care of the eastern side of the world.
A comment by John about not working with negative longitude numbers identified the issue, thanks John!. 
Well, watching the Olympics , and the concept of living in a global village have motivated me to sit down and fix my code so all of you people on the left side of the prime meridian can embed you Geo location in your Jpegs as well.

JPEG GPS Coordinates GeoTag Exif Example

China wants to be in first place in the total medals count in the 2008 games.
Here are three easy ways to see if the can stand up their word.

1. Search  Google for Beijing 2008. The first entry would be a simple and clean table with the result.
   
   
2. Check out this official Beijing 2008 results page.
   
   
3. Embed this NBC medal count widget in your website.
   

For other Beijing 2008 related info, check my pervious post

 

I hope the title of this post is not too much misleading, by IT I don't mean to talk about which brand of CPUs is being used to host the official games website, or which Imaging technology is being used by which vendor. By IT I mean that I need and want to see the Olympic games Information ,now show me which Technology I can use to get it .
Well there is of course the official Beijing and Olympics games sites. But since according to my world time zone a lot of the events would take place when I sleep or when I'm at work so watching it on a plain TV wouldn't always be an option. With RSS I can get interesting almost real time results streamlined into my favorite RSS reader. Now the only problem is to actually find the RSS feeds. The official Beijing web site has a 13 category RSS page which was actually a bit hard to find (there is a small RSS link at the bottom of the main page). For me the most interesting one is Sports News: News on the Games' sport events , only trouble is that it only includes a segment of the first sentence. You have to actually press the link to read the full detail.

There are also some more RSS feeds :

• Eurosport's - Which currently looks a bit lame (only one post)
• MSN/ Fox sports
• Yahoo's

But the king of them all RSS feeds has got to be NBC's

It's the king because it lets you customize your RSS feeds according to nation or sport events or other relevant criteria. Here is for example the rss feed for just the Sailing events or Judo events

NBC also offers a set of gadgets that can be embedded in your favorite Web 2.0 social network ,or on your desk as a vista widget or in your blog (if your reading this from the actual web site , check out the results and schedules widget on the right pane)
I highly recommend checking it out. more info here

So what can I also get on other media fronts ? you would expect that IPTV would be huge by now , getting a boost by this global event. Well , the situation here is not that great.
Here are some IPTV options:

• Eurosport
• Youtube channel
• CCTV.com

Youtube's dedicated channel is a bit ironic , it only serves countries where the IOC failed to sell exclusive rights which means , in my guess , that these are countries that the economic situation is not that good , which also means that a broadband connection needed to watch YouTube's streams is not that common ;-(

There are also some podcasts and videocasts
http://www.olympic.org/uk/news/podcast/podcast_vodcast_help_uk.asp

And your occasional on location video blogs

And there are also some Media you should probably avoid. here is a toolbar designed for the Olympics [ttp://2008summergames.ourtoolbar.com] (add a prefix h to this url) http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url say they are a shareware legit site, yet I would double check the end user and setup to understand what's really in there that they are installing.

I just wish that there was a cool results screen saver.

Good luck to all of the athletes!! 

Both IE7 and Firefox 3 are embedded RSS on page aware, meaning that in order to improve user usability they provide a one click RSS subscribe button.
Here is how it looks like :

• IE7 when enabled (from cnn.com)
  
  
• Firfox enabled
  
  
  
• IE7 not enabled (from bbc.com)
  
  
• Firefox not enabled
  

Now you ask , what makes these nice buttons to be enabled or disabled. It's pretty simple, it is basically just a <link> directive placed within the <head><head/> section of the page.

here is a simple example

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Roiy Zysman's Blog" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/zroiy">

Not so much software related , but something to keep in mind when designing user interfaces aimed for security purposes.

From the following picture, guess which buttons are being used for typing in the parking lot gate code ...

BTW, this is a real life parking lot code key..