Mike Nimer's Blog - Travel

I want to see this - looks like I need to go to Berlin

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 14:05:00 -0400

"Placed at the lobby of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Berlin, the 25 meters high AquaDom is the largest cylindrical aquarium ever built." http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2007/01/aquadom-worlds-largest-cylindrical.html

My world, according to Flickr

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:28:00 -0400

I've written 2 versions of this app myself and now Flickr has done it. This week Flickr added support for geo tagging photos. There are still some things I don't like about the Flickr version. For instance I hate that all of the photos are broken into pages of 250 photos. My current count is 4000+ geo tagged photos, which means 20+ pages. And I'd love to add a time line so I can see photos taken by a date range. Perhaps a little animation so I can watch photos of my travels - I went there, then there, then there. But, this is Flickr. The company with a simple api. And with the new support for Geo data in the api building an application like this will be even easier. My last version took 1 http request to get the photos and 1-2 more http requests per photo to get the geo data, depending on if it was stored in the EXIF data or as a Tag. As you can guess that could result in hundreds of http requests for 1 search. The updates the Flickr Api, should let me consolidate this down to 1 http request. Guess it's time to start on the 3rd version of my Flickr/Flex2/Map Mashup. Check it out. My World, according to Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nimer/map/

Flex2 (beta 2), Flickr, Gooogle mashup

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 15:11:00 -0400

I thought I would share this photo/map application that I've been working on for a few a few weekends now. It's my buzzword bingo app, a Flex2, Flickr, Gooogle mashup. Snoopy in the desert
download the flex 2 beta 2 player
Some of you might remember a photo/map application I did a few years back. (Yes I'm a sucker for maps.) However, that was before the flick api and google maps were released. Not to mention it was very slow. With Flex2 and the flickr/google apis that are out there now, this was a lot easier to do. Thanks to flex2 I had a working prototype in just a few hours. And the experience is a lot better too. The first time around just finding and displaying a map was a pain, this time it was the easy part. And with the flickr api I didn't have to write any back end code to parse thousands of photos. Instead I just needed to spend many nights uploading them all to flickr (I still have more to upload but I reached my flickr monthly limit already, I need to wait for May to finish). I'm not done yet, some of my future plans include:

Allow others to link to this app, to show their own geotagged flickr photos. (I need to speed it up, and document the url params)
Speed up the flickr http calls with some server side threading. (flickr wants you to make a separate request for each photo to get the exif/tag data = SLOW)
Add support for Yahoo and ESRI maps too.
Add a regular flickr photo browser
Make a better looking slideshow popup (anyone have one already?)
Add some kind of timeline slider, like the one on google finance. (anyone have one already?)

I love the fact that this is possible

Mon, 16 May 2005 22:45:00 -0400

Last night, while we were in the Key West (a very cool city), we found out we need to get to Salt Lake City by Thursday. (why? that's another story) Anyway back to the subject, right now I'm driving through Florida using my Motorola MPx220 for dialup while we dive. I'm getting about 230k transfer speed over the GPRS network. I've also found FireFox works better with Google maps over the slower speed (what a shock, I know). On a side note: we do have the GPS in the car, something I will never buy a car without again, we don't like the "fastest route" so I wanted to try some variations of the route to see if we can get a more scenic route with out loosing much time.