March, 2009


20
Mar 09

NASA Multimedia

Although not everyone, a few of us must definitely have dreamed of becoming an astronaut or are still fascinated by the facts of outer space. Fascination could have very well led to curiosity and in that process, anything associated with space reminds us of NASA.

So, if you are one of those space buffs looking for some fun time, the Multimedia section of NASA’s official website has some cool and interesting stuff ranging from images, videos, televised events, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, 3D resources and more.

RSS feeds are available for all the multimedia features as well as mission specific news. Updates can also be received via E-mail.

The one I like most is the NASA Image of the Day feed – one stunning image a day with description attached and available for download in different resolutions.

Here’s today’s image:


16
Mar 09

GeoRSS: A Technical Overview

GeoRSS is essentially a standard that enables RSS feeds to have location information encoded into them. Examples included news feeds, travel blogs and the well known real time earthquake feeds from USGS. Location information is of point type in most cases but can also include line, polygon and feature descriptions.

Geoweb Guru
has a concise technical description of the GeoRSS standard


11
Mar 09

Unzip multiple zip files using Shell script

For the Linux newbie from a noob

Scenario: You have quite a large number of zip files in a folder with other files and would like to avoid manual labor of extracting one file at a time.

The below graphic is the result of extracting an e-book downloaded from the web in compressed format.


Solution: A simple shell script to extract all files at one go.

Save the script with a .sh extension and make sure it resides in the same directory as the compressed files.

Fire up the terminal, cd to the target directory and execute the script using ./xxxx.sh

P.S.: Has been successfully tested on Ubuntu


2
Mar 09

Preview of ArcGIS Explorer 900

This is no new news (definitely not for users of ESRI products), but for all those who may have missed the buzz around the latest version of ArcGIS Explorer which is soon to be released during the ESRI Developer Summit ’09, here’s a quick preview of the upcoming 900 version.