Google recently released street-level maps for Australia and New Zealand, yay! I checked my DNS LOC maps page to see whether street maps would show up for me. They didn't. Apparently, Google Maps released version 2 of their API a couple of months ago and I hadn't upgraded yet.

After upgrading my page to version 2, street level maps for New Zealand magically appeared. Now you can DNS LOC hewgill.net and zoom in to see approximately where we live!

I made a new user icon today.



In map stores here, you can buy "south up" maps which offer a new perspective on the arrangement of land masses on our planet. Of course, many of these are published by Australian or New Zealand companies and show those countries near the top centre.

I've also changed my xearth desktop image to be a "south up" map. It's fun!

Amy is well into her round the world trip - 114 days so far! Back when she started she said she wanted some kind of map of her travels online. I said I could do that, and about two months ago I started working on a map page for her.

Finally, I have added enough information to the page to make it interesting. Here it is: Amy's Round The World Trip Maps

Behind the scenes, there is a Python script that reads an input text file containing place names and locations, each leg of the trip including mode of transportation, and boundary coordinates for the small maps on the right. The map data (land and water) comes from xearth. To find the location of some of the more obscure place names, I look them up in the GEOnet Names Server from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. I drew the little transportation icons myself, after failing to find an appropriate set online. The page is laid out with CSS, and since I don't really know all the good CSS layout tricks, things tend to bunch together and overlap if your browser window is too narrow. And the small maps use the same (rectangular) projection as the main map, which makes them look squashed, especially higher latitude locations like the UK (it should be taller - Edinburgh to Swansea should look nearly twice as far as Swansea to London).

Yes, sometimes I do this sort of thing just to play with technology.