Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

I am not a big cricket fan (Understatement of the year…) but this is something really interesting. As some of you might know the cricket World cup is currently going on and is a big craze in India/England/Australia/and a lot of other countries.

Now Sky Television has the exclusive rights to broadcast the matches live so if you want to watch the show live you have to pay them for it. There’s nothing wrong with it but in places that don’t have SKY TV it becomes and issue. There are websites that broadcast the matches live but they are illegal and usually very slow with horrible picture quality.

There is a website called cricinfo.com that solves this issue in a very unique way:

Cricinfo 3D is based on public domain information gathered by our scorers who record a number of factors such as where the ball pitched, the type of shot played and where the ball goes in the field,” said a Wisden statement. “That data is then fed as an xml to anyone who has Cricinfo 3D running on their desktops and the software generates an animation based on this data.”

The match coverage is delayed by between 3 and 12 balls during the match and its still in Beta so might not work perfectly. But still Pretty cool eh?

Check it out: http://www.cricinfo.com/3d/

Thanks to OpenDotDotDot for the link.

– Suramya

Here’s a different twist of the usual mod where users modify their computer case so that you can look into the innards of the CPU. In this version, instead of creating a window looking inside we put in a LCD monitor in the CPU. Which looks really cool. Below is a pic of what it might look like.

I have a flat screen sitting under my desk from an old system I bought a couple of years ago so maybe I will try to set this up sometime in the near future when I get some free time.

The site has some other really interesting projects also. Check it out if you are interested in DIY projects.

Source: Inventgeek.com – LCD Window Kit

– Suramya

This is a really interesting idea. It uses the power of open source/wiki/group efforts to create a free map of the planet. Now you might ask why do we need a free map of the world? Can’t we just use Google Maps or Yahoo Maps to get a map? After all they don’t charge us for access…

Well yes and no. In the open source world there are two kinds of free: “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. Google Maps are free as in beer, not as in speech.

Basically since Google has to pay for the mapping data it can’t make it available for free. So even though I can access it for free online and get directions I can’t export the map data and create a map to be used on a GPS from it. That would violate Google’s copyright. You can’t copy it to your local system and fix a street name that they got wrong or add new items to the map.

To fix this issue OpenStreetMap was born. It uses GPS coordinates fed to it by users to a Wiki like system and allows users to fill in information like street names etc. Which gives us surprisingly accurate and upto date data as whenever anything changes (e.g. a new street is added) anyone can edit the map and make the changes.

Check it out here: OpenStreetMap.

I think I will be using my GPS on my trips from now on and upload the tracking data collected to the site.

Thanks to TechRepublic for the link.

– Suramya