The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) has provided an RSS feed with the latest updates on bush fires in NSW for a while now, and it’s a geoRSS feed with lat/long data included so you can see where each incident happens.  However it wasn’t until this week, when their incident and major updates feeds were included in the data.australia.gov.au repository that I noticed something else.  They don’t just have a location point for each fire, they have the actual boundary coordinates included.

This means that Google Maps can create a polygon overlay of each fire, showing its size and location.  I’ve included it in Google Maps, you can see it here.  Each place marker includes useful information like description of the location, what council area it’s in, what type of fire it is and the latest updates.

But additionally, if you zoom into one of the incidents, you can see the outline of the location of the fire and really get a feel for its size and what property it’s near.

After the devastation of last season’s bushfires, and the fact that this season is expected to be very bad, this service is one of many tools people can use to keep up to date.

It’s also worth giving props to the NSW Rural Fire service. They’re the only fire service in the country that is providing this level of detail in their public news feeds, and keeping it updated.  Additionally, as far as I can see, theirs is the only dataset on the data.australia.gov.au that is actually a live data service rather than a CSV or Excel file download.  If the government wants the data provided to be used they’re going to need to provide more live data. Or at least more up to date than last years crime data.

The map below has the RFS incident feed embedded, so it will update as the RSS feed from the RFS is updates. You can click on the link at the bottom to go to Google Maps, where you can add this map to your ‘My Maps’ section for later.

View Larger Map

News is that Google will be partnering with iLike and LaLa to provide a music service.  TechCrunch has been pimping the news the last couple of days, with the report being that an announcement is due next week. There is much discussion over what form it will take.  GigaOm’s Paul Bonanos is sceptical that the new feature will involve actually selling streaming/downloads, where as TechCrunch is more upbeat.

While I am interested in seeing what Google’s play will be with this (assuming that the rumours aren’t all hot air) it really underwhelms me, as I know pretty much for sure that I won’t be able to access it here in Australia. Or if it is just a music search engine, the vast majority of its results will be unavailable to me. Pandora is unavailable, last.fm has us on the ‘lite’ version, LaLa is locked down. Even iTunes, which we do have access to, is limited in what they can sell to us dirty non-Americans. 

This is not the fault of any of these sites.  This is the fault of the rights holders, the record labels.  Their inability to see the value in ‘foreign’ markets and their lack of imagination when it comes to monetisation has led to this ridiculous geotarding that we see not just in the music industry but also in the movie, tv and book publishing industries. As I’ve mentioned before, my money is as good as anyone’s (better than, if this trend continues) why won’t you let me pay you for your products?

This is just all kinds of awesome:

Joe W-A was miffed when the L4D campaign mod he’d been working on wasn’t deemed awesome enough to warrant him being flown to Valve HQ to preview L4D2. Other modders were, mostly to get them onside as peer-leaders to counter the odd anti-L4D2 community uprising happening at the time. Anyway, Joe managed to get Gabe Newell to agree to fly to Brisbane, Australia to check out the mod-in-progress – provided Joe paid the airfare. “I was just joking”, said Gabe today. With pure internet inventiveness, Joe got the community rallied and raised the fare in a couple of days. Today in Sydney, the great meeting took place, and we were privileged to witness it.

The site he created to raise the funds is here, which has screenshots of the email conversations between Joe and Gabe. Three days to raise AU$3000, now that’s impressive crowd-sourcing!

So as everyone knows, the east coast of Australia was covered with a massive dust-storm.

The fiery haze was the result of the sun hitting the blanket of dust, Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Jane Golding said.

"The reason for the dust is we had some really strong winds in the inland areas of NSW and in South Australia for a sustained period yesterday," she said.

"That’s lifted a whole lot of dust off the ground because it’s quite dry out there. Many of those areas are still drought affected."

The lifted dust had been carried by the winds into Sydney.

"I’ve not seen anything like this before," Ms Golding said.

My wife has some photos from our house this morning showing what it looked like when we woke up:

Weatherzone has some satellite imagery showing the dust, but it’s mixed up with cloud cover too. The Japanese MTSAT satellite has a good wide shot of Australia showing the dust cloud stretching all the way up to Queensland.

But by far the best footage is this video from Broken Hill in western NSW. (For those who don’t know this is where Broken Hill is)

Nick Bradbury has just released the latest beta version of his great RSS reader FeedDemon. With the new update comes a bunch of new items & so that means that my old localisation file is now out of date.

Since I got to play with a pre-release version (thanks Nick!) I had a chance to update the language file that comes with version 3 to replace Synchronize with Synchronise, Color with Colour and so on. So if you like your colourful language, you can grab the file here after downloading FeedDemon. To install the file either click on the link to the language file while browsing in FeedDemon, or download the file & copy it to C:Program FilesFeedDemonDatalang (Assuming you’ve installed FeedDemon there) and then double-click on the file.

One thing to note: in the Tools menu, the ‘Synchronization Options’ menu item uses the ‘z’ as the keyboard shortcut.  Because ‘Open FeedStation’ already uses the s, I’ve make the ‘Synchronisation Options’ use the ‘y’ as the shortcut letter.

Any mistakes or missed words please let me know! There is a topic on the NewsGator localisation forums for this language file too.

First, here’s the obligatory Harbour Bridge & Opera House shot.

Now, Google has introduced it’s Street View imagery for Australia.  And when I say Australia I mean all of Australia

Except Darwin.  Sorry Mum & Dad, no street view for you.

Those blue lines are roads where street view is available.  This means that some poor guy had to drive all the way across the Nullarbor in one of the camera cars.

Anyway it is quite amazing, privacy complaints notwithstanding, how much detail you can see.  Here’s the Esplanade at Manly Beach, where you can see the blurring effect (actually you can see it being a little over-zealous, it’s blurred the traffic light too!) .  Here’s the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the ANZAC statue on the ANZAC Bridge, looking back down Leura Mall or down the main street of Beechworth. 

It’s a bit of a pity that it was overcast on the days when the shot a lot of the Sydney imagery, but this is very cool.  It’s a game changer for real-estate too.  The real estate agent hasn’t got a shot of the outside of the house?  Doesn’t matter, you can probably look it up.  Trying to find a location, now maps can not only give you the directions, but show you what the place looks like too.

This was actually quite handy today. I needed to find a factory to pick up a new trampoline mat & thanks to Google Maps, not only could I find how to get there, I knew what the building looked like when I was looking for the street.

The Google Australia blog has more details and a video about the new release.  So go check it out.