NSW Rural Fire Service current incidents map

Posted on October 27, 2009 by glenn

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

Oh look, another wonderful music service that I won’t be able to access

Posted on October 22, 2009 by glenn

No Entry 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?

Video of the Australian Left 4 Dead modder who flew Valve's Gabe Newell out to Australia

Posted on October 7, 2009 by glenn

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!

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Posted on September 23, 2009 by glenn

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)

Localising FeedDemon 3 for Australia

Posted on April 6, 2009 by glenn

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.

Google Maps now has Street View for Australia

Posted on August 5, 2008 by glenn

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.

iTunes now selling Australian TV shows for $2.99 an episode

Posted on June 25, 2008 by glenn

From the SMH:

Apple iTunes users in Australia can now buy television shows – some of which have long been offered for free elsewhere – for the first time at $2.99 each.

After a protracted tussle with local networks and the studios for rights to distribute episodes to Australians via the internet, Apple has secured deals with the ABC and Nine networks in Australia, as well as Disney, ABC and MTV in the US.

Local shows on offer include Summer Heights High, McLeod’s Daughters, Canal Road and Sea Patrol, while US favourites are also available including Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, The Hills, South Park, Pimp My Ride and Scrubs.

Single episodes cost $2.99 but unlike overseas there are no discounts for buying full seasons. In the US, where TV shows have been available through iTunes since 2005, individual episodes cost $US1.99.

‘bout time. Hopefully this is the beginning of some better online entertainment content for Australia

Google's moving in next door

Posted on March 18, 2008 by glenn

Google really is busy here in Australia. First they announce Transit for Perth (and other states to come soon), and now I hear they’re building their new headquarters next door to my office. They’re currently across Darling Harbour from us over in Darling Park here, but they’re moving here. It looks like a big block of concrete there, but it’s actually a construction site now. Pyrmont is turning into a media hub, with Channel 7 next door too, and a whole bunch of other small media agencies near by. Channel 10 is just up the road too.

The new Google building is been billed as a new ‘green’ style of building, apparently “Workplace6, a joint venture between site owners GPT and builder Citta Property Group, will generate one-quarter of its own power supply, take in harbour water to release heat and recycle sewage to flush toilets and irrigate nearby parks”. Makes sense, sounds like Google is expanding its solar power scheme. Wonder if we’ll get a monitoring page like that for Sydney.

This Lifehacker article has an image of what it’s going to look like.

Sydney’s Googlers will move into the new building in 2009. The press release was long on “dull but worthy” details such as “Workplace6 is NSW’s first 6 Star Green Star building, going above and beyond green office standards for Australia.”
We can only assume from the brevity of the press release that Google Australia has conceded that Google Zurich – which features a fireman’s pole or a slide to get you down to the ground floor in a quick and fun fashion – reigns supreme as the “cool” Google office. Aww.

Google Maps (and Earth) have super-high res for Sydney

Posted on March 16, 2008 by glenn

(via Simon Job) Google Maps now has maximum resolution images for Sydney. Not just Sydney actually, here’s the Penrith Regatta Centre. How about the Three Sisters at Katoomba. Newcastle’s covered too, and it looks like everywhere in between is covered too! This is a huge update. Doesn’t goes so far south though, the high res layers seem to stop at Waterfall.

Cool things we can now see:

The Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor
Looks like there’s a test match on at Telstra Stadium (Sydney Olympic Park)
Boats at the marina at Nelson Bay

Oh and sorry, but Melbourne doesn’t have this yet.

1 millionth Australian domain name registered

Posted on December 3, 2007 by glenn

From auDA:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator, today announced the 1 millionth .au domain name had been registered.

"We are pleased to announce that the 1 millionth .au domain registration is elite-finance.com.au" said Chris Disspain, auDA’s CEO. "We congratulate the Registrant of elite-finance.com.au for being part of this momentous occasion."

Adrian Kinderis, Managing Director of AusRegistry, the Registry Operator and wholesale provider for all commercial and non-commercial .au domain names concurs, "We too offer our congratulations, 1 million .au domains is a huge achievement for the .au namespace and for Australian internet users. It was only 5 years ago the tally was close to 250,000."

You really don’t see the growth in domain names that you see in other countries, especially the US, due to auDA’s very strict registration policies. This is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. Doubling in size in 5 years isn’t exactly amazing growth, but given the regulation of the market, it is a positive sign.

I’d like to see some data on the breakdown of those domains, what type of domains (com.au, net.au, org.au, etc.), what’s the actual growth rate & is it increasing or decreasing. That would give us a better picture of how the market is going.

Development on a shoestring

Tag Archives: Australia