Chinese World Wind interest?

Out of curiosity I made a Google Blog search for "world wind ammianus" to see how my own blog ranked in searches.

Posts from this blog did come up, as well as many of my forum posts

One interesting search result was of a Chinese blog that actually referred to my screen name in reference to a recent SVN check-in log.
Original URL: http://www.cnblogs.com/wuhenke/archive/2009/12/11/1621459.html | Translate |

It is encouraging that a) there is someone out there doing something with World Wind.NET source code still and b) there seemed to be a lot of interest in the user comments in the .NET version and some members eager to learn the World Wind code.

Now I am anxious to analyze WorldWind analysis of the code, but each part of the collection and study how knowledge point, at this stage is only supporting them to learn from WorldWind source. 我最终会基于WorldWind的学习，开发自己的应用的，到时候会放很多DEMO的。 I will eventually WorldWind-based learning, develop their own applications, by that time will be playing a lot of DEMO's. - Seamless Customer

and this

I would like to start learning ww, every class, every method, every line of code there I would like to learn. 。 . - Xue-tao

I made a comment on their site (in English, if I can use google translate, so can they). If we could get some new developers working on the code maybe that might spark more involvement and participation of others either on the forums or in actual bug fixes or features? Obviously language might be a barrier.

Imagio WinMo Update: Korean fonts, Android OS

This blog discusses some do-it-yourself steps for installing Korean fonts.

Requires a 3rd-party WinMo registry editor

http://leeblood.com/2008/02/16/windows-mobile-6-changing-the-system-font-adding-korean-support/

It is from 2008 and for Windows Mobile 6.1. My phone is 6.5 so may be no luck.

Also in my quest to find out more about what kinds of things I can do with this phone I found this thread at ppcgeeks forums where they booted a version of the Android OS on the HTC Imagio phone.

http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?s=59f047bb80ecfbf608588ea4f9f4b35e&t=104666


If that becomes relatively standard in the future it would be the best of both worlds. How would Verizon feel about it?

WinMo phone

Just got a new phone this weekend. It was an HTC Imagio on the Verizon network.

I was really looking to upgrade from my 2 year old Samsung "dumb"phone with a cracked LCD over. I don't use cell phones very much, but I do travel for work a fair amount and the ability to get on the internet from anywhere appealed to me. I spent about a weekend researching, the iPhone is the cool gadget still, lots of my friends and colleagues have them, but I didn't want to switch to AT&T, not that I am a huge fan of Verizon, at least their service is reliable and consistent.

Verizon basically markets the new Motorola Droid and HTC Imagio, along with Crackberries as the top "smart phones" currently with the HTC Droid Eris being the cheaper Android OS offering. I was drawn to the Imagio solely because of it's "Global-Ready" capabilities. Like I said I travel for work, and recently have been assigned European and African accounts. A single phone i could use while traveling would be helpful.

The Verizon sales people initially pushed the Droid, then switched when I mentioned the global travel needs. I wasn't sure about Imagio because it is WinMo, I've never used it before, in general it seems to have a not-as-good-as iPhone or Android vibe. The Imagio has what appears to be better screen-resolution though they claimed it was the same. My wife and I did a simultaneous test of playing the same youtube clip on each phone side by side. The Droid was more pixilated, and the actual video size on the screen was a smaller square. Both took quite a while to load the clip. Actually a nice touch on the Imagio was it showed a % complete while waiting.

In the end, due to these factors I settled on the Imagio and WinMo over Droid and Google. If there were a global ready android phone it probably would have been a different story.

So far my experience has been fairly good. Call quality, what little I've tried has been much better than previous phone. The touch screen is good, I love the stylus, even though the on-screen keyboard has given me no problems. The app-store "Windows Marketplace" is somewhat limited, but I can't really compare it to anything else.

Big disappointment was no native support for Asian fonts/languages, especially Korean. I was surpised by this. I figured given how fairly easy it is to install Korean IME/fonts on Windows it would be similar on Windows Mobile. Apparently not. Also the WinMo apps may not even by internationalized even if the fonts were there. Fairly bush league for 2010 on a "global-ready" phone.

Project Update: One year on

Around one year ago, I was working very hard on some unpleasant projects at work at what seemed like a dead-end position in terms of where I wanted to be in my career. One aspect of this was that I wanted to be hard-core developer where as my current position was more consulting-oriented for a particular vendor.

Not being in a development position for about 3 years prior, I wanted to try to get some development experience under my belt in order to help landing a job in the field I wanted to be in. Given that I was not getting this opportunity at my job, I felt contributing to an Open Source project would be personally gratifying and giving me the chance to get deep into the code of an application and prove myself.

I made it a goal of 2009 to contribute to an open source project. This was my intention.

I focused on World Wind, given my enthusiasm for NASA, space travel, and geography. It was C#.NET which was a language I hadn't used in years and seemed interesting enough.

I found the code difficult, it took a long time for me to make any contributions, at first this was because of lack of documentation, but also lack of clear process or community support. No fault of anyone on the WorldWind project but it seemed to continually lose support, members and momentum throughout my involvement in 2009. What I didn't realize when I started is that although WorldWind has the NASA name, NASA has officially moved all their support to the Java WorldWind SDK project and virtually abandoned the .NET version. Not only does this mean that their full time developers who originally wrote WW.NET no longer made any contributions, they also removed the JIRA defect tracking site for the .NET project. This makes it impossible to track our progress, or even determine the goals of what needs to be fixed. I even got frustrated with this so I created a "bug tracking" page on the World Wind wiki just so we had something tangible to work against.

So after a year spent part-time on this OpenSource effort, I have made a number of contributions, the largest being perhaps the download code refactoring. I've also contributed to the project management side by documenting issues and pushing along input and contribution from the team members still active. I regret not being able to get into developing new features rather than just bug fixing, but in the Fall of 2009 my real-world job took precedence as I was assigned a literal Death March project.

As things stand we have a stable build with a number of fixes implemented. We have been discussing making a release of this build as World Wind 1.4.1, but as of this week I am still unclear on what steps are done to build and package this release. I gather it involves updating the installer and getting NASA to do some testing to sign-off on the changes. At the very least we have been giving people guidance on how to build their own WW app from the latest source with our changes. I suppose my efforts will live on.

In 2010 I am considering embarking on a personal web-site project. This will probably take most of my time outside of work, but I am very excited about this effort as I have control over it and can make a difference. Contributing to World Wind was an good experience but I feel it is time to move in a different direction, at least for the time being.

How does Visual Studio include Referenced Libraries?

A problem was raised on the forums a number of times about World Wind building in Release mode.

If you checked out the source from SVN, and opened the project in Visual Studio, then tried to build in release mode you would receive errors such as:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0. 50727\Microsoft.Common.targets : warning MSB3245: Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "Tao.OpenGl.Glu". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0. 50727\Microsoft.Common.targets : warning MSB3245: Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0. 50727\Microsoft.Common.targets : warning MSB3245: Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "Tao.OpenGl.ExtensionLoader". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.

C:\Apache2\htdocs\html\WWsrc\PluginSDK\T iledWFSPlacenameSet.cs(10,7): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'ICSharpCode' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Answer given by forum member, James_in_Utah:

I think the problem is that those DLLs may not be checked in for the "Release" mode build. Try building in Debug mode. That should work. Then find the dlls mentioned, Tao.OpenGl.Glu.dll, ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll in the Debug target directory and just copy them to the Release mode target directory. We really probably should check these into the release mode build target directory in SVN, but I don't have privs to do that.

I added these two .dlls to the Release folder in World Wind SVN and commited the changes.

This brought the question to my mind, this seems to be a bad practice to check in to source control the contents of the output directory. I see that the .dlls are referenced under project references. Shouldn't there be a way that on build it copies the required .dlls to the Release folder or Debug folder as necessary?.

Unfortunately no one on the forum seemed to have a response and a quick web search revealed no answers.

Stars3d fix

I commited my changes to the Stars3d plugin. This was Issue #4. After a few days this was registered by ohloh as my 3rd commit. Also after some time my kudos rank registered this work and bumped me up to level 4. Hooray (sarcasm).

Right now the dev forums for World Wind are like a ghost town, I've replied several times and not heard anything back, no one else is currently working on fixes, and the one guy who was, has not checked in his changes to the trunk.

Since I am so busy with work, I can't do more, would like to keep this momentum going forward and maybe pick up some interest.

I went to Amsterdam two weeks ago for work. Next week I will be in London for two weeks for the same. Doesn't look like I will work on this anytime soon.

ohloh kudos

It seems that when I made commits for the two fixes that ohloh did get updated and track my commits to SVN which is good. But although I have an account there with a username which is the same as my SVN login "ammianus" it didn't associate that those commits were made by the me who had set up the ohloh "ammianus" account.

I guess it makes sense, since these are external systems, how can ohloh assume that just because someone made a commit to some repository and they happen to have the same screen name that they are the same person. I guess it makes sense so people can't accidentally take credit for other's work, although it seems there is nothing preventing someone from maliciously doing so.

While my starting "Kudos" rank was 1 (lowest), it looked like the "ammianus" who was logged as making commits to WorldWind had a level 4 Kudos rank. I thought that was cool. But when I associated my ohloh account to those commits, my rank went back down to 1. I wonder if the system takes some time to update? We'll wait and see for the gadget on the right to update.

Meanwhile, while I was traveling last few weeks on business and generally busy with work, seems that all momentum on the WW.NET seems to have petered out. I'll try to kick start things, I have one more bug fix to commit up my sleeve.