What is it?
It's an application suggested by Brendan Nelson on the Iain Banks discussion mailing list, The Culture. The idea was to have a globe showing the location of senders of e-mails as they arrive; no real purpose aside from the aesthetic.
What does it do?
This program relies on update.txt, which can either be the local file, or downloaded from the internet and updated on a server. I am currently working with Stephen Fulljames to get the requisite script online. You can spin the globe (in realtime) to view it from any angle, or select a person and it will spin round to view them. A spotlight appears over them so you can see them at night.
What doesn't it do?
Solve poverty. Cure cancer. Make tea.
Okay, Mr. Facetious, what doesn't it do that it's supposed to?
When coupled with the script, it will basically function as envisaged. However, there are additions I would like to make.
On the functionality side, it would ideally have an option to display all listees registered with the system. It relies on the external program wget to download the update file rather than using its own internet code; from looking over the wget source, it would be a lot of work to change that though.
On the graphical side, city lights should appear on the night side of the planet. The astronomical model is entirely innaccurate, resulting in solar and lunar eclipses every month, and randomly placed stars. Clouds are static, and could either be procedurally generated or downloaded from weather sites to generate a truly realistic, up-to-date depiction.
Other minor bits are listed in the readme.
Why is this page so sparse?
Because I'm busy. More on its way. Eventually.
| Australia | | Sorted labels |
| Overlapping labels | | Night encroaches on the West Coast of the USA. |
| Spotlight on the author | | And again |
| The sun bursts through the atmosphere... | | ...before slipping away |
| Two jewels hanging in space | | Moonrise |
Windows executable, version 1.0 beta revision 1. Please contact me (see home page) if you find any bugs.
Textures (required), unchanged since version 0.5. Place in same directory as executable.
For internet access, requires wget, available from: http://space.tin.it/computer/hherold/
You will need to enter the directory in which you have installed wget into the globe.ini configuration file. Be aware that (on my machine, at least) it's using the rubbish old DOS 8 character filenames (for reasons I have yet to fathom), and so directories such as C:\Program Files\wget\ will become C:\Progra~1\wget\
Requires the OpenGL extension, GLUT, available from http://www.opengl.org/developers/documentation/glut.html You will need to place the glut32.dll file in either your windows directory or in the same folder as globe.exe (latest version at time of writing is http://www.xmission.com/~nate/glut/glut-3.7.6-bin.zip)