Exploring the Amazon / / No Comments National Geographic’s Into the Amazon takes you on an impressive virtual tour of one of the world’s most breathtaking and ecologically vital regions. From its source high in the Andes, the Amazon River carves its way through dense rainforests, winding past diverse ecosystems teeming with life, before finally reaching the Atlantic Ocean. For two years, 16 scientists journeyed along the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Amazon, Exploring
Links For You (3/22/25) / / No Comments Happy Saturday folks. I just spent an hour or two playing "Avowed" (great game) and eventually need to get off my butt and start some bread I want to bake today, so I thought I’d put it off a few minutes more with a quick blog post. As always, these links are meant to be informative, helpful, and fun, so I hope they brighten your day. Date Formatting in JavaScript (Again) Date formatting in JavaScript, or, well, any language, feels like a topic that just keeps coming up. When I saw this link I initially didn’t bother clicking, assuming it was about the Intl spec. However, it instead talks about toLocaleDateString and toLocaleTimeString, both of which I’m sure I’ve... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/22/25, links
State of the Global Climate 2024 / / No Comments MET Office visualization of near surface temperatures since 1970 2024’s Climate in CrisisThe World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) annual flagship report was published yesterday, and it makes for deeply concerning reading. Each year, the WMO releases its State of the Global Climate Report, providing an authoritative scientific summary of global climate trends and extreme weather events.The& Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 2024, Climate, global, State
BoxLang Quick Tips – PDF Generation / / No Comments Today’s BoxLang quick tip is one near and dear to my heart, generating PDFs. Creating dynamic, expressive PDFs is fairly easy. Let me show you how. As before, I’ve got a video version as well so you would rather watch that, just skip to the end. Step One – The Module By default, BoxLang doesn’t ship with PDF capabilities built-in, you need to add it via the PDF Module. This can be done quickly via the CLI: install-bx-module bx-pdf Installing the module adds three new tags to your BoxLang runtime: bx:document – This is the core tag for PDF generation. Everything inside it will either be content or directives (see the items below) to control what’s produced. bx:documentitem... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Generation, Quick, tips
Air Tours of the World / / No Comments TripGeo’s new Air Tours app is an engaging and immersive way to virtually explore cities around the world. This interactive web application combines Google Maps’ 3D imagery, Street View, and aerial perspectives to provide you with four different perspectives of some of the world’s most iconic locations. Whether you’re a travel enthusiast, an urban explorer, or simply someone looking to get a new Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Tours, World
Building a Jira Search Tool in BoxLang / / No Comments Developers seem to have a love/hate (or perhaps hate/despise) relationship with Jira. I’ve never minded it, but the biggest issue for me is that if I haven’t used it in a while, it can be overwhelming. Yesterday I was thinking about this and wondering if perhaps I could build my own tooling to interact with Jira via an API, if it even had one. Turns out, of course they have an API and it’s not terribly difficult to use. With that in mind, I whipped up a quick tool to search Jira via the command line with BoxLang. Jira API Basics The docs for Jira’s API are pretty good and cover the huge set of operations you can perform with it. Your root API url will be based on your... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, building, Jira, search, tool
Generative Images with Gemini (New Updates) / / No Comments Back in January of this year, I wrote up my experience testing out Google’s Imagen 3 APIs to generate dynamic images. A few days ago, Google updated their support with new experimental support in Flash. I’ve been playing with this the last few days and have some code and samples to share with you, but before that, what exactly changed? Gemini and Imagen 3 There are now two different models, and different APIs, to generate images with Google’s AI platform. The new one is Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental and the previous one (the one covered in my blog post) is Imagen 3. Of course the next question is, why two, and what do you pick? The docs do a great job of explaining the differences,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Gemini, Generative, images, updates
The Future of Urban Mobility / / No Comments This impressive animated data visualization shows the average levels of traffic on Dubai roads over the course of one day. It is one of a series of mapped visualizations in Moving forward: What drives the future of urban transport, a data-driven exploration of urban mobility in Dubai. Dubai city has one of the highest car ownership rates in the world, with one vehicle for every two residents, Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: future, Mobility, Urban