google

Today, since it’s Saturday, we took a longer walk down the Cedar Lake trail.

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When I got home I went through my usual GPS download ritual and used the new Google Earth (I just had to try out Google Sky yesterday) to create my KML file and uploaded it to the server. However, when I tested it Google Maps kept complaining that it contained an error. No additional info, just that the file had an error. After scratching my head for a while and doing several google searches, I found this. For the impatient, I’ll summarize. The new Google Earth saves KML 2.2 files (the old one saved KML 2.1) but Google Maps doesn’t support KML 2.2. Doh!

The fix is easy though. Just open up the KML file and change the second line from:

<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.2">

to:

<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1">

Perhaps yesterday’s praise of Google was a little premature.

Google Maps just added a way to embed custom maps in web pages in much the same way you do with YouTube videos. For instance, here’s the walk we took today:

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I think I’ll be having a lot of fun with this feature.

Today I found myself having to answer an obscure math question: what’s hexadecimal 59 divided by hexadecimal FF. I didn’t have a physical scientific calculator available so I tried a number of web-based calculator widgets (because I didn’t want to install new software just to do some hex arithmetic and I certainly wasn’t going to do it manually with a computer sitting in front of me).

None of them could answer this silly question.

So then I thought, what about searching google? Maybe someone has posted the answer somewhere on the web. I went to google and typed in “0x59 / 0xFF” and got something even better.

Apparently google’s had a built in calculator/converter for a while now, but it was a rather pleasant surprise for me.