Well, I said in a previous post that I was going to come over to the wordpress side, installed it and configured it most of today. I am very pleased with the results and I am not rushing to dismantle and retire my old blog now. For Archival purposes I am putting links to the old blog here:

Link to my old Blog

Link to my old Work Blog

Link to my old Minecraft Blog

Link to my old About Page

I am reviewing a proposal for my capstone project idea. I previously presented at ISCRAM 2012 for ASAP which takes qualitative text and generates maps to visualize locations mentioned in disaster reports. After going to ISCRAM and reviewing some of the amazing crisis management software ESRI was demonstrating I am revising my capstone idea to be more inclusive of other features. What my final capstone project may be a lot like GATOR, which is the state of Floridas Interactive Crisis map, except the one I am designing would be utilized by upstate New York, and created and managed by RIT. I will talk to Brian about my ideas later this week after I have more of it in writing.

ESRI provides a lot of out of the box Flex command center packages, which have widgets and other tools to incorporate and customize the operations map. Again many of these tools do not require a lot of technical knowledge to operate or implement. Although if you are going to fine tune, and fully customize the flex application you are going to need some programming chops. Right now I am working on a New York State Flood Crisis Response online map and iphone android app. The server side AJAX calls can easily be translated into Flex since I made it so the returned data is in XML, and highly reusable. I may take this and make a widget for the said Flex Interactive Crisis map. Below is a screenshot of the demonstration Operation map ESRI provides. I set it up to demonstrate the possible extent of a chlorine gas spill, it outlines the possible population that could be affected, and based on wind direction it shows which schools could be hit. Really neat stuff, and all included in one of the widgets, which then is installed into the Interactive Crisis Map provided by ESRI I was talking about above. Below is a link to GATOR, and the mississippi crisis map google through together for a flooding incident. The app I am coding now will try to include the stuff from the mississippi but applied for new york state flood detection and mapping. By making my code reusable now, I will hopefully be making a complete crisis map, and installing the new york state flood aspect as a widget.

Geospatial Assessment Tool for Operations and Response – FloridaDisaster.org GATOR

Mississippi Flood resource map for April 2011 – Created and provided by google

I started listening to some web development and netsec podcasts. I feel almost as if I have developing research software in a silo, and not getting to fully utilize newer techniques and technologies. The podcasts are getting me excited for the next time I get to dive into my website’s code. I recently just purchased some books to learn dojo javascript toolkit after a phone interview with a client side web developer at ESRI. I also got a book on dotnet in an effort to eventually break free from my php core, and explore some other frameworks and languages. Again the podcasts and discussion on there are great for learning what is trending in the industry. Check out some of the links to them below. Eventually when my workload dies down I will tackle possibly making my blog a standard wordpress blog, and maybe get rid of my current infrastructure. I was trying to resist using an out-of-the-box blog format because it was a personal challenge to code and maintain my own blog from scratch, but the tools and utilities of wordpress are so abundant it’s impossible for me to ignore the shortcomings of my blog just in the name of personal pride. But that is not for another month or so, because I have projects to finish before I walk during my commencement in three weeks. During the summer I will be working for the USGS in Golden Colorado. Their research project is identifying earthquakes using twitter and social media. Once I get moved in to my apartment down there, the absence of friends and a girl friend to talk to after work will give me tons of time to work on these things. Or perhaps the release of the newest Blizzard game Diablo 3 will curve my productivity. We will see

Great Netsec Podcast Site, by Martin Mckeay

Web Developer Podcast by Michael Kimsal a PHP developer

Dot Net Podcast by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell

Today I am hacking on a little bit of my website, as well as working on some final projects for the SMP group. Our mobile application is coming along nicely, although it needs a lot of javascipt/AJAX work, which is sort of my main responsibility to get working. To summarize our project into a small paragraph in a rushed blog post: We are creating an automated watershed model which would run when a flood is detected from a feed from water/flood sensors around new york state. The model will create a KML/KMZ which should resemble the flooded area. Richie, Mike, and myself are working on an android/iPhone using phonegap which will overlay this KML/KMZ flooded area over a map. Additional functionality would be to add schools, hospitals, and possibly nursing homes onto the map as they are vulnerable or important locations during an emergency. The main functionality is to provide emergency personnel, crisis responders or individuals affected by the flood with this important information, as well as a visual representation of the flooded area. If you have never seen a flood map before, I attached one to the blog post; it sort of sums up what we are shooting for in this application. The 6 person team consists of meteorology and imaging science majors working on the model for the flood, and the rest working on the client side application with me. Since most of our team has android 2.2 phones we are going to try to try to get our prototype to work on them first, then work on the Iphone version if there is time.