8 Ways to Sunday

Anyone out there who’s read Neal Stephenson’s breakthrough novel Snow Crash probably remembers “Earth,” the software that used satellite images, GIS data, street maps, and more to provide Hiro Protagonist with a zoomable 3D view of the world from the outer atmosphere all the way down to the street level. Well, the Planet Earth Project in Australia is going a long way toward reproducing that software on today’s computers.

The software is currently in a 1.0 demo version — virtual a virtual geographical explorations of the Dolomite Mountains in Italy, the Tasmanian wilderness, and Sydney, Australia are available. The hardware requirements are a little steep for my aging computer, but I’d love to hear about the experiences of anyone who’s had a chance to try the software!

Six Apart, the company behind the industry-leading CMS Movable Type (used at this site), recently announced the pending release of an alpha test for Movable Type 3.0. This will be the first major-version upgrade for the software in quite awhile, and should incorporate some of the features seen in the company’s TypePad hosted blogging service along with several new enhancements.

I’m excited about the new release, but I’m concerned about backward compatibility. One of the announced enhancements is a new plugin API that allows more extensibility for the software. This is great, but will plugins developed for version 2.6x still work?

This blog and my photoblog have evolved to become dependent on several special-purpose plugins, and I’d like to know how much of that infrastructure is going to break before I dive in with a new version. Anyone out there with some insights into this?