Richard Hall told the 15 members present that Microsoft had sent some door prizes in honor of the release of Vista. Richard put names in a hat and Carl Mayrath drew the prize winners. Of the expensive door prizes, Fred Greene drew the MS Flight Simulator program and Carl drew his own name for the 2GB thumb drive. No one wanted the Vista pre-release copy so Richard said he would load it on Luggie4 as soon as the computer was ready.

As Gregg Wonderly set up to do the Google Earth demo, Richard explained the demise of Luggie3, the luggable computer that had been used at previous meetings. He said that the motherboard had a serious problem and that a new one had been installed, along with a new CPU and memory. More on that process at a future meeting.

Greg gave an encore of a previous demo of Google Earth. This time he demoed 4.0 Plus, a consumer version that costs $20 a year. Google Earth Pro is available for $100 a year for commercial use. There is also a free version that does not have composition and saving features of the paid versions.

Gregg showed the members his childhood home and points, data and polygons that he had saved in his old neighborhood representing where he had gone to school and other landmarks. He saved the information in KLM and KMZ file formats that can be sent to others or saved to disk. KMZ is the compressed file format of the KLM format. Gregg showed the HTML code that the files contain.

Gregg demoed how Wikipedia pictures, articles and other data are embedded into Google maps. A 2 GB data cache available on a user’s computer for the program data, but Gregg said that was not enough. Gregg’s laptop therefore had to continuously access the library wireless network to download data as Gregg roamed around the earth to look at maps, objects and data.

Gregg showed how a radio club had attached a GPS to an old weather balloon and launched it. Google Earth plotted the track of the balloon as it went to 75,000 feet and burst. Google Earth also plotted the fall of the balloon back to earth. Gregg demoed the locations of Ham radio operators all over the earth who had sent their locations to a central server. Gregg showed photos of parked airplanes near Tucson, the Chicago skyline, Miami OK, Poteau OK, Paris France and Brussels Belgium. The librarians interrupted the meeting to tell the members it was time to close the library. Gregg got a nice applause for his demo.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here