It’s a verb, a noun, an adjective and nothing if not an enigmatic company; the greatest place for a hacker to work, a pattern for the future, and more romantically, a cathedral awaiting Alan Turing’s soul. In January, I’ll be heading to NYC for a few months of working with the Google Maps Team—it’s hard not to be a little excited.

Once again it is that my life has taken a bizarre and unpredictable turn. Surprise is the flavour that keeps one anchored in the present; I have no complaints.

Some folks have noticed that Google Maps has a swanky new zooming control. You can now roll the mousewheel to activate it, or just double-click to zoom in one level on a particular point. This feature isn’t in the API yet, but there’s another new zoom control that’s really fabulous as well.

Andre Lewis has cooked up a classy draggable-rectangle zoom widget. Check it out on his page.

So I’m back online again.

The (otherwise super-terrific) folks at Dreamhost sprung a surprise Rails 1.0rc4 upgrade on us, and I was definitely not prepared for it.

At any rate, I’ve got little else to say, so I’ll just share two little experiments with you: The Google Maps Autolinker and the Ajaxian File Browser.

Neither of them is perfect, but 24 hours offline wasn’t perfect either.

Stuff this cool should be illegal. Seriously, I thought only the military had access to satellite maps this good. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get yourself over to Keyhole.com and sign up for the 7-day trial.

My housemates and I spent at least a good hour bouncing around the globe checking out various landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Washington Monument. It seems that some areas are censored out, such as the US Capitol, however the Pentagon is shown in stunning detail, as is my neighbourhood back home.

Unfortunately the town of Waterloo is considered ‘Rural Area’, so the images of campus are considerably less impressive. I was also disappointed to not see some international sights such as the Pyramids and the Palm in Dubai. In spite of these, it’s an absolutely stunning job they’ve done of compiling data from different mapping projects into a single globe like this. It’s my understanding that similar projects have been undertaken before, but never with this slick a result.

It’s hard to even describe, but it gives you such an incredible feeling of the enormity of the Earth when you’re able to zoom from street level to viewing the whole thing in just a few mouse movements.

This sort of thing has incredible potential as a teaching tool. I was embarassed with myself that I wasn’t able to locate the Eiffel Tower without cheating (looking up the co-ordinates). However, experience playing Scotland Yard gave me a significant advantage navigating around London and identifying a few of the buildings between Hyde Park and the Thames.

I don’t know what these people would charge a school board for a site license, but it would be criminal to not at least consider it. This thing has implementations extending far beyond geography. History, Geometry, Languages, Literature, anyone?

Mike