Salty Coder

Pocket Stars - star chart and celestial navigation

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:43:00 GMT

As a programmer and a sailor, I have a soft spot in my heart for other programmers with sailboats, particularly when they produce great programs useful to sailors that are not programmers.

One such sailor/programmer is Jay Alan Borseth, a former Microsoft employee, he now runs his own firm, Nomad Electronics in Seattle, WA. Jay has a 40 foot Crealock Pacific Seacraft sailboat named Serenade.

Among his other accomplishments, Jay has produced Pocket Stars. Quoting from his website: "Pocket Stars is a fun, fast, high accuracy star chart, astronomy reference, celestial navigation tool, and guide to the heavens." Basically it is everything a sailor would want for star viewing or celestial navigation on either your Windows based PDA/Smartphone or your Windows computer. The cost is extremely reasonable at $19.95 and you can download a 15 day free trial at his website. Free trials are something I especially like as I hate buying a pig in a poke and learning after I parted with my money that something wouldn't work for me.

Anyway this is a great little program and lots of fun for checking out the night sky, even if you have no interest in celestial navigation.

Weather Radar on your Mobile Phone

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:29:00 GMT

As a sailor, knowledge of the weather is important. As a sailor in Florida during hurricane season knowledge of the weather can mean life or death.

A popular feature on chartplotters these days is weather information delivered via satellite for a monthly fee. Both Garmin and Raymarine offer this feature.

With internet access one can access extensive weather data for free from the National Weather Service. One item I particularly like is Real-Time Doppler weather radar images. You have lots of options with this data, but one I appreciate is the ability to show a "loop" of the past few minutes which shows how the storms are moving in real-time. Take a look at this for Portland, Maine. With this data one can get a really good idea how long it will take an approaching storm to reach your location, or clear once it is upon you.

Of course one does not always have internet access, and that is why Weather Radar from Memory-Map Software is such a great product. It takes the same data from the National Weather Service and displays it on your mobile phone if your mobile phone runs Windows Mobile. I happen to have a XV6700 from Verizon which is runs Windows Mobile, so I gave it a try and love it. The software costs $9.99 and you can download a 10 day free trial from their website.

Richard Stevens, the author of Weather Radar is an avid sailor, and has developed other software for sailors which you may want to check out as well.

New way to share photos, Microsoft's Photosynth

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:32:00 GMT

One of the great things about living and working on a boat is that the view out the office window is far more interesting than that afforded by cubicles in corporate America. Like most people these days, I have a digital camera (more than one, but that is a story for another day).

Incidentally I highly recommend that you get a waterproof camera for your boat. They are inexpensive and if you have one your anxiety level will go way down, as everything on a boat gets wet sooner or later. Mine is an older model no longer sold, but if you are in the market for a new camera you might checkout either a Olympus Stylus waterproof model or a Pentax Optio W60. Please note that these links are current as of August 2008 and models change frequently.

Once you have some photos you will naturally want to share them. Of course you can email them, burn them to a CD or DVD, get them printed on photographic paper or upload them to a photo sharing website like Flickr or Snapfish.

Just made available is a really new and innovative photo sharing website from Microsoft Research called Photosynth. What makes Photosynth different is that it stitches your images together to make one big composite view. Basically this means that if you walk around an object taking lots of photos, the website will combine them into one big 3D view of the object. This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words, so rather than blog about how it is done, I encourage you to simply go to the site and view some of the samples.

The easiest way to learn what it is all about is to watch their short video which will show you how to create your own synth for free.

This weekend I decided to try it for the first time and I have created three photo albums or Synths here. This was my first time, so my results were a mixed bag.

For my first attempt I simply uploaded about 100 photos of a sailboat that I once considered buying. This LeComte NorthEast 38 sailboat was not a particularly good synth. In fact the website gave me a synth rating of 8% out of a possible 100%. What this means is that the website was unable to figure out how the images joined together very well. This is understandable as I had not taken the photos with this application in mind, and when taking the photos I had zoomed in on details rather than insuring that the photos overlapped in their coverage. After this attempt I decided I needed to take some more photos and try again.

I am currently in Tarpon Springs, Florida, the sponge diving capital of the US. Tarpon Springs has a large Greek community and the downtown is adjacent to the sponge docks. Here there is a bronze statue of a sponge diver as well as a plaza with an older sponge boat set in the plaza. I shot both of these locations and returned to the computer.

The Tarpon Springs Florida Greek boat synth turned out much better although not perfect and the sponge diver is OK.

This is one of those things in life where practice makes perfect. The key is to make sure that you have lots of overlapping area in your photos, something I could have done much better at.

Please remember that I am more of a geek than an artist, so I am sure that with a little practice your results will be far better than mine. This service is free, lots of fun, and easy to use. Give it a try and I am sure you will come up with lots of ways to use it no one has though of before.

Welcome to the Salty Coder Blog

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:43:00 GMT

Hello and welcome! My name is John Tarbox, a partner in BoatMaine.US. You can read more about me on my page. In a nutshell I have worked with computers all my life and now live on a 38 foot sailboat with my fiancée'.

As you can well imagine, working with a computer on a boat poses some unique challenges and opportunities. You can't simply order a modem from the cable company and use it while out at sea for example.

In future posts I will be focusing on the challenges of:

Using computers on boats
Working and living on a boat
Computer software and hardware useful to boaters
Random musings of personal interest

Hopefully you will enjoy reading the blog as much as I will writing it. Please feel free to send any questions or comments to me at john@boatmaine.us.

Thank you,
John Tarbox, the Salty Coder