Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 2, Mapping Your Neighborhood

#15 Zoom Right In on Your Neighborhood

HACK

Running the Code

Enter your own U.S. location in place of the latitude and longitude lines,

place the script in an empty directory, and run it with

perl zoom.pl. The

script fetches a series of maps centered on that location, narrowing the scale

of the map by 10% each time. The maps will be stored as numbered image

files, with the names file_000.gif through file_008.gif or so.

Next, we’ll animate this collection of GIF images using the convert tool from

ImageMagick. ImageMagick is available for Unix/Linux, Windows, and Mac

OS X platforms. Unix/Linux binaries are available via your favorite package

manager, or from http://www.imagemagick.org/.

Once you’ve got ImageMagick loaded, creating your animated ballistic navi-

gation is a cinch:

convert -adjoin -delay 10 zoom_*.gif oreilly.gif

The delay is measured in hundredths of a second, so this creates an anima-

tion of 10 frames per second.

More Ballistic Tomfoolery

This hack uses standard animated GIFs, so there’s nothing stopping you

from interposing your own images, as you preserve the zoom_###.gif nam-

ing convention. You could, for example, replace the last image with a pic-

ture of your house or even a series of ever-closer views of the blueprints to

your home. Another hack would be to change the center (

lat, long)ofthe

image request so that you could have an animated ...