I found a very handy little utility today called “Pipe Viewer“.
Pipe Viewer (PV) create a progress meter for the command line when a file is being moved.
I used it with MySQL to show the import of a 6.6GB SQL file like so:
pv ./database.sql | mysql -u root -p -D database
This saved me a lot of concern about whether MySQL was getting mucked up, and exactly how much time I can spend doing other tasks instead of waiting for the import to finish. 
It’s small potatoes in the big scheme of things, but I’m really hopeful for the mural project to come to fruition.
Here are a few screen grabs from my trigger images, which represent just small sections of the full size mural.
I’m involved in a class project with a wonderful team of students in the Art & Design program here at the University of Illinois. The task is to pitch a mural to go up in the historic area of downtown Champaign, at a barbershop located on North First Street.
Recently, my class had a chance to review our creations using the large scale projectors at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on campus.
We are working on a borne digital mural, meaning it is all designed with Photoshop and Illustrator, taking historical imagery and photographs. There is no guarantee that we will win or be able to get funds for building the mural, but it has been a very rewarding process to participate in this.
I am working on creating an Augmented Reality component to this, and will provide more photographs and updates as its the project continues.
For now, a group picture of my team, Ismeta (I’m so meta, even this acronym).
Pictured from left to right -> Acton (me), Hugh Sato, Danielle Sheppard, and Pat McPherson.
I’ve recently worked on two projects involving “Deep Zoom”.
The idea of the “Deep Zoom” is to take an incredibly large image and then tile it much like Google Maps or Open Layers does with maps. As the viewer zooms into the image, more things become revealed, whether its a finer detail or displaying the imagery in a different way.
Microsoft has done a lot of work in this field.
As well as Google with its art project.
While I’m just looking into this for the first time, I’ve used the concept for embedding a one page newspaper graphic into a website:
I got a lot of practice with this idea from a recent class project.
While this isn’t a “Deep Zoom” in its purest sense, we wanted to explore a more interactive side with story telling. In this case, everything is built using HTML 5 in combination with OpenLayers:
The secret to the sauce for these projects is using a freeware program called MapTiler, more information available here.
MapTiler has a lot of options, including the ability to overlay KML files, geo-encoded data, and to create OpenLayers and Google Maps. I found that OpenLayers is by far the easiest and least fussy, but not necessarily the best looking interface.
Just something about how smooth and elegant Google is always brings me back.
Getting these into a CMS website is easy: I just embed the generated html file into an iframe.
I find that OpenLayers doesn’t play well with mobile devices, so I’m hoping to continue playing with the Google Maps version until I’m comfortable with it.
One idea that intriques me is going into the tiled images and then creating animated GIFs. Though, that can be a lot of work and the type of story that would be useful for isn’t quite clear to me yet.