Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

OK, so Goole has finally released a first version of Google Earth for Linux (beta, of course).

Well, maybe this time they really mean it when they say "beta"...

Here's some quick observations:

• Of course, it's not open source, you basically get a bunch of *.so files and an executable.
• It uses a bunch of open source software packages, though, e.g. libcurl, OpenSSL, libjpeg, libPNG, libtiff, libmng, zlib, Expat XML Parser, FreeImage, and a bunch of other things. All the licenses of those projects are contained in a README, though.
• The installer seems to be (based on) the Loki installer, at least a ~/.loki directory is created with some stuff in it.
• The maps cache, and some other files are stored in ~/.googleearth.
• The ~/.googleearth/crashlogs directory contains log files which are generated when the application crashes, and sent to Google upon the next restart of the application automatically. The README says that you should basically chmod 000 ~/.googleearth/crashlogs if you don't want that. They say these files don't contain personal information. I haven't seen one yet (didn't crash, yet), so I cannot tell if that's true.
• The EULA says that Google Earth will phone home (they call it "check for available updates to the Software"), and that you automatically agree to that when you use it: "By installing the Software, you agree to automatically request and receive Updates".
• When I start Google Earth, I get a popup window which tells me to install Bitstream Vera Sans fonts or things might look strange. No idea which fonts extactly they mean, I've got the Debian packages ttf-bitstream-vera, and ttf-dejavu, but the warning still appears.
• After Google Earth connects to the server(s) I get to see something resembling a globe, but not really what I (or Google possibly) expected. There's simply no textures for anything, I just see (broken) wireframes (see screenshot), but that's about it.

I'll have to play around with it a bit more, maybe it's an issue with the NVIDIA drivers or something. But as I don't have the source I can basically just make stupid guesses...

(via Golem, and a bunch of other sites)

Just a quick note: Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3 is available now, fixing more than 100 bugs since the last beta. If you have any further issues or suggestions for 4.7 — now is the time to speak up, file bug reports, post patches etc.

I haven't had too much time for Drupal development recently, but I guess I should really start updating the poormanscron module now (finally!) and help with getting the German translation up-to-date...

Hm, more food for my video iPod which hasn't arrived yet.

Revver ("a Flickr for video") is a new video publishing community site which allows you to upload, share, watch, and tag videos for free. You need a special upload tool for uploading videos (there's a Windows version, a MacOS X version, and a Java version which probably works on Linux).

They intend to give the creators of the videos some money by attaching a clickable advertisement frame (the so-called RevTag™) at the end of each video. Everytime a viewer clicks the ad, the video creator gets some money. While this might be a great idea, it still leaves me with a strange feeling (the ad is not on a webpage, it's appended to the video itself!)...

Some noteworthy details:

• They currently have a size limit of 100 MB per video.
• They don't censor the videos except for obvious copyright violations (porn yes, illegal stuff no).
• You get 50% of the money and Revver gets the other 50%.
• You need a PayPal account to get the money.
• "Your videos stay on Revver for as long as they generate a reasonable amount of revenue" (no unlimited hosting, it seems).
• The videos are automatically put into iTunes and formatted to work with the video iPod.
• All videos are automatically converted into the mov format.
• The default license for the videos is the Creative Commons ShareAlike license (you can probably choose others, I didn't check).

More information is in their first blog post, and in the FAQ.

A final quote from the blog post:

It’s a new game, we’re thrilled to be in it, and we tip our hats bigtime to the Ourmedia crew, the YouTube crew, the Participatory Culture crew, the Creative Commons crew, and all the other crews that came before us.

All in all this looks quite promising, and I'm curious how it will develp and grow...

(via Boing Boing)