climber

I'm building a game, and need a 3D Model of the world, like the geographical data from Google Earth, but at much much much lower resolution.

All I can find on the web (searching via images.google.com) is maps of the earth, but I'd like 3D data.

Thanks!

Anyone have information on Ooyala? Besides tech crunch mentioning that they've raised 8.5 million series B, I can't find much on the company. The video analytics / hosting for business seems kind of interesting, but anyone have deeper insights?

Thanks!

Hi!

I'm writing an iPhone app. Everything's done, except for wanting to add in a button where when the user clicks it, it'll pop up the iPhone / iPod touch email client (with a pre-written message) so the user can just click send to send it.

How can I do this?

Thanks!

We just got a new office; and for security purposes, we'd like to have a bunch of webcams, with data streamed to a centralized server (for motion detection / logging).

"Privacy" is not a problem as it's a small company and all the founders are okay with it.

What are the best open source tools for this? We'd like the backend to be linux, and for the actual cameras, just get a bunch of cheap cameras (that can hopefully stream over wireless or network).

Is there a firefox plugin where I can place my cursor over an Unicode chinese character, and have it tell me the pinyin / definition of the word?

thanks!

I thought I once read an article to that affect, but I can't find the article on Google. (Get all these links for torrents to porn, but not articles documenting how bit torrent started out).

If so, are there other technologies that also become popular through the ease of distributing porn?

After watching "Touching the Void", I have been inspired to go mountain climbing myself.

I'm posting on Hacker News as I've been a programmer for the past 10+ years and have no mountain climbing experience (nor the physique).

I'm wondering -- have other programmer types gone mountain climbing? And if so, what was the process? What mountains did you start with / what lessons did you take / etc ....