magicGNSS is being showcased at this year’s ION GNSS in GMV’s booths (208 & 210 – no excuses for not visiting us!) and it’s nothing but magic here. Our magician, Harrison Carroll, has been entertaining all of us with his flash of the hand card tricks using our very own decks of magicGNSS cards. But the real magic is to be found in our software suite, so come by and see Harrison do his thing and ask for a demo of magicGNSS.
From the 10th to the 12th of December, 2008, we are showing magicGNSS Beta at GMV’s booth in NAVITEC 2008 at ESTEC, the European Space Agency centre in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
We are doing live demos of the new *pro* features, including the ability to upload and process your own data and to compare orbits.
If you are attending the workshop, don’t forget to check us out there!
magicGNSS at NAVITEC 08
Today we are at the GIOVE Workshop in ESTEC, the European Space Agency technology center in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. The experimentation results of GIOVE-A and GIOVE-B, the first two experimental Galileo satellites, are being presented to the media. GIOVE-B carries a Passive Hydrogen Maser (PHM) on board, the most accurate atomic clock ever flown in space. This clock has an awesome stability that allows to predict its evolution within just one nanosecond after one day.
GMV has been involved in the different Galileo test beds since the early stages of the mission. In particular, we had the privilege to observe for the first time the behaviour of GIOVE-B’s PHM clock from ground using our EOSPF (Experimental Orbit and Synchronization Processing Facility), the operational software for GIOVE experimentation developed by GMV for ESA.
To celebrate the GIOVE Workshop and the success of the GIOVE Mission, magicGNSS is wearing a new “dress” today: go to the main web page and you will be able to see a colour map showing the geographical coverage of the 13 GPS+GIOVE dual stations that have been deployed by ESA worldwide.
Last week I attended the Google Developer Day in Madrid. It was a very interesting event where Google engineers and gurus from all over the world gave presentations and workshops, a unique opportunity to have an overview of the state of the art in internet technologies today. Among other things, Android, the new open source operating system for mobile phones was introduced and explained. Chrome, the new web browser from Google, was also presented.
One of the most inspiring speeches was the one given by Dion Almaer on The Future of Web Applications (watch video, or see presentation). Dion Almaer is one of the fathers of AJAX, the web technology that allows asynchronous communication between the browser and the server to update different parts of a web page without reloading the whole page. This creates more responsive and interactive web applications. For example, in magicGNSS you can run a scenario, monitor the progress banner, and at the same time create new scenarios or delete existing ones. AJAX is behind all this.
Dion’s talk gave me the idea to write about the past of the web and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and about how much things have changed today. Back in 1993 I got my first job with GMV based at ESOC, the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany… But this entry is getting a bit too long, so I will post the rest of the story in this blog some other time.
To be continued…
