All posts by Julie

Local hospital cutting I.T. jobs

Jobs

From what I have heard, Fletcher Allen, Vermont’s largest hospital which is in Burlington, is one of the few places in Vermont where I.T. people get paid salaries that are more in line with Boston or even NYC. So it is notable to learn that they will be laying of 10 IT people – software analysts, programmers and a project manager. This article in the Burlington Free Press says that FAHC will help these people find new jobs. I’m skeptical about them finding that many comparable positions in the Burlington area. The sad part is that the IT department is probably downsizing is because they have done there jobs too well. I absolutely wish these guys luck. There is an amazing number of health care related software companies in Vermont, so hopefully, their background will be a benefit in that regard.

www.acehaid.org

Virtual Earth does Ink!

Just Rambling

I have added ink to Virtual Earth. It wasn’t easy, but I’m a bit of a pitbull when the computer tells me “no you can’t!”. Thanks to Dr. Neil Roodyn and ViaVirtualEarth for lots of help with building in additional features like zooming, panning and searching, to my application. ViaVirtualEarth is already a phenomenal resource for working with Virtual Earth and also has a great gallery of other applications people have written.

check it out

www.thedatafarm.com/virtualearth

A few caveats:

  • Requires  the TabletPC 2005 Edition (on a tabletpc or with the TabletPC SDK install)
  • It won’t work with a full zoom out (showing the entire world) and I have to build something in there to prevent users from doing that
  • Pushpins won’t get carried over to the inking page
  • There are probably more. It is a work in progress…

www.acehaid.org

Virtual Earth Tiles

Virtual Earth

I have been working with Virtual Earth some more. I wrote recently about the tiles that make up the map image and have made some new discoveries.

When you create a new map, the tiles collection has the tiles in the order of their placement in the grid, by column, as opposed to by row, like a <table> object builds a grid. So in a map of 12 tiles, map.tiles[0] through map.tiles[11] are placed like this.

049
159
2610
3711

However as you pan (scroll) around the map image, VE just keeps adding tiles to the end of the collection based on your movement. Therefore, when you stop scrolling, the tiles will no longer be in any order that you can count on, which is not good if you have code depending on the above order.
To rectify this you can use two methods of the map control to jiggle the tiles back into “proper order”.
Capture the onEndContinusPan event of the map and then use the SetCenter method followed by the _UpdateMap method.


map.onEndContinuousPan = function(e)
{
map.SetCenter(e.latitude,e.longitude);
map._UpdateMap();
}


I had originally tried to just create a new map when the panning ended, but I was unable (by hook or by crook) to get the compass control, zooming controls, etc to interact with the new map.
Thanks to ViaVirtualEarth for the lesson on how to capture map events.

www.acehaid.org