Jan Snelders

Well that Java API for Google Maps doesn’t exists which is a shame. Especially considering the fact that there is an API for Flash!

With the help of this post “How Google Maps Works“, I created this small useless (no navigation/zooming yet) proof of concept which caches the map-tiles on disk (in a separate thread) to avoid getting banned from Google Maps.
Nice to see that Google uses some security mechanism to avoid people from abusing their service; they add a variable-length substring “Galileo” to each url of a tile where the substring is calculated as follows: “Galileo”.substr(0,(tile.x*3+tile.y)%8). That isn’t difficult to find (it’s straight there to read in their JavaScript code), but one day they might change this code….

While figuring out how to implement face detection in Java I created this very simple face-detection-application. It is based on Intel’s Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) library.

Since I used JNI together with dll’s only, the application currently only runs on Windows but should be easily extended to Linux.