Cruising my desktop

Well, in the continuing search for an ever cooler desktop, I thought I would try to add Cruise Ships to the list of things that are now available for tracking. Well, there are a lot of cruise ships. Unless you zoom in, you really can’t make them out; the names all pile up. I might try later without the names, but it’s a lot more fun with the names. I zoomed in on the Caribbean Sea and now you can see the various ships.

Orange ships are underway and brown ones are in port. I was trying to make it look like they were lit up (busy) or dark (not busy). I guess it works okay. I might play with the colors some more. Right now, I just get the cruise ship data once a day and plot it on the earth desktop. I’m collecting the ship locations over time so that I can try and create a sense of where they’ve been (and how fast they move). We’ll see how that goes.

Oh, here’s an updated pic – you can see that Mexico is still largely in daylight, but most of the Caribbean is in darkness.  The night terminator is just past Houston.

I have to offer my sincere thanks to the Perl Monks; truly without them, I would not have gotten this done. Thank you.