Re: xearth

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Cleaning up my old email, I noticed that 

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Tittsler <jwt@example.com> writes:

    Jim> Yes, its easy and even kind of neat.  If you run xearth -
    Jim> showmarkers >mymarkers once, it will dump its internal
    Jim> database to stdout.  Capture it to a file and edit it to
    Jim> suit.  From then on invoke xearth with: xearth -markerfile
    Jim> mymarkers

    Jim> Now the cool bit.  Every time xearth redraws, it rereads the
    Jim> marker file.  That means that with a little cron entry
    Jim> dumping the positions of the satellites into the marker file
    Jim> from an old tracking program that shows current sub-satellite
    Jim> position, xearth can plot these moving objects.
    Jim> Ooooh... neat.  A kludge!

This ought to work with a named pipe, don't you think?  Then you can
save all the HD accesses.  But I guess it would require making sure
that the thing is locked correctly.  Or maybe you just need to write
EOFs to the pipe...  I can see two ways this could screw up though, if 
the cron job is either too fast or too slow.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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