http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=820919

So what is PMPlanet? It's a little project that theorbtwo started in 2004. Based on XPlanet, it shows the location of the Perl Monks who are currently in Other Users, on a 3D rendering of planet Earth, with up to date cloud map, and current lighting by the sun.

It got little love since then, partly because theorbtwo tends to lose interested as soon as a project is working (and that's perfectly fine as he tends to come up with new cool projects on a regular base); partly because its resource requirements were a little high for those days, considering it ran on an old PC at his home, both in CPU time as in internet bandwidth; and partly because it requires quite a bit of maintenance to get reasonable guess for the location of monks who are unaware that PMplanet even exists: at the moment, pmplanet.pl counts over 1000 custom entered lines of code for rules for matching locations, with their longitude and latitude.

It has been years since PMplanet last ran... but a lot of Monks still fondly remembered it. As there are enough dead, formerly cool, (Perl) projects already, and that isn't good for morale in the Perl World... So we decided to revive it.

moritz has generously offered to host PMplanet on a more beefy server of his own, with a proper internet connection (and a cute domain name — unfortunately, no longer...); and I have taken over maintenance and (some) development. You may remember that I've been tinkering with PMplanet back then. I'm planning on merging at least some of those additions, back in. Plus, I have a few more new ideas...

You can now find it on its own domain, thanks to the miracle of virtual hosts, at http://pmplanet.timtowtdi.org http://pmplanet.perlgeek.de/. The map is updated once every 6 minutes, partly because we don't want to put an unnecessary strain on the Perlmonks webservers, and partly because the contents of Other Users isn't supposed to change quickly.

If you find that you are displayed in a wrong location on earth, the most reliable way to fix that on your own, is by inserting a HTML comment with your coordinates (latitude and longitude) in your home node. Instructions are on the site.

Update: due to unfortunate expiration of the domain name (and it was cute), the project has moved to yet another domain: you can now find it at http://pmplanet.perlgeek.de/.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: PMplanet has a new home
by moritz (Cardinal) on Feb 02, 2010 at 11:01 UTC
    It is actually bloonix who generously provides the server where pmplanet runs on, parrot developers run their benchmarks on etc. He deserves praise, I merely run aptitude full-upgrade once every two weeks to incorporate security updates.
    Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.
Re: PMplanet has a new home
by theorbtwo (Prior) on Feb 03, 2010 at 15:43 UTC

    Thanks for the Res, bart, moritz, bloonix! It's nice to see this piece of my work live again; perhaps it will manage to spurn me to actually *finish* more projects, and *release* them.

Re: PMplanet has a new home
by BioLion (Curate) on Feb 02, 2010 at 11:21 UTC

    Hmmm... I just spend a small, but still embarassing, amount of time wondering who 'oBioLion' was, and why (s)he is copying my nick, and lives near me... and ...*doh*!

    Just a something something...
Re: PMplanet has a new home
by GrandFather (Saint) on Feb 03, 2010 at 21:06 UTC

    Is there a way to show the 'other half' of the planet? I notice that there is a 'Zoom of Europe' available, but at least some of us on the back half of the planet feel a little left out. There are after all a fair number of monks in Australasia, Asia, the Indian sub-continent and other areas of the 'back half'.


    True laziness is hard work
      Blame theorbtwo. ;-)

      But really, that was one of the things I had done back then, years ago, and is one of the things I was going to introduce again real soon.

        Indeed, blame me. There was one for a while, but most of the time, it ended up being a lot of CPU to generate a blank globe. Now, it'll probably be a lot less CPU to generate a blank globe, and that's OK. Note that the view is dynamic, though -- the globe will move about as the centre of gravity of the monks moves about. There's a bit of a dodge there to keep the view from going polar, both because it just looked strange to me, and because the cloud map is glaringly bad at the poles... but it will freely rotate east-west -- you aren't being unfairly not shown, there just aren't many of you.

        I blame Christopher Columbus.

        If we all still believed the earth was flat, this would not be a problem. But noooooo, he had to go and prove go the damned thing is a sphere.

Re: PMplanet has a new home
by mje (Curate) on Feb 02, 2010 at 11:53 UTC

    This is cool. It is nice to see in this way where the people you are chatting with are. ++ to all involved in creating and resurrecting this.

Re: PMplanet has a new home
by Gavin (Archbishop) on Feb 03, 2010 at 11:49 UTC

    ++ To all concerned in the development and implementation, an excellent piece of work.

    It would be nice to see all Monks displayed as and when they are online and I hope others take the opportunity to add their details so that they can be included. Perhaps a link could be added to Leftovers.

    Perhaps someone can help with two problems that I have regarding the map display.

    1. Even though I am logged in sometimes I do not appear in other users and therefore do not show up on the map, any ideas why this may be happening?.
    2. I put my location in the format  <!-- location:latitude:-DD.MM.SS,longitude:DD.MM.SS --> in User's Bio: along with other details but for some reason I'm still showing as being on the Isle of Man and not near Newcastle, again any ideas?.

      ++ To all concerned in the development and implementation, an excellent piece of work.

      Credit where credit is due: the whole idea, and most of the implementation is all theorbtwo's work. Kudos to him: I do agree with your sentiment.

      1. Even though I am logged in sometimes I do not appear in other users and therefore do not show up on the map, any ideas why this may be happening?.

      I'm guessing that that is a consequence of the fact that Perlmonks runs on 2 webservers. If your activity here is limited, there is a chance that you're only registered on one webserver (at least for within the last several minutes), and AFAIK their data is not merged. So if Other Users is generated on the other webserver, you won't show up...

      As an experiment, try reloading somebody's home node a few times. You'll probably notice his "last here" time jumping between 2 values... possibly far apart.

      2. I put my location in the format <!-- location:latitude:-DD.MM.SS,longitude:DD.MM.SS --> in User's Bio: along with other details but for some reason I'm still showing as being on the Isle of Man and not near Newcastle, again any ideas?.

      Well, actually, you didn't... The current value on your home node is <!-- location:latitude:-54:58:30N,longitude: 1:24:41W-->. There are at least a few things wrong here:

      • You're using both signed values and N/W. Those ought to be alternatives: using one or the other. BTW The convention is to use a negative value for latitude, for South, not North; and a negative value for West (but that's OK here as a positive value can be thought of as unsigned). Anyway, I don't think the regexes are currently set to capture a combination of the two; and if they were, they'd probably put you in the southern hemisphere...

      • The regexes currently don't accept ":" as a separator. Well, I can fix that.

        update: I think I fixed that. I am planning on making the matching regexes less fragile.

      A value that currently ought to be accepted is <!-- location:latitude:54.58.30,longitude: -1.24.41-->.

      update (Feb 04, 2010 at 13:40 UTC): I refactored/replaced the regexes, so that parsing should be both more rigid (fewer false matches) and more relaxed (more freedom in format), at the same time. So if you find your location suddenly unexpectedly moved, this is the probable cause. That is the case for jdporter, who moved to somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and for broomduster, who moved to the North Pole. They both have 2 HTML comments with coordinates on their home node, and it switched the one it uses. (What is "Xlocation" anyway?)

      If you're sure it's something I did wrong, and not you, please let me know.

      BTW It'll now show the latitude/longitude that it is using, for Monks on the map, in a tooltip ("title" tag, in HTML).

      As for why you don't appear in the Other Users, the FAQ About the Other Users Nodelet explains that the contents of Other Users is cached, and regenerated only every few minites, so you might not appear immediately. The nodelet also shows the time that cached copy was generated below the list. The two webservers don't have much to do with this. (In addittion, the map itself is regenerated only every few minutes which adds an addittional delay.)

        ambrus Don't think it can be a "cache" issue regarding delay from login to appearing in Other Users as I have been logged in for a couple of hours and appear to come and go from Other Users during that time, eg at the time of writing I do not appear in Other Users.

Re: PMplanet has a new home
by roho (Bishop) on Feb 05, 2010 at 21:51 UTC
    I too have put my location data in User's Bio in the format <!-- location:latitude:38.01.01,longitude:-077.01.01 --> but my userid remains on the lefthand list "No idea of their location". What am I doing wrong?

    "Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."

      Maybe you're not doing anything wrong.

      I looked at the pmplanet logs of today, and the last thing I saw logged about you is that it threw out your data from the cache. Apparently it did that around the time that you left... And it was the first time it did that today. That means whatever you changed about your home node during the day while you were here, it wouldn't be visible for a long time (a few hours) before it finally shows up.

      Yes, there is a node contents cache. The purpose is to spare the Perlmonks webservers a little and not bombard them with requests for home node contents, for every user that is around, every few minutes. The cache time is on the long side, from the point of view of us humans. But the webservers like it just fine that way...

      Anyway, conclusion: next time you come around, you'll probably show up at the right location.

      p.s. I think I'll add a button or something so people can manually remove their own home node from the home node cache, so you'll show up with the updated data on the next run. Within minutes.

        I always meant to do that, but it was one of the boring bits I never quite got around to.

        I think I'll add a button or something so people can manually remove their own home node from the home node cache, so you'll show up with the updated data on the next run.

        Why not use the Recently Updated Home Nodes list for that?

Re: PMplanet has a new home
by Skeeve (Parson) on Aug 25, 2013 at 21:52 UTC
    Couldn't find it :( Where is it now?

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    +.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e