Looks like the OSGeo Jobs email list is needing some help.
As of today, still only one job is being offered – surely there are
more out there that people should be made aware of?!
I already posted about my thoughts on the email list so I won’t go over them again, but even I’m amazed that there is this little interest in the email list.
Tilting at Windmills – A jobs email list won’t grow the open source community as much as good case studies would.
Ed Katibah, who has a long history with IBM and Informix and is now the spatial project manager for Microsoft’s SQL Server, is blogging.
Blog reader Mike emailed this link to me and said that he thought it was well written. I agree, I think if you’ve been having difficulty understanding how map tiles work, this is a great primer to grasping the concepts. Map tiles are critical to getting performance on your web mapping applications and if you aren’t using them, you should.
Now this is exciting.
With our new WPF and Silverlight 2.0 map controls, developers and designers will soon be able to build rich interactive mapping applications for the desktop and web. In our opinion, WPF and Silverlight 2.0 take giant leap forward from other user interface technologies such as Windows Forms, Java, Flash, JavaScript APIs and ActiveX controls.
Many .NET developers I know are really excited about what WPF and Silverlight can do for them on the web. Now that development environments are available to actually push production websites out that support WPF and Silverlight, I think we’ll start seeing some very interesting Virtual Earth/GIS applications in the coming months. Despite what some say about “doing GIS” inside web clients, there is a movement toward giving basic GIS controls to web users to perform GIS tasks. WPF, I think, gives an effective platform to run geospatial analysis.
Personally I think I’ve got to get that MDNS project a kick in the pants. We’ve been stalled due to funding (warfighting takes precedence these days with DoD projects), but maybe we can get things back on track this spring.
WPF bringing in Weather.com tiles into your project
Peter Batty poses an interesting question:
If you could do geospatial analysis 50 to 100 times faster than you can today, what compelling new things would this enable you to do? And yes, I mean 50 to 100 times faster, not 50 to 100 percent faster!
Just think about that for a minute, it blows one’s mind. I’m pretty sure someone reading this blog might have a good case study for Peter (below Peter says this isn’t hypothetical so if you’ve got a great need for such processing, email him your needs).
Wouldn’t it be better to be the Road Runner instead of being Wile E. Coyote when running spatial analysis?
ESRI’s ArcGIS Server RESTful API docs are now available on the web. Now I really want the ArcGIS Server 9.3 Beta to ship tomorrow.
Between traveling to Denver for FRUGOS-apalooza, getting sick from my son, vacation and now a root canal; it has been quite the week for me. I’m back in the office putting the finishing touches on a proposal that I should have finished last week. I hope to catch back up on blogging in the next few days in addition to catching up on my work. Fight on!
Paolo Corti has written up his introduction to FeatureServer.
So I decided to spend a day for installing and testing [FeatureServer], without thinking of the lack of documentation (FeatureServer is still a young project, so no wonder here if the only way to get infos is digging in the source code and posting to the mailing list). The day I considered to spend on it then spawned to more and more hours that I could imagine, and given my actually very busy schedule at my job, I had to find free hours during the night and the weekend. I then decided to write this post to help people in getting started with FeatureServer in a quicker way that was for me.
FeatureServer isn’t easy, but the effort you take to use it pays off in its flexibility.
Looks like I’ve run out of disk space with my blog and the database is confused. Comments seem to have disappeared and reappeared at will. On top of it, my son seems to have given me his flu cold (I took one for the team and stayed home with him today, but I’m beginning to feel the affects). I’ve done some things to get it working again, but given that I’m probably down for the count tonight and tomorrow if things go wrong again, the blog might look bare. Rest assure all comments are backed up so nothing will be lost. Wish me luck on the cold (flu shots don’t work, it is all a conspiracy by the government to get a RFID implanted into your skin).
The Open Thread has pretty much fallen into a petty argument about if Google Maps is a “GIS” or not so lets break away from that and focus on the issue that seems to have come out of that discussion.
Dimitri hit on some of his feelings about open projects and the open source community here and here, while Christopher responded here and here. Others pointed to an old GIS Monitor “Letter to the Editor” and a response to that by Howard Butler. There has been more discussion on other blogs about open source, here and here.
Dimitri’s assertion at Linux was a complete waste of effort could have been the most bizarre comment on my blog I’ve ever read.
A good example is Linux, which has to my mind been an appalling waste of a generation or two of programmers in a narcissistic effort to re-engineer an operating system that was already grossly obsolete in the late 1980s, with no greater point, apparently, than substituting some private intellectual property ownership of some core parts of the model OS upon which it is based from AT&T’s ownership into Red Hat ownership. Linux now is much more expensive than UNIX was.
I guess at least Linux is good enough to run Manifold.net.
My personal experience with open source GIS is not that it is cheaper than proprietary GIS systems such as ESRI, Oracle, or Manifold, but that it gives you the freedom to respond to the needs to a project directly, rather than working around them. It is the freedom that it gives both developers and the users of the applications developed with it, that is the “power” of Open Source GIS.