Category: Thoughts

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.

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.

Ed on Spatial

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.

HT: ROK Technologies ESRI Developer Blog

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.

I’ve been totally swamped this week so posting has been very light. How about an open thread to keep things rolling?

The crowd is ready to attack

I’ve been following the discussion on the OSGeo mailing list about setting up an “open source jobs list” and it looks like it is now live.

FOSS4G Related Jobs and Resumes

I’m not sure why they feel the need for such a list rather than work with existing job posting sites, but I guess this has to do more with tackling “low hanging fruit” and avoiding writing case studies for migrating to FOSS4G which one would think would be a higher priority for OSGeo. It will be interesting to see if this Jobs list actually gets some good jobs or becomes full of job spam.

OSGeo efficiency rivals that of the Galactic Senate

I’m traveling this week to the hinterlands of Arizona for some marketing so posting will be very light, but Paul is filling in very nicely with some of the points that needed to be addressed from the discussion last week. He’s got a great point about skills already existing for using open source software:

• PostGIS: Already worked with Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE’s “new” spatial SQL feature? You already know PostGIS.
• Mapserver: Learn the .map file and you are good to go. No harder than picking up enough AXL to be useful. Budget a couple days of learning time.
• OpenLayers: Already worked with Google Maps? You’ve got the concepts down pat. You’d better know Javascript, but that’s a transferable skill and you’ll need that for any non-trivial application.
• Geoserver: Point and click through the interface. Do you known enough to deploy a WAR into production? If you installed ArcIMS, you already do.

Sean is spot on with is analysis as well.