UPDATED! Stand Up for Atanas Entchev
UPDATE: More news on Atanas from Bill Dollins. Randal Hale was able to login to the ENTCHEV blog and post a note. Caitlin Dempsey also has an entry on GIS Lounge. Please don’t forget to send in a support letter making sure you put your signature to it. Hopefully this can all get figured out for Atanas and his family.
Both Atanas and his wife may be in detainment!
John Reiser blogs about a serious matter happening to a close friend of all of us, Atanas Entchev.
Last week, I received an email from Mayia, his wife, asking for letters of support as he is facing deportation.
Says Mayia:
I am writing you on behalf of my husband, Atanas Entchev, and our family. As you may know, Atanas and I emigrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria 20 years ago. Today, our immigration case is at a crossroads, and it is pertinent that we obtain letters of recommendation from the community. I am reaching out to you because you have been a colleague, client, or valued business contact of Atanas?. I am hoping you may be able to write a letter of recommendation for him. Time is of the essence, and it it crucial that we gather these letters as soon as possible, by today would be best.
There are instructions on that page letting you know what you need to do to help out Atanas. If you’ve ever had any interaction with Atanas, I’d urge you to give him some help. I’m going to write my support email right now.
UPDATED! Stand Up for Atanas Entchev
UPDATE: More news on Atanas from Bill Dollins. Randal Hale was able to login to the ENTCHEV blog and post a note. Caitlin Dempsey also has an entry on GIS Lounge. Please don’t forget to send in a support letter making sure you put your signature to it. Hopefully this can all get figured out for Atanas and his family.
Both Atanas and his wife may be in detainment!
John Reiser blogs about a serious matter happening to a close friend of all of us, Atanas Entchev.
Last week, I received an email from Mayia, his wife, asking for letters of support as he is facing deportation.
Says Mayia:
I am writing you on behalf of my husband, Atanas Entchev, and our family. As you may know, Atanas and I emigrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria 20 years ago. Today, our immigration case is at a crossroads, and it is pertinent that we obtain letters of recommendation from the community. I am reaching out to you because you have been a colleague, client, or valued business contact of Atanas?. I am hoping you may be able to write a letter of recommendation for him. Time is of the essence, and it it crucial that we gather these letters as soon as possible, by today would be best.
There are instructions on that page letting you know what you need to do to help out Atanas. If you’ve ever had any interaction with Atanas, I’d urge you to give him some help. I’m going to write my support email right now.
WhereCampPHX 2011 — Success!
Last Saturday, we had the first ever WhereCampPHX in Arizona. I was very happy with the attendance and after the first jitters of never being to a unconference before, the crowd totally got into it. In fact, I had many people come up to me after and say they wanted to do another one right away because they had no idea how much fun they can be if you take part. In what was unique for me at a WhereCamp, there seemed to be two tracks that people created. One of “traditional” GIS (scripting geoprocessing, map servers, analysis) and then another one that focused on new technologies. I spent most of my time in the second one where there was discussions on Google Fusion Tables, Google Earth Builder, TileMill, Places APIs, Vectors in the browser (Polymaps, Raphael.js) and back-end databases.
Getting Ready for the Sessions
It was a nice change of pace to have a WhereCamp in my hometown and not having to travel to another state or country. The feedback from those who attended clearly shows that there is a need for these more informal sessions as opposed to the traditional conferences. Having the first one of these here in Arizona gives us a leg up on the next one since most of the crowd now knows what to expect and they can propose their own topics.
We also had a great time at the Turf Pub for the after party (thanks Bentley for the food) watching Arizona State fall behind and then blow out Oregon State. My plans are to have some sort of event (maybe an Ignite style talk program) or another unconference in the spring so we can continue what we’ve started. Everyone who attended seemed to have their minds filled with new ideas after the day so there needs to be some downtime to implement all the new stuff we’ve learned.
Mapnik, the Cartography Engine of GIS, Goes 2.0
The Mapnik team is pleased to announce that Mapnik 2.0 is finally here! We’ve jumped from 0.7 to 2.0, not because we got confused with our numbers, but to reflect that this release represents a big step forward for the project. We believe Mapnik 2.0 will provide a much more flexible and expressive platform for creating beautiful maps.
For details you can read the milestone list or change logs. Unless you are under a rock, Mapnik is everywhere and used by everyone. FOSS4G 2011 was dominated by two projects, Mapnik and PostGIS. Good company if you ask me.
Mapnik, the Cartography Engine of GIS, Goes 2.0
The Mapnik team is pleased to announce that Mapnik 2.0 is finally here! We’ve jumped from 0.7 to 2.0, not because we got confused with our numbers, but to reflect that this release represents a big step forward for the project. We believe Mapnik 2.0 will provide a much more flexible and expressive platform for creating beautiful maps.
For details you can read the milestone list or change logs. Unless you are under a rock, Mapnik is everywhere and used by everyone. FOSS4G 2011 was dominated by two projects, Mapnik and PostGIS. Good company if you ask me.
Open Source Update Friday
Everybody’s working for the weekend, especially on Friday. But there is good news for those who like to install updates to software on their Friday; QGIS 1.7.1 and OpenLayers 2.11 are available.
- QGIS 1.7.1 was released this week. This is a bug fix release so there isn’t much new there other than cleaning up issues. Check out those release notes to see what was updated.
- OpenLayers 2.11 also was released this week. Don’t let the .01 update fool you, this is huge. Specifically “native” support for touch devices (you know, like that thing called an iPad) and some big performance updates. Clearly, this is an update all who are running OpenLayers 2.10 should look at very closely.<
- Esri Canvas Maps are now available on ArcGIS.com (er ArcGIS Online). Now your paleo maps can have a little neo map flavor. Everyone is a winner! Yea that’s not really open source, but you can use it in OpenLayers so that’s a win for libre.