Chris' GISmo's » Misc

Movements afoot!

Chris Tweedie — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:37:55 +0000

Its been a long time between posts lately but there is a lot of things I’d like to report. Thanks to everyone who has reminded me how lazy i have become at every industry event i seem to attend

First up, I have resigned from my position at Landgate starting December 1. Its been a great four years working with all sorts of industry and government personnel around Australia but its time to go. Landgate really is an innovative land information provider so if you are interested in a “bleeding edge” position specialising in spatial web service delivery, the job has now been advertised on Seek.com.au. I’m not aware of anything else in the government sector like this in Australia so get writing as it would be great to know a solid candidate will fill my rather large shoes

It is with no surprise then that i have accepted a new position at ERDAS to be based in Brisbane in the new year. ERDAS’ recent aquisitions and alignment towards strong OGC support has provided sufficent interest for me to join the team to dabble, tweak, prod and spread their internet solutions around Asia/Pacific. Watch this space!

Many will know much of my time over the years has been spent on the SLIP spatial data infrastructure in Western Australia. Its kinda sad to walk away from it, but its at a state now that I am confident the system will continue to grow as demand keeps increasing. Its time to hand over the reigns, so to speak. If you have no idea about the project, please check it out. Its very much a world leading project, not because its a new idea, but because we’ve actually deployed a system across a wide range of sectors. Its with great pleasure to announce then that in the last week we have been awarded both the WA Premiers award and the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Award for Spatially Enabled Government which is great to be formally recognised in the community. While I wasn’t successful in the Young Professional category, i’ve still got a few more years to apply before i hit 35 Kudos to my offsider, Patrick Fitzgerald for picking up the Student of the year for two years running

In less exciting news, I am currently transitioning domains (again). It became clear this year that an address like http://chris.narx.net simply caused people to think i was American (a little too often for my liking). The current webmapper.com.au will be updated soon to yet another domain but the move will be transparent but the old address will still redirect automatically. So just to confirm, no I do not do consulting in the US, but thanks for the emails!

It certainly won’t be the end of me and this blog. It appears i might have even more time to write more frequently at ERDAS with would be great. Change is a good thing, and I look forward to see where we end up in the next 12 months

Chris

Game programmers facing similar problems to GIS imaging?

Chris Tweedie — Tue, 16 May 2006 03:49:49 +0000

Stumbled upon an interesting article at gamerwithin.com which has an interview with iDSoftware guru John Carmack about their new “mega texture” technology. I have always predicted that at some stage gaming technoology will cross paths with spatial high-resolution and that time has seemingly arrived.

The following comment comes from the Slashdot article, and alot of them have similarities to GIS imaging compression technologies but for a gaming environment eg. for large outdoor terrain textures.

Do some elementary calculations kiddies.

32,000 x 32,000 is 1024 million pixels. (A gigapixel?)

Presuming 16 bits per pixel, that’s a couple of gigabytes. That’s not going to be sitting in texture memory. Think about it.

Sounds familiar

There is a very good article on “clipmap” technology which gives a good overview on one such implementation. Image pyramids, caching and compression issues are all mentioned.

Of course i am not a game programmer and i know there are lots of other issues to consider such as line of sight calculations, alpha channels etc. If only it was as simple as drag and dropping MrSID, ECW or JPEG2000 compressed textures into your gaming environment

Still quite interesting nonetheless. If anyone has any high level articles i’d love to have a read.

Not another “flying car”

Chris Tweedie — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:52:51 +0000

The latest “flying car” (KMZ) has been sighted, yet again, in Perth as reported in SMH and various GE blogs.

The first sighting was due to a shadow cast by a tall information site at Point Walter, but this new anomaly is further south in the carpark of Coogee beach

Latitude: -32.111624 Longitude: 115.764759

Being a secret informant for the land information department i can supply these time lapse images over the past three years. Alas, we were unable to capture this futuristic automobile … but we can relax, knowing that at least they are travelling to some nice tourist areas!

Where will the car strike next?

ps. Note the sarcasm, i am sure the shadow will turn out to be another sign or maybe even a pile of sand next to the car I had a quick look and the “shadow” supposedly being cast by the car next to it does not appear to match those arround it (eg. look at the angle and size of similar features nearby)

Location Intelligence Conference

Chris Tweedie — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 04:58:08 +0000

I had been meaning to look more closely into the LI Conf for some time, and boy did i get a shock when i casually read the agenda today. Wow!

Kudos to the organising team for targetting such a wide net of companies from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to ESRI, Oracle and open source-based firms such as TOPP and DMSolutions. Some of the panel workshops look mighty intruiging to say the least.

I’d love to hear if anyone in the blogosphere is planning to do writeups of their adventures in a couple of weeks time