Archive for the 'Rants' Category

Fun and games

Published
by
Chris Tweedie
on October 15, 2009
in Rants
. 2 Comments

Ok. I am kinda pre-empting the fallout of the FOSS4G Benchmarking list here. But for everyone interested, this is a cross post from the Tilecache list where Bruce Foster has, I believe, drawn a very long bow.

This offer also extends to anyone else at Foss4g who may draw similar conclusions for ERDAS not participating in the event. I’m easy to spot in a crowd :)

I have never been fond of this mythical Opensource vs Commercial divide in the spatial industry; even when I was exclusively using opensource software. Mapserver is no different from a commercially competitive point of view than ESRI products.

Bruce,

Lets set the record straight here. We were invited, but declined. There is nothing more to it.

I will be at FOSS4G on Thursday and Friday on the CCIP booth. Swing by and I will sit down and show you whatever you seem to think we are hiding?

The FOSS4G benchmarks are a great starting point and I would like to think we can be involved next year. I really hope customers do much more by way of due diligence in selecting enterprise software than just some benchmark results.

Lets not forget that we are not the only ones not competing in the event. Mapguide, Deegree, Mapnik, Cubewerx, Mapinfo, Oracle, Cadcorp, Manifold  … the list goes on (notice, there is no delineation between OS vs Commercial here). There is no conspiracy here mate and I’d be happy to show you.

Look forward to seeing you next week.

Regards,

Chris Tweedie
ERDAS Australia

Now, where did that unicorn go and my car with that rocket booster …

gvSig mobile release & other thoughts

Published
by
Chris Tweedie
on March 20, 2008
in Rants
. 1 Comment

Seems as though a lot of people missed this release last week.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that the pilot application awarded the development contract for the gvSIG Mobile application by the Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is available. gvSIG Mobile is a smaller version of gvSIG which has been adapted for use in mobile devices. It supports shapefiles, ECW, WMS and images and is able to make use of GPS systems. Currently, only the visualization of layers and the generation of GPS tracklogs/waypoints are supported.

gvSIG Mobile … available at gvSIG website http://www.gvsig.gva.es

I must thank the gvSIG guys for helping me out with my WALIS Forum presentation by supplying me with a pre-release copy. Implemented a work around in 5mins and had it talking to our SDI straight away. Anyone with a Windows Mobile device, its definately worth checking out and things will become more interesting pending the gvSig and OSGEO talks.

gvsig.jpg

In other news, i am officially slack. But the good news is that i have been harassed by that many people at events and on email that i will begin making a concerted effort posting more regularly now. SO LAY OFF!

WALIS Forum has been and gone for another 18 months. Attendance was the biggest yet, with 820 through the doors. Highlights for me (in no particular order)..

  • Tim trying to do updates throughout the conf but stopping after the first post. Hey, i never said i was going to!
  • Harvey from Microsoft failing miserably trying to demo photosynth live. I feel ya pain buddy, i really do, but we had seen it all before anyway :)
  • Mr Parsons with the usual tidbits of humour. My only feedback would have been tailoring another presentation addressing the “short tail” as 95% of the attendees were the custodians and advanced spatial users. Certainly from my point of view, addressing how Google is tackling this area would have been far more interesting from a GeoWeb perspective! Next time.
  • Leaving a room of 100 people stunned after a presentation but then all saying what a great presentation it was. Hmmmm?
  • Cameron not taking a breath, ever, throughout the 2 day conference. That man can talk.

Where art thou WCS clients?

Published
by
Chris Tweedie
on December 30, 2007
in Rants
. 9 Comments

How can I push a proposal for provisioning elevation data via Web Coverage Services when there are no freakin’ clients?

After a couple of hours I seriously only found,

Suggesting users manually craft the requests is not an option :)

I guess this kinda gets back to my previous rants on this issue. We’ve got Deegree, Geoserver, Mapserver and quite a few other notable suppliers pushing coverages out … to where exactly??

Image courtesy http://www.refractions.net/terrainserver/

It seems absurd how many people grab the whole SRTM/Landsat/DEMs in general just because “its easier”. After looking into WCS, perhaps they are right. Chicken meet egg, again.

Bravo ..

Published
by
Chris Tweedie
on August 9, 2007
in Rants
. 2 Comments

..to Sebastian’s spatialreference.org post. You made me chuckle and i don’t really know why :) I had actually not seen the projection render call, that is damn nice work Chris and Howard. Sebastian lists a few suggested improvements to the “service” which i whole heartedly agree. Geodesy/datums/projections/geoids/coordinate systems need not be some magical black art done only by PhD’s, or alternatively some magical program that you insert numbers in, get stuff out, but having no idea what just happened. Let there be light …

Second bravo goes to Flamingo mapping components, a new (i think) dutch GPL mapviewer. I happened to stumble onto these guys’ Flash based WMS client the other day and all i can say is hooray! Finally a flash client which is separated into components, has a neat interface and is actually configurable WITHOUT requiring Flash CS3 just to change the stupid service URI.

Exciting times for FOSSG

Published
by
Chris Tweedie
on July 28, 2007
in Rants
. Closed

For those that know me you should know that i like to think i am impartial to geospatial solutions. I’m not a “fanboi” of opensource or commercial solutions … i really do tend to use the best available product. I have been getting the distinct impression lately that the quality and features starting to be developed in the OSGEO / FOSS4G realm is peaking particular interest in the commercial sector. More and more demonstrations i see by vendors are implementing some or all foss and customising it to their needs which is an interesting shift for the industry. Probably the most common project used in this respect is Openlayers. Just about everyone has used, touched, smelt or developed on OL and is really a testament to the hard work the contributors have put in (particularly the metacarta guys).

Take a look at some of the upcoming features in the stack. Anyone in the web mapping space has got to be excited about these …

  1. “Look into my lines” … AGG support in the new Mapserver 5.0 beta! Its incredible how much difference high quality antialiasing makes to web mapping applications. G/Y/M tiles raised the bar in that respect and Mapserver is certainly catching up to that quality. Mapnik is another choice, but is feature lacking in comparison.

    2. anti_aliased.gif

     

  2. DMSolutions Mapguide Fusion. Wow, such a powerful tool for deploying quick apps. It kinda reminds me how i felt after first seeing the ArcIMS website publisher, although obviously the similarities end there. Customising the old Mapguide clients was a fairly painful experience modifying 20 frames for the layout. Hoping Fusion improves this 10 fold.
  3. Geoserver’s move to 1.6 adds the WFS1.1 implementation and GeoJSON output plugins. Although Deegree and Featureserver have offered these for a while, im always partial having a flexible single application rather than supporting multiple.

Now the hard part for me is deciding which one to start playing with first!