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Tuesday 28 October 2008

James Phone Home - GeoTools.org needs you

The GeoTool DNS Entry has lapsed; so the web site is available here:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home

To continue to work with the source code:
http://gtsvn.refractions.net/

Todays IRC logs are here:
- IRC Logs Oct 27th

We will be hunting down our honoured founder (ie James) who is charge of the domain.

Saturday 25 October 2008

Moving on

One of my great joys in this industry is performing introductions. As an open source advocate I get to make a lot of introductions to all the helpful people that make up our community. As a proponent of standards I get to help people wade through the OGC site. When doing a workshop I get to introduce specific technologies, and occasional geospatial concepts.

It is all a great deal of fun.

Recently I was asked "how I learned all this stuff".

The answer is a story. In 2003 I moved to Victoria (British Columbia) to start a new job. Dave Blasby (a friend of mine with mad skillz) recommended this small company operating out of what appeared to be a roof top green house overlooking a square. I had actually worked with a couple of the characters before. Paul Ramsey (as a mad Perl Hacker, operating like an Alice in wonderland creature with hap-hazard limbs clustered around a keyboard speaking in regexs) and a quiet new guy called Graham.

The second step was due to a hobby of mine - swordsmanship. Shortly after starting this job I managed to break my thumb (over a small argument of philosophy with pole-axes).

My recovery time was spent trying to build GeoTools with one hand; and reading all the OGC specifications – even the boring ones. Not a kind introduction but it seemed to do the trick.

Today is my last day at Refractions; I am really excited about the next adventure I have lined up but I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has made the last five years such an incredibility rewarding experience.

Thank you.

Thursday 16 October 2008

uDig 1.1.0

If you check the uDig download page you will see uDig 1.1.0 is available.  Please see the official announcement for an overview of what is new, and the organizations that made it happen, etc...


Apparently this is good timing for a release; a recent uDig GIS: A First Look article was published in the Linux Journal.  If you are new to uDig (in addition to the article above) please consider the following resources:
This has been a really interesting ride leading up to uDig 1.1.0. The project has migrated from a core developer team located in Victoria to a diverse set of developers from all the corners of the earth.

Much of this transition has been under the leadership and support of Jesse Eichar. I would like to personally thank Jesse for supporting development teams - often on his own time as a volunteer. I am especially pleased that his hard work supporting others has been echoed back on the email list in terms of testing, translations and feedback.

A friendly reminder for the GeoServer project; it appears they have a ways to go before they catch up to our Release Candidate record.

Friday 10 October 2008

FOSS4G Round up? Welcome back to the Internet

News from FOSS4G has been very light this year; one of the only round-ups I have found is from Directions Magazine.
 
The article highlights Digifesto blog post - "FOSS4G2008 - Culture shock" which is shocking to me for a number of reasons. The main one stems from a representation of the OSGeo mission statement that I find troublesome.

Here is the actual mission statement:
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.
I would like to thank Sebastian for providing some of the only coverage to date on FOSS4G - the real standout blog post is this one - "Get Real". I spent some time in Africa and this post covers some the central problem of applying solutions, that are often Internet based, into an in appropriate context.

I join everyone in offering Paul Ramsey congradulations on getting this years Sol Katz Award.

Jesse Eichar was kind enough to send a Summary of Foss4G to the udig-devel mailing list. Word on the IRC channels is that FOSS4G was a success, everyone is still tired, and that blog posts will need to wait until a decent internet connection is found.

Welcome back to the internet OSGeo members - I missed you!