The book is now available in beta. Excerpts from two of the chapters are available online.
What’s a beta book? Well in this case it’s a lot like software—feature complete and ready for you to give it a spin.
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Well it was a short summer here. Or perhaps we have defeated global warming. This is the view from the deck on Thursday evening:
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Everybody who gets an Eee PC has to write about it—it’s required. I don’t really have much to add to the raft of reviews, except for one small point.
I found myself wanting to print something and, based on my last experience, prepared for the ordeal of setting up a printer. I about fell out of the chair when I opened the Printer configuration and found that the Eee had already found the CUPS printer on my network and added it. Hit print and it works. Nice.
I’ve come to the conclusion that storing rasters in a database is of dubious value, particularly from a data warehouse perspective.
If you manage a collection of rasters that are updated on a frequent basis, storing them in a relational database with ArcSDE quickly becomes a pain. I’m not talking about a dozen or so rasters, but rather tens of thousands. The overhead of the database and middleware just doesn’t seem to be worth it.
A better solution is to use MapServer with a tile index (created using gdaltindex) to serve them to your desktop clients via WMS. Fast, simple, and easy to update and manage.
Matthew Perry poses the question: Why is the command line a dying art?. Funny how these things go—I was thinking about posting on this same topic just the other day, although I may be repeating myself.
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In Beyond the RDBMS Sean references Martin’s post which in turn points us to a paper (gotta love the web in action) promoting “The End of an Architectural Era”. This paper advocates the complete rewrite (well trashing actually) of current RDBMS code in favor of specialized “engines”.
It’s an interesting read with some good points until I got to this:
Our current favorite example of this approach is Ruby-on-Rails. This system is the little language, Ruby, extended with integrated support for database access and manipulation through the “model-view-controller” programming pattern. Ruby-on-Rails compiles into standard JDBC, but hides all the complexity of that interface.
Rails compiles to JDBC? Now I’m questioning the the whole paper…
The Pragmatic Programmers have announced the upcoming Desktop GIS title.
I use my MacBook as my “command center”, connecting to the other machines I need to work on using ssh and Nx. After a bit of tuning, I had this working nicely under Tiger.
Enter Leopard. I upgraded my machine rather than a clean install — I’m in the middle of too many things to start from zero. Being cautious, I waited a few days to see what kind of issues might arise (such as the Blue Screen of Death). For the most part, the upgrade went well, with a few exceptions: Read the rest of this entry »
Following the instructions for a “hard” upgrade in Chapter 2. Installation of the PostGIS manual results in large objects not being restored to the database. If you create a dump using pg_dump -Fc –oids and then use the postgis_restore.pl script, the oids will be restored but not the large objects. This is not really a PostGIS issue, it can happen when dealing with any PostgreSQL database.
To remedy this situation I found that the pg_dumplo utility has the answer. The trick is to use pg_dumplo to dump the large objects from the “old” PostgreSQL/PostGIS install and then use it to restore the objects to the “new” install after running the postgis_restore.pl script.
The pg_dumplo utility can usually be found in the contrib directory of your PostgreSQL install. For a complete example, see the README.pg_dumplo file located in the contrib/pg_dumplo directory.
Note: You only need this utility if you have created database tables containing large objects. On a “stock” PostGIS database the postgis_restore.pl script does it’s job in a most efficient way.
I guess Ubuntu must be popular. I’m just trying to upgrade my Feisty install so I can do the upgrade to Gutsy. Looks like it’s going to take a while… Read the rest of this entry »
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