It’s true—everything you have ever done is wrong. If you are a developer, look at the code you wrote five years ago—it’s wrong. If you collect and store data—it’s wrong. This is the nature of human endeavor. The world used to be flat. The earth used to be the center of the universe. Discovery...
GIS in General
GIS for the UN*X World
In a recent post on VerySpatial.com, Jesse was discussing the apparent dominance of U*nix and observed: ‘…the geospatial industry almost completely left behind support for UNIX-like OSes’ It is true that the proprietary GIS vendors have largely abandoned Unix and Unix-like operating systems and continue to do so. However the open source GIS community...
The Ink is Dry
Looks like the ink is dry on Desktop GIS and it should start shipping soon. You can get the full scoop from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Update: It’s now shipping. See the announcement.
Wither the command line
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.
Beyond the RDBMS
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...
Desktop GIS – A Car With No Wheels?
Is desktop GIS software a rusty old car with no wheels? Bouncing around the blogosphere sometimes leaves you with that impression. All the excitement these days seems to center around mashups, hacks, and mapping in your web browser. It’s definitely cool stuff. A number of folks think this is the future of GIS, even...
Where Did the Dirtbag Go?
What happened to the GISDirtbag? He (or she?) seems to have disappeared off the face of the blogosphere. After stirring the pot with several posts (see example), he is gone. I wonder, did the lawyers from some unnamed giant take him down? Or did he say the wrong thing about the wrong person/group/software/topic and...
Brittle Systems
Lets face it, GIS systems are complicated. Typically there are multiple servers and applications that make up a “system”. Each of these represent a potential point of failure, thus creating a brittle system. Brittle systems break. The definition of the word brittle is: Brittle Solid, but liable to break or shatter
GIS Data is an Illicit Drug
GIS data is like an illicit drug. You can’t control it. It travels in secret and hides in the dark alleys of your organization. Its effect spreads and enslaves those that use it. In the end it can lead to ruin.
Hail the Command Line
In this day of GUI GIS, sometimes you can’t beat the good old command line for getting a job done, regardless of whether you use Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, or Windows. This may sound strange coming from someone heavily invested in a GUI project but its true.