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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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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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 »
Well, the QGIS workshop at FOSS4G2007 is history. We had a capacity crowd and covered a lot of ground in a short 3 hours.
Rumor is there are some pictures and heaven forbid, audio from the workshop floating around. Maybe they’ll surface at some point this week.
I have a few LiveCDs left over and some of the coveted QGIS carabiners. If you run into me at the conference and want either, just ask.
The conference goes into full swing tomorrow, with the plenary session and the first presentations beginning in the afternoon.
Day 0 - Things are hopping in Victoria. Yesterday I helped a big group of volunteers set up 160+ PCs for the Workshops and the Labs. People filtered in all day and the process of putting faces to names was interesting.
Workshops start at 0900 today (Day 1) and run till 1600, then the OSGeo Annual General Meeting begins at 1630. I imagine by the end of the day, nearly the full contingent of conference attendees will be stalking the streets of Victoria.
This is an experience report–your mileage may vary
I decided to give JUMP another try today. So I downloaded the latest release (1.2) and unzipped it into a directory. Looking at the JUMP Installation Guide reveals the document is written totally for Windows users. No problem, but I’m using a Mac.
Looking in the bin directory there is a shell script named JUMPWorkbench-mac.sh. OK, make that executable and give it a go:
$ ./JUMPWorkbench-mac.sh
: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I’ve seen that before–the shell script has DOS line endings and that makes for an unhappy script on OS X. That can be easily fixed in a number of ways; I chose to load it up in VIM and set the file type to unix:
:set ff=unix
:w
Now the script will execute and JUMP starts up. Of course the first thing I try to do is load a shapefile. No go–clicking on the OK button after selecting the shapefile results in nothing happening. The dialog doesn’t close or change, and nothing is added. No exceptions and nothing in the log either. Checking the mailing list reveals that at least one other person had this problem, however there is no solution in any of the posts.
OK, so let’s try a WMS layer. I enter in the old faithful NASA JPL WMS server (http://wms.jpl.nasa.gov/wms.cgi) and click the Next button. This time an error pops up telling me “No description was provided (Null Pointer Exception)”. Clicking the Details button gives me a stack trace but nothing to indicate the root cause of the problem.
I tried a PostGIS layer, but of course I didn’t have the PostgreSQL JDBC drivers on my system so that didn’t work.
I was able to load an image and create a new layer.
I guess maybe JUMP isn’t ready for the Mac–or maybe my system is just cantankerous. Maybe I’ll try Windows or Linux next…
Marco Hugentobler at the Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich has announced the QGIS MapServer project.
From the website:
“QGIS mapserver is a server module for geographic maps. The content of vector and raster datasources (e.g. shapefiles, gml, postgis, wfs, geotiff ) is visualized according to the request parameters. The generated map image is sent back to the client over the internet.”
This project is very much in the early stages, as it requires a specific development version of QGIS. There is a Windows binary available for download as well as packages for Ubuntu (make sure to read the caveat).
You can also view a sample map request that displays the countries of Europe.
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 when it comes to doing analysis.
Part of this trend stems from a desire to deliver mapping to the masses. If you’re a consultant or service provider, it’s a good thing. Being able to provide your “customers” with a toolset over the web makes sense.
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