Posts by Spatial Galaxy

Oblique Speak in the Technical Realm

It amazes me how people fail to communicate when speaking about technical matters. I’m sure you have heard this refrain: “My computer doesn’t work” or perhaps “Program XYZ blows up”. Ok, in the general sense there is some information being conveyed here. Often times the speaker is not merely providing a fact but asking for help in a very oblique manner. Before you think I’m picking on the poor newcomer, I’m not.
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Diminished Expectations

I’ve had to lower my expectations of the Open Source GIS user community. Now that I have your attention, I’ll explain. The OSGIS user community by and large is composed of a great bunch of folks. Its the few that have soured my outlook a bit. I repeatedly see posts to mailing lists blasting one application or the other (usually not to the project’s own list but another). The software stinks, doesn’t work right, the developers are stupid, its not as good as X, Y, or Z, and so forth.
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Making Open Source GIS Easier

How can we make getting started in Open Source GIS easier? To begin with, it needs to be easier to Discover Install Use Discovery This is probably the least of the problems, but you would be surprised how many people “stumble” on OS GIS each day. Things are improving as more exposure is gained through books, blogs, conferences, and the media. The more we talk about it, the more well known it becomes.
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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 In other words, we can design solid systems that serve us well, but they can be brittle. We can push on them a bit and they perform well, but push too hard and the whole thing shatters.
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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. Well maybe its not that bad but organizing and managing your GIS data is difficult. If you need to maintain canonical datasets, the spread of “temporary” and/or “working” copies is your enemy.
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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. Case in point - I recently needed to create two seamless regional layers from over 100 individual shapefiles. The source shapefiles were stored in individual subdirectories two levels deep.
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Free Support for Open Source GIS

One of the often overlooked support mechanisms for Open Source GIS applications is Internet Relay chat, better known as IRC. Many OS GIS projects maintain an IRC presence. Often times you will find the project developers hanging out on the channel and willing to answer questions (more about that in a bit). Speaking personally, the Quantum GIS project has used IRC for project coordination, communication, and user support for several years.
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Should MapServer join OSGeo?

The MapServer Technical Steering Committee today approved an RFC that calls for MapServer to join the newly formed Open Source Geospatial Foundation. A poll has been put up on the MapServer site (login required) to collect the responses from the community. So far the vote is unanimously in favor of joining, although the poll has only been open for about an hour. Some thought it interesting that MapServer didn’t join immediately, given it was at the center of the failed MapServer Foundation attempt at the end of last year.
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Open Source Geospatial Foundation Meeting - Review

This is an unofficial recap of the OSGF meeting, based on my recollections having spent 10 hours on IRC and the phone. I’m sure the foundation will release an official version of the day’s events, so take my comments with a grain of salt. As I stated in an earlier post, the name was chosen early on and without an excessive amount of debate. OSGF rolls off the tongue rather easily and has a nice ring to it.
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Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Well, I have been participating in the “GeoFoundation” Meeting since 5:30 am local time this morning. We’re two hours into the meeting and so far a name for the foundation has been agreed upon: Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The domain osgeo.org has been registered. I suppose most folks will refer to it as OSGF from this point on, although the term OsGeo was also mentioned in the discussions. I was concerned that the name of the foundation would become a major stumbling block in making progress during the meeting, however the groundwork and informal polll seems to have paid off in that regard.
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