Už je to týden, co jsem byl na zatím poslední kontrole v Krči. Výsledek je, že jsem byl prohlášen za zdravého (podmíněně ovšem - na dalších několik let). Následovat budou kontroly, ve smyslu jednou za pár měsíců markery, sem tam PET a CT. "Váš organismus má velkou pochvalu." Řekla mi ...

<rant>

Like others, I recently received a comment about an upcoming competition on  my “about” page. Like others, I feel that this is a curious way of advertising a competition with large monetary prize. Possibly unlike others, I also feel quite strongly about being contacted in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a very worthy competition, and had the advertising policy been better thought through I would be all for it.

I do feel quite strongly about only posting my own personal views on my site. I do occasionally get asked to post on particular subjects/sites/products, and in general I won’t, unless it fits with something I was going to say anyway. I also feel quite strongly about posting on subjects that have been covered ad nauseum by other people, unless I have something different to add.

All in all, that makes me quite tetchy when I receive comments like this. By not using the contact form, it means I have to decide whether to get quite stalinist with my comment deletion policy, or to give people some free advertising. Furthermore, by posting to multiple blogs, our collective readership get stung with the same old post multiple times.

I guess this is just all just a request for people to learn a little blog-etiquette- make the effort to contact people in the correct way, and don’t use blog comments to advertise!

</rant>

Kurt, I have in fact seen mapping integrated with Zotero. Shekhar Krishnan used the GeoNames database to locate items by their place of publication in a demo at THATCamp.

Jeff Harrison’s mass email caught my eye today with the free trial of CarbonArc. I had the pleasure of taking an early release of CarbonArc for a spin last year and while it was a good start there were a few key things missing from my point of view. Having pushed and prodded Mapinfo 9.5 support for use with our SDI, why not run the new CarbonArc 1.6 through its paces …

From the press release,

CarbonArc PRO 1.6 eliminates barriers to SDI usability through advanced SOA-based discovery, analysis, exploitation, transaction management and security tools for OGC SDI - directly from the ESRI ArcGIS desktop.

Instead of just regurgitating the release, the key question that always gets asked is … doesn’t ESRI ArcGIS already do all this?

Its a tricky question to answer because while on paper i could say, “Yes it does!”, in reality there are just so many annoying quirks and missing features, it quickly becomes a nightmare integrating SDI features into your normal ArcGIS workflow (which is what this is all about, right?).  So with fingers crossed, lets dive right in and see what i can find in 5 minutes flat …

The Good

1. Well laid out and robust tool set which delivers fully functional WMS/WFS/WFST/WCS capabilities … with no mucking about required!. The thing just works.
2. Very easy export to Shapefile tool
3. Full featured filter encoding support … no black magic, user has full control
4. Full access to the query string for all service types
5. Caching of features / images when saving to project files

The Bad

1. GML Integration will always be difficult given its a completely new ArcGIS feature source, but its still not up to the average users expectations I dont think. There is no attribute table, the features are independant of pretty much all other ArcGIS functionality so you are really left with GAIA functionality squished into an ArcGIS window.
2. Web services request headers are devoid of any accept-encoding headers. I’m still pondering the choice of Expect: 100 requests … but i’m sure there’s a good reason in the depths of HTTP …
3. The exclusive tool for CubeWerx “Identity Management Service” seems a bit strange as i’m not aware of any services that use this technology? Shoot me a link if i missed something!
4. Lack of support for any WMS LegendGraphics. Users can choose from multiple Styles, but theres no way to actually view legend information which is a bit disappointing
5. In the full minute spent trying, i wasnt able to get the WFST support working … i could get as far as the schema but as soon as i’d try to insert a feature the thing would just bail out.

I’m beginning to think the best suggestion would be to somehow merge CarbonArc WFS functionality with an automated export to shape on each filter response. This would allow excellent SDI WFS support, while still giving full ESRI ArcGIS functionality to users without having to reinvent the wheel (for things like the edit system). With the WMS/WCS support pretty solid, i think getting the balance of WFS right could mean the difference between a very promising product and one I would recommend to everyone using our platform.

Thoughts?

Frank has issued an update for FWTools bundle. The latest version of Frank’s binary kit has number 2.2.6 and is dedicated to Windows users only. Available to download from primary and mirror site.

The FOSS4G 2008 is only one month away. Traditionally, the Community gathered around Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial will award an individual with prestigious Sol Katz Award:

The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS) will be given to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in the geospatial realm.

Past Awardees:

• 2007: Steve Lime
• 2006: Markus Neteler
• 2005: Frank Warmerdam

Yesterday Frank posted official call for nominations:

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation would like to open nominations for the 2008 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software.

The winner will be announced on at the FOSS4G 2008 conference closing plenary in Cape Town, South Africa.

Front page of http://geourl.info has been welcoming visitors with Offline message for a few days. Anyone has an idea what’s going on with the geourl.info service?

I hope it won’t be down for 9 months as the previous services was.

Version 1.0.7 fixes problems with polygon ring dimensions and reference cycles. Related: I fixed the only known Rtree bug and am lobbying hard to push it ahead to 1.0.

From Andrew Turner, the Urban Spoon spatial-temporal map of restaurant seeking. Among the insights you can glean from this data presentation:

• People look for restaurants in cities full of people, not in the wilderness.
• People don't look for restaurants when they are asleep.

Perhaps a zoomed in view of San Francisco would be more interesting.

One of the simplest, most useful, and well executed applications on the iPhone is UrbanSpoon’s free restaurant finder. Open the application, it geolocates you, give the iPhone and shake and three Slot machine style selectors spin around and randomly choose a restaurant nearby. You can then even lock in specifics such as location, cuisine, or price range and shake to give more suggestions.

However, what’s particularly neat about the application is that UrbanSpoon has been recording these “shakes” by location (inherent in the API call obviously) and created a great visualization showing the locations around the US over a day of “shaking”.

The heatmap essentially shows the evolving enquiry of people looking for a place to eat. There isn’t an actual time display or timeline slider to investigate - but I imagine there are interesting trends during meals, and particularly after normal eating times when people don’t have a plans on where to eat. In addition, a timezone lag that would show shaking progressing east to west.

Context mining of mobile devices, combined with geographic location - and especially via inferred geographic information instead of directly volunteered information can yield interesting trends on ambient behaviors. Imagine if UrbanSpoon could also collect the number of people in the group by detecting other repeatedly seen nearby bluetooth/wifi devices, previous meals of the day, and the ultimate destination and distance to the chosen restaurant.

By the beginning of the year 2009, new must-read book for C++ hackers is rolling around. Anthony Williams is writing book titled: C++ Concurrency in Action (ISBN: 1933988770):

I will be covering all aspects of multithreaded programming with the new C++0x standard, from the details of the new C++0x memory model and atomic operations to managing threads and designing parallel algorithms and thread-safe containers. The book will also feature a complete reference to the C++0x Standard Thread Library.

from Anthony’s blog

Since June, Anthony’s book is available through Manning Early Access Program. The final release is planned on February 2009.

In the meantime, Anthony has published an article Simpler Multithreading in C++0x introducing multithreading support and thread library as a new feature in the C++0x standard.

Mateusz posted a link to an interesting topic on osgeo-discuss. I think it’s a great idea to document the history of geospatial and open source, and I echo Dave’s comments on how Wikipedia would be an ideal home for documentation and maintenance. Perhaps the best way to go about this would be for the various [...]

It's a shame I'm not a geographer, because there are probably some interesting sociological nuggets hiding in the way manufacturing has dispersed across the USA over the past 40 years. This weakly reasoned article in Salon includes the point that auto manufacturers are locating their US plants in the South. Why so?

Union avoidance probably has something to do with it. But the price efficiency of a dependent labour force has to balanced against the inefficiency of being separated from a concentrated nexus of talent. Jane Jacobs, in the "Economy of Cities", talks about the self-reinforcing nature of the skills networks that develop in cities, and you don't have to look far to see them in action. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the Research Triangle, etc, etc.

Oddly, the USA has some world class geographic nexuses of intellectual talent, while the manufacturing base has dispersed. Intellectual work is highly portable (I'm writing in a coffee shop, linked into a client's VPN, and compiling a library on their machine) and virtual. Manufacturing work is heavy, with physical objects to move around. Why aren't all the auto parts manufacturers, secondary assembly plants and final auto assembly still located in Michigan?

Clearly the cost of moving things around has fallen so much in recent years that factory sites can be chosen on other bases (prevailing wages, tax holidays) instead. I would also guess that the automation of parts of the assembly line has lowered the required skill specialization of line workers, so that having access to a pool of qualified talent in a factory hub has become less important too.

I wonder if increases in the cost of transport will cause some manufacturing to geographically re-integrate, so Boeing (for example) will stop shipping wings around the world, and their parts suppliers will find it more economical to set up satellite production closer to final assembly in Seattle.

Maybe if I beg, FortiusOne will dig up some cool maps on this topic. Please? Pretty please?

(this was posted on fdo-users)

This is the query being used at the moment for the describe schema in King Oracle,
(I did rewrite the sql a bit, I got rid of there where clause)

SELECT   a.owner, a.table_name, a.column_name, a.srid, a.diminfo, b.cs_name,
      b.wktext, c.index_name, d.sdo_layer_gtype, s.sequence_name,
      d.sdo_root_mbr, NULL o1, NULL o2, NULL o3, NULL o4, NULL o5, NULL o6,
      NULL o7, NULL o8, NULL o9, NULL o10, NULL o111, NULL o12
FROM all_tab_columns t
INNER JOIN all_sdo_geom_metadata a
 on t.owner = a.owner
  AND t.table_name = a.table_name
  AND t.column_name = a.column_name
LEFT JOIN MDSYS.cs_srs b
 ON a.srid = b.srid
LEFT JOIN all_sdo_index_info c
 ON a.owner = c.table_owner
  AND a.table_name = c.table_name
LEFT JOIN all_sdo_index_metadata d
 ON c.sdo_index_owner = d.sdo_index_owner
  AND c.index_name = d.sdo_index_name
LEFT JOIN all_sequences s
 ON s.sequence_name = CONCAT (a.table_name, '_FDOSEQ')
--and s.sequence_owner=t.owner criteria
ORDER BY a.owner, a.table_name

it's pretty slow because of the use of the all tables, I think there's
a bug in there as well with the sequence join, it will match on duplicate
table names in other schemas.

but the performance goes to hell if you add the s.sequence_owner=t.owner criteria back in

if we just use the user views, that problem disappears

SELECT a.table_name, a.column_name, a.srid, a.diminfo, b.cs_name,
b.wktext, c.index_name, d.sdo_layer_gtype, s.sequence_name,
d.sdo_root_mbr, NULL o1, NULL o2, NULL o3, NULL o4, NULL o5, NULL o6,
NULL o7, NULL o8, NULL o9, NULL o10, NULL o111, NULL o12
FROM user_tab_columns t
INNER JOIN user_sdo_geom_metadata a
 on t.table_name = a.table_name
  AND t.column_name = a.column_name
LEFT JOIN MDSYS.cs_srs b
 ON a.srid = b.srid
LEFT JOIN user_sdo_index_info c
 on a.table_name = c.table_name
LEFT JOIN user_sdo_index_metadata d
 on c.index_name = d.sdo_index_name
LEFT JOIN user_sequences s
 ON s.sequence_name = CONCAT (a.table_name, '_FDOSEQ')
ORDER BY a.table_name

the performance improvement and load reduction is quite dramatic, the
difference is that user_tab_columns lists the objects owner by the users,
while the all_tab_columns lists everything that the user has access to

when using these tables, a ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA='%kingoracle.oracleschema%'
would be required at the start of the session if you use a different
username than the specified oracleschema

small schema
q_user_schema (Datasource=gis, Time=16ms, Records=4) that's roughly 100 times faster
q_all_schema (Datasource=gis, Time=1750ms, Records=4)

big schema
q_user_schema (Datasource=gis, Time=234ms, Records=146) that's roughly 6.5 times faster
q_all_schema (Datasource=gis, Time=1531ms, Records=146)

not only is it faster, but it's also a lot less work for the database

Speaking of maps in the media -- I like this one of John McCain's homes:

I know he doesn't personally use the internet tubes, but maybe an aide can print it out and help McCain keep track of these places.

Does this kind of "attack map" contribute to the stupefication of US politics? Yes, perhaps, but I for one am happy to see the other side get the rare pleasure of defending itself from this kind of bullshit. For once.

Today, George Silva asked on the OSGeo Discuss mailing list for some details on history of Free and Open Source Software for GIS. Shortly, the discussion has turned into a very interesting brainstorm session resulting in detailed overview of FOSS4G roots and chronology.

More on Brief history of GIS OSS (bit off topic?)

Update: 22-08-2008:

Based on the discussion about history of FOSS4G, dedicated article on OSGeo Wiki has been started: Open Source GIS History

Mateusz's post about marshaling geometries from hex-encoded WKB strings in C++ reminds me how easy this is in Python using built-in string methods and Shapely:

>>> from shapely.wkb import loads
>>> g = loads('01010000005839B4C876BEF33F83C0CAA145B61640'.decode('hex'))
>>> g.wkt
'POINT (1.2340000000000000 5.6779999999999999)'

My only regret about switching to dynamic languages for (almost) all my development is that I didn't go straight to Python. Last weekend I ran into a former co-worker at the Fort Collins downtown street festival and was reminded about the enormous Perl legacy I left behind at that shop.

This is better, as I was saying. It's nice to see Python catching on in my home state's GIS department, and also to see ESRI users catching on to the power of more idiomatic Python. It's more than just an open source Avenue, after all.

Speaking of better Python things, yesterday I found out about Tarek Ziade's Atomisator project. It's the kind of framework for feed processing that is entirely lacking in my Mush application. A comment on his entry then led me to TOPP's Melkjug, which has a slick web UI for creating feed filters that is also not to be had from Mush. I think I'll borrow liberally from each, and maybe Mush can provide some geographic processing and filtering inspiration in return.