2010 FOSS4G Bids are In

Four bids this year, from the, er, three corners of the earth. China, North America, and Europe (times two, Barcelona and Utrecht). Apparently sated after winning bids from South Africa and Australia, the antipodes are not represented this year.

My criteria will, as always, tend towards the practical matters of putting on a financially successful conference. Is there a track record of past performance? Is the local organizing committee well connected and able to bring in local sponsorships? Has the bid thought about some of the practicalities of putting on a conference for many hundreds of people? Is there a strong leader attached to the bid who can cut through committeeitis and get decisions made quickly? Of course, my own criteria will be subordinated to the overall conference committee criteria, and the process described therein, but that's where I tend to come from. I like to see a bid that makes me think "yes, those people could put on a half-million dollar conference with no problems at all".

One thing I hope we will manage well this year is getting a good discussion going during the evaluation phase with the proponents. In 2009 it didn't matter, because we had just one bid, but in 2008 we didn't really get any IRC chat going or really any back and forth, and I didn't feel like I really knew who the proponents were.
 

Information Infrastructure

Governments around the world are poised to unleash untold billions of dollars in spending on infrastructure, in stimulus packages that hope to cushion the landing we are currently plummeting towards. Ron Lake posits that the initiatives will require a meta-investment, that

We are going to need to invest in infrastructure (information infrastructure) for infrastructure!

It is probably not a good sign that I, a professional technologist, am chilled to the bone by the prospect. Information infrastructure historically has an obsolescence period that does not stack up well against physical infrastructure. Bridges last fifty, a hundred, sometimes a thousand, years. Government IT is planned for replacement in a decade, and occasionally pushed out as far as two decades in oddball cases.

It got me trying to think about the government IT investments that have shown longevity and been repeatedly leveraged by the economy over the years. And the two obvious ones seem to be data and open source software. The topographic mapping done by the US government and published by the USGS has been used and re-used so many times in so many contexts, the investment has been repaid many many times over. Same thing with the TIGER data. Investing in very core data sets and making them freely available seems to generate knock-on economic effects for years.

The same thing has been happening with investment in core geographic software libraries. The Proj4 reprojection library had its genesis at the USGS, and has been integrated into many many pieces of software, both open and proprietary. The JTS/NTS/GEOS geometry library (genesis in Canadian government funding) now lives inside many open and proprietary software packages.

The difficulty is perhaps in distinguishing what pieces of data and software are "core" and can get maximum leverage and re-use over time, and are therefore worth "investing" in. It's not as obvious as in physical infrastructure what pieces of software and data are "roads" and which ones are "trucks".
 

GIS Analysis with PoVRay

Is this "neogeography"? At the minimum, it's someone seeing a powerful tool at his disposal and pressing it into service, rather than waiting for ESRI to release a suitably branded version. Check out Smathermather, scroll right to the bottom and work your way up. Faaaabulous!
 

We aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto

No, we aren't, because I got home last night.

But, the last couple days, I was in Kansas – Lawrence, Kansas, to be precise – a little piece of Massachusetts, cunningly hidden on the eastern edge of the Great Plains. Easy parlor game: find Douglas County, the home of Lawrence, in this map of county-by-county 2008 election results.



The organizers of Kansas University GIS Day were kind enough to invite me out to keynote their event. The talk I delivered, on disruptive technology and open source, was well-received. I also got to meet up with Howard Butler and Steve Lime, two members of the Mapserver community who live in fly-over country and who drove down to Lawrence. Steve came to present on Mapserver at KU GIS Day, and Howard just came for the beer and camaraderie.

Here's the wordle of my keynote.



The folks at the KU Natural History Museum invited me and Howard over to talk about open source and their plans for open sourcing their collections-management software, Specify. They were also kind enough to give us a short tour of their holdings, which are incredible – four floors of climate controlled racks of bottles of specimens, and that was just the fish and frogs! We also got to see a coelacanth, the "fossil fish", unchanged over 40M years.



Thanks to Josh Campbell, Xan Wedell and all the other GIS Day organizers who showed me and the other presenters such hospitality.

All in all, a great trip, but *click*click* there's no place like home, there's no place like home...
 

Nearest Book

From Sean Gillies. My excerpt:

Automobiles were getting larger as the station wagon and van yielded to the supremacy of the sport utility vehicle (SUV), an expeditionary car based on a light trick chassis and therefore exempt from legislated fuel efficiency standards.

The rules are: grab the nearest book; turn to page 56; find the fifth sentence; post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I'm sitting next to my bookshelf, so the closest in this case was an artifact of what was where in shelving order: "The Long Emergency", by James Howard Kunstler. Ground zero of Kunstler reading is "The Geography of Nowhere", which I would heartily recommend to anyone and everyone – he is still living off the particular style he honed in "Nowhere". For example, sentence number two on my page 56:

Meanwhile, South Korea, Malaysai, Thailand, Singapore, and especially China were becoming the world's manufacturing workshops as America "outsourced" heavy industry and focused its energies on hypertrophic suburban land development and the consumer infrastructure that went with it – malls, so-called power centers, and the vast highway strips with their fried food shacks, tanning huts, and muffler shops.

Kunstler translates into visceral language his thesis that the automobile (whether it runs on gas, vegetable oil, electricity or magic) has hopelessly degraded the public realm of most of North America, creating a "cartoon architecture" and a land-use and life-style pattern utterly hostile to normal human relationships.
 

10,000 Hours

I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" for a plane ride last month, and it was a fun read. About 25% of it I had read before, as he gets double duty out of much of his writing by serializing bits of it into the New Yorker.

Anyways, he has a new one coming out, "Outliers", a study of exceptional people, and one of the theses is:

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

Which got me thinking – what skill did I hone enough before the age of 20 to become world class? I did a fair amount of music, but not anything close to 10,000 hours. Then I remembered.

I have all the makings of a world class reader. So, if you want a book read, send it along, I've got the mad chops to get it read for you.
 

Fake Issue

IT bureaucracies have a way of ginning up all kinds of contradictory reasons to keep people from doing things that, while not really impossible, are inconvenient to IT. Take, for example, the issue of providing e-mail service to the Most Powerful Man on Earth:

In addition to concerns about e-mail security, [Obama] faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

So, on the one hand there's the problem of maintaining security, and on the other hand there's the problem that everything said will be on the public record. Hey, wait a minute, those are contradictory objections! Taken together, they are meaningless.

Take them separately then.

Security. Does the Director of Central Intelligence have e-mail. How about his subordinate? How about the subordinate's subordinate. At some point, someone dealing in highly sensitive national secrets has e-mail already, and is probably using it to transmit those secrets to other people dealing in highly sensitive national secrets. E-mail security in the government is a "solved problem".

Publicity. Simply attach a .sig to every outgoing Obama e-mail, "Please remember, all messages sent to me are, or will become, part of the public record of the United States."

Kennedy (and famously, Nixon) recorded his Oval Office meetings, including some pretty blunt discussion. Presidents make pretty blunt notations on the margins of memos they are reading. It all ends up in the public record.

Unless they are saying they think President Obama doesn't have the self-control to realize that his e-mail is going to be public at some point, I really fail to see how e-mail is a medium so radically different from all preceding that the President has to actually stop using it.



Heck, the most effective argument against email in the New York Times article came near the end. Says Diana Owen, of the Georgetown American Studies program:

It’s a time burner. It might be easier for him to say, “I can’t be on e-mail.”

Truer words were never spoken. Could be worse though, he could be blogger.
 

What is OSGeo becoming?

From James Fee:

[Open Street Map] comes off very “hacker” to many of my clients and they can’t get beyond that. I hope it doesn’t fall into what OSGeo is becoming.

Glurp?

Update: Clarification from James:

Why does OSGeo seem more concerned with creating new logos than creating case studies? To me that sums up its existence. Almost three years into OSGeo, what has it really done besides confederate some open source projects? Does this really help me sell open source projects? Email threads, are you kidding me?

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Case_Studies

If people put half the effort they do into logos and open source job lists that they do into case studies, maybe companies would look more at their products. I know Paul that you aren't the president or director or whatever the head of OSGeo is, but this logo nonsense has got to stop and OSGeo has to embrace the real world.

Update 2: Almost as if to answer James (or at least to demonstrate that there are many, many minds about what OSGeo should "become"), Howard Butler posts to the OSGeo board list:

Marketing doesn't write software, it doesn't improve documentation, and it doesn't streamline project communication.... I guess I've always had a bit of a problem with the marketing aspect of OSGeo, especially when its not at all clear to me who we're marketing to other than the general GIS ether and for what purpose. IMO, the people using Open Source software are the ones who market it, not the people who make the software. [italics added] Could the OSGeo marketing proponents please set me straight on how I see this all wrong?

PostgreSQL 8.3.5 - Important Upgrade

Normally, minor releases just sail by... the bugs fixed are tiny things that don't apply to your neck of the woods, but for 8.3.5 you will find this entry in the release notes:

Fix GiST index corruption due to marking the wrong index entry "dead" after a deletion (Teodor) This would result in index searches failing to find rows they should have found.

The PostGIS spatial index is built on top of GiST, so for any production table where entries are being deleted or updated, this bug could actually cause errors to crop up. Data would not be lost, but it would occasionally not be found in index-enabled searches.

If you are using PostGIS on PostgreSQL 8.3, upgrade to 8.3.5 as soon as possible. This bug has been seen in the wild, one of my clients just ran into it, it could affect you too.

Update: From Mark Cave-Ayland, the bug was only introduced during the last set of point releases, and was backpatched all the way to 8.1. So the complete list of affected PostgreSQL releases is: 8.1.14, 8.2.10 and 8.3.4. If your version is not one of those, you're safe.
 

Local Color

One of the stranger rituals you will come across in Victoria is the annual fish stencil that the staff at the Goldstream Provincial Park put on for the kids every year during the salmon run. This is no ordinary fish stencil, because at Goldstream they use real dead salmon as the template.



Picture from Aaron Racicot on his recent Victoria trip.

Paint your fish, press a sheet of paper onto it, and voila, instant fish keepsake. If you come to Victoria in the late-October to early-November period, make sure Goldstream (just 20 minutes outside town) is on your agenda.
 

On Guard

While the "Obama-dot" in Charlie Savage's rally snapshot is nice:



What really makes the picture, to my mind, is the snipers on the roof:



Nothing says democracy quite like snipers! :)
 

Best Election Map

I've always been a bit of a connoisseur of election maps, but most maps don't really tell me much that I don't already know. The maps I like best are those that show smaller geographies than usually reported (in Canada, maps of polls instead of ridings, in the USA, maps of counties instead of states) and those that show changes from previous results – "delta maps". The New York Times is currently running one on their front page, here's a snapshot.



The colors are not reflective of number of votes, but of direction of movement. Hence, Montana colored blue even though McCain won it, because in every county Obama did better than Kerry did in 2004.

One of the things I found curious about the numbers in the paper today is that while Obama won a strong Electoral College victory, his popular vote share is not much different from the share Bush won in 2004, and Bush won a squeaker in the Electoral College. The map tells the tale.

McCain didn't lose support across the board, he actually improved on Bush in places, but mostly in places where the Republicans were already winning smashing majorities – more votes in Alabama don't get you any closer to the Presidency. So a respectable showing in the popular vote translates into an Electoral College whomping.

Somewhat disturbing is how nicely the red areas map into the phrase "rural white voters in former slave states". History just never goes away, does it?
 

PostGIS Code Re-org

Most commit messages are pretty terse affairs ("Fix for issue #142.", "Remove compile warnings.") but this morning, Mark Cave-Ayland posted this novel along with his code changes:

r3224 /trunk/loader/ (Makefile.in pgsql2shp.c wkb.h)

Switch pgsql2shp over to using liblwgeom.

There are few commits that can be as satisfying as one which involves the removal of ~1200 lines of code. By using the liblwgeom parser instead of the in-built parser, we have now achieved the following:

i) all parsers within PostGIS, shp2pgsql and pgsql2shp are now the same which means they all follow the same rules. Also extended error reporting information including error text and position information is available.

ii) the complexity of the shp2pgsql/pgsql2shp is considerably reduced.

The slightly unfortunate cost is the overall executable size is larger, since we are linking with liblwgeom. However, from both a consistency and maintainability point of view, this is a big win. Note that while there may be a difference in behaviour in some corner cases, all regression tests pass here.

Some extra explanation is in order. Mark's goal for the 1.4 release of PostGIS is to clean up the underlying code and make it easier to develop on. That has resulted in some major reorganization under the covers.

The geometry framework (liblwgeom) under PostGIS was written to be separable from the rest of the specific PgSQL code, but historically was managed right alongside it, in the same directory and built chain. Mark has broken it out into it's own directory with a separate build out to a true library file.

Now that the geometry framework is a true library, it can be used in other places, not just the back-end. So hooking the data loader/dumpers into it is a first step, and as he notes, improves the code immensely.