20 Sep 2010
I was a little surprised last week when Jody Garnett told me that the most contentious session of FOSS4G turned out to be the “WPS compliance testing” talk. Really? “Really”, Jody insisted, “Voices were raised.”
Over web processing service (WPS) compliance? Well, we are all knee-jerk nerds, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The results were presented by just one WPS project, the 52North one, but tested a broad swathe of them. I think the lesson to be learned is that you should be careful testing other people’s software, and even more careful when brandishing the results of those tests.
The WMS benchmarking exercise, where each team runs their own service, seems like a better model, though demonstrably hard to coordinate in its own right.
The ZooWPS team has now published their response, so if you are interested in WPS, here’s a chance to dig deep into XML response payloads. Yum.
20 Sep 2010
The PostGIS web site is temporarily down, but the project team is pushing ahead (belatedly) with the 1.5.2 release series in the meanwhile. The reason we are not waiting is the same reason we are belated: 1.5.2 is required to run with PostgreSQL 9.0, which was freshly released recently (we should have released 1.5.2 a couple months ago, really).
You can get the 1.5.2rc1 source code from the PostGIS issue tracking page and wiki: http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis
Please test and post any issues as tickets, we are aiming to drop a final release pretty quickly. Try to confine yourself to posting deal-breaker tickets only.
20 Aug 2010
If you find yourself writing a query like this:
... WHERE ST_Intersects(ST_Buffer(g1, r), g2)
Stop. Take a cleansing breath. Do this:
... WHERE ST_DWithin(g1, g2, r)
With the carbon emissions you save doing it the efficient way, you can afford to drive to the ice cream store for a well-deserved reward.
16 Aug 2010
Did you know that OpenGeo is hiring a software engineer? It’s true. Let’s build something beautiful together.
06 Aug 2010
Noticing this a little late, but have a peak at these posts from Chris Hodgson about how the R-Tree fails for variable density GIS data, and his approach to a packing process. Unfortunately, packing is a post-facto process, and it’s not clear to me how we would do it with the GiST infrastructure that undergirds the PostGIS database. But it’s nice to see a good R-Tree and a reminder of just how ugly they can get under the covers.
