04 Jan 2010
Update: We’re expanding from the “C tribe” to the “curly braces tribe” and bringing in some JavaScripters too. Tim Schaub and Andreas Hocevar of OpenLayers/GeoExt will be joining the crew!
**Update 2: If you haven’t added your name to the wiki and booked your hotel room, you don’t exist! GeoExt, OpenLayers folks don’t delay! **
Update 3: Avencia has joined as a sponsor (and is sending a couple staff to join in the fun). Along with OpenGeo, who are providing us with lovely space and free internet access, that bring our sponsorship docket to LizardTech, Coordinate Solutions, qPublic.net, Farallon Geographics, Avencia and OpenGeo!
Update 4: Other members of the curly braces tribe will be in attendance, in the persons of Justin Deoliveira, Andrea Aime, and Gabriel Roldan from GeoServer. I’m looking forward to working with them on adding PostGIS 1.5 GEOGRAPHY support in GeoServer.
Whoops, it’s 2010! How did that happen?
I hope all members of the open source C tribe have gone beyond thinking about attending the New York Code Sprint (February 20 to 23) and moved into the travel planning stage! Don’t forget to book your hotel, the room block closes in three weeks.
The list of attendees includes top contributors from MapServer, GDAL, OGR, and LibLAS. I’m feeling a little lonely at the PostGIS table with just Olivier to keep me company. And where are the folks from QGIS, Mapnik and GRASS? We love you guys! Come on, group hug. There you go.
We have four great sponsors now (LizardTech, Coordinate Solutions, qPublic.net, Farallon Geographics) and are looking for a couple more to round out the event. Thanks to our sponsors so far!
Remember to sign up to the mailing list and add yourself to the wiki page so we know you are coming, and you receive all the event notices, it’s impossible to plan for you if we don’t know you exist. See you soon in the Big Apple!
Thanks to Joel Schlagel for the logo!
02 Jan 2010
If you know you’re going to FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona this year, you can save 20% by taking advantage of the Sooper Dooper Early Registration rates. Rates end January 15, the early bird gets the savings.
22 Dec 2009
If “open” is good at making others loose, and less than free is the model for things outside your core revenue stream, why isn’t Microsoft giving away free advertising?
16 Dec 2009
Dan McKinley takes a look under the covers of a couple Python PostgreSQL abstraction layers:
Database client drivers intended for the same database can do drastically different things. By Python standards, the Postgres driver situation is completely schizo. There are a lot of them available - there are five dedicated Postgres drivers listed on the wiki, as opposed to just one for MySQL. People might choose different drivers for licensing reasons, for religious reasons, randomly (because they never did any analysis like I am about to do), or for completely inscrutable reasons because they are just plain out of their minds. You really would not believe how much blood I have seen spilled over Postgres client drivers.
Read it!
16 Dec 2009
I typed “postgis” into Google this evening, and in addition to the exquisitely organized first entry there were two ads, one relevant (EnterpriseDB, the Postgres company) and one seemingly utterly random, for an English language school.
Has the Google algorithm made a mistake? How is this relevant? Well, the language school is in Victoria, BC, birth-place of PostGIS, but it gets better than that.
Here’s a picture of their sign, which I walked past every morning for almost five years, since the school shares a building (1207 Douglas Street) with Refractions Research, birth-company of PostGIS.
But wait, there’s more! The name of the school is “GEOS Language Academy”, and the GEOS spatial library was also created in Victoria, specifically to bring spatial predicate algorithms to PostGIS!
Poor Google algorithm, you never stood a chance.
