Happy Jobsmas Eve!

How does your family mark Jobsmas Eve? Do you sing 1,2,3,4 and dance around your AirPort Extreme router, like my family? Or do you have a more relaxed, modern Jobsmas Eve, and just play networked iPod games together?

While, obviously, I am excited about the approach of Jobsmas, I find the hand-wringing and obsession about the physical shape of the Gift to be a bit over the top.

Possible Representation of the Gift

No matter what, it’s going to be a glass slab about the size of a hard cover book, OK? Does it really matter if the back is silver or black? What gets my Jobsmas noodles in a knot is … what is it going to do???

It’s all about the software, how is this Gift different from the Gifts that have come before? Will the the new feature be something pointless and pretty like “Cover Flow”, or something useful and immediately intuitive like “flick to scroll”? Pointless and pretty would be virtual 3D display via head tracking. Useful and intuitive would be pen-less handwriting.

No matter what, I am looking forward to getting up tomorrow, putting on my black turtleneck and black jeans, and celebrating true spirit of Jobsmas, by oggling the Gift and figuring out how it Changes Everything.

New York Code Sprint 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!

FOSS4G 2010 Savings

FOSS4G 2010If 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.

Deep Thought

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?

Abstracterrific!

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!