O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://omsug.ca/osgis2004/program.html

I had the privilege of being part of the Open Source GIS / MapServer User Conference last week in Ottawa (June 9-11). Many software projects end up “proving” themselves by having some sort of conference themed around them. This conference was no exception. It was a wonderfully executed and very well-organized event. Kudos to the Ottawa MapServer Users Group for their tremendous effort organizing the event!

There were at least two key aspects to this conference: community building and solution showcasing.

This was a “coming out” for the community that has developed around the technology over the past few years. More than 200 delegates met face-to-face, many for the first time. In an age where you can “know” someone without ever “meeting” them, this kind of contact will help the long-term health of the community.

This was also a public showcase and hands-on learning opportunity for numerous technologies. Many of them sit quietly behind other applications in the form of libraries, databases or web services while others take an up-front role as a graphical interface or mapping engine.

The conference audience included GIS analysts and web developers, among many others. The fact that these two realms are overlapping regularly is exciting in itself. At a domain level, I met representatives from the ocean science, ecology, natural resources, health and academic communities - to name a few - many who were coming together for the first time.

What does ocean science have to learn from epidemiology and vice-versa? Everything - if it has to do with geospatial data management and visualization. We all learned that there are common problems and (potentially) common solutions to these problems.

I personally met people from Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Canada and the U.S. We had the opportunity to listen to presentations and participate in hands-on workshops. Both helped us learn about what others are doing with the free and open source geospatial tools that are available.

Often the main benefit of open source GIS and mapping tools appears to be the low cost, especially when compared to the commercial alternatives. However, the greater strength, we are realizing is the vibrant community support and also the power of technology that is ahead of the commercial software curve in many respects. It’s great stuff all around.

I’ll touch more on the specific technologies in future weblog entries.

Did you take in the conference? Hear of it? Want to learn more? Leave a note.

Related link: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/06/11/2003174595

A nice pairing of articles in today’s Taipei Times.
It seems that 40% of households(?) are
"http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/06/11/2003174595"
>online in Taiwan. And this is providing scope for
"http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/06/11/2003174591"
>private enterprise of various kinds and for innovative policing. Some of Taiwan’s police forces (for example, Taipei’s) are criticized that their regular anti-drug clampdowns sometimes just provide a cover for the gay harrassment of older days. But it is very heartening, and a sign of Taiwan’s democratization, to see examples like this of police protecting the vulnerable. It made my day.

The other interesting thing about the 40% figure is that it comes hot on the heels of reports that the lack of Arabic support in the WWW infrastructure has meant that the WWW has passed Arabic-readers by. It is now more than eight years since we made sure that URIs in XML could include any characters; and at least four years since we introduced the anyURI type into XMl Schemas. Why have other standards bodies dragged their heels on this: what is there left to think about? The current IRI formulation looks good to me.

Related link: https://jdic.dev.java.net/

JDesktop Integration Components (JDIC) allow better integration of the platform-provided web clients (mailer, browser) from inside Java. Looks like a good thing.

I whinged about Java’s HTML component in a
>previous blog.
While it would be best to have this plus to have a more modern HTML browser classes in Java, this is definitely a step forward. So well done, Sun. I guess the idea is that
since every desktop platform has a browser, file browser, and mailer, Java does not abandon WORE (write once run everywhere) by providing better access to it.

Perhaps more importantly, the optimist in me sees hope in JDIC: that maybe someone in Sun is pushing towards providing the kinds of things that we desktop application developers need in Java now. Next if only they would provide a standard platform-specific launcher that that matches the max heap with the available RAM, allows subsequent invocation of an application to send parameters to the running one, and connects to status bars and system notifications: now that would be really great! (I don’t have any hope that anyone will standardize a logging system for Java that remotely is usable for desktop applications, or that a system-pulse system can be provided by the JRE to allow applications to throttle back when PCs are congested due to other actions. But they are certainly the kinds of things that Java needs to be excellent: looking at the hard work done on the new Java memory model indicates that Sun is still more interested in how to support MPU systems rather than how to utilize RAM on single PCs better. Fie!) It looks like the kind of thing the java.net site might be a good home for.

Related link: http://www.voq.com/site/explore/try.voq

Voq Professional Phone - cool flip out QWERTY keyboard

The keypad flips open to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. I wish I had thought of that.

Related link: http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0524.pdf

I celebrated eight births by the end of this May!

First, my own birthday. I went to Sydney’s best Japanese restaurant with some friends who happen to have
birthdays the successive three days to mine: 18, 19, 20, 21.
Apparantly we are all in the
"http://www.novareinna.com/constellation/taurusdecans.html"
>third decan of Taurus, however I suspect the decans need re-factoring, because while I indisputably fit most of the profile, the woman with the birthday the next day to me is an always-on organizer of celebrity drag bake-offs for AIDS charities who didn’t seem to fit any of it; and the guy in the next position perpetually turns down promotions to stay where he is happy-just last week he turned down a job for twice the salary. On the other hand, another
"http://www.astrologycom.com/astromatch/index.html"
>site says that Taureans are good with Capricorn partners, because we are content to maintain the status quo. Err, but that is the opposite of the first site’s ancient wisdom,that we have a potent desire to succeed: shades of St Augustine’s astral twins! Oh well, at least we are all in tune with pleasure-loving venus, which sounds fine.

Azuma make a chrysanthemum of thinnest raw white fish, then splash it with hot sesame oil and chilli, so that the top side is slightly cooked while the under side is raw, which is a great feat. (For any other Sydneysiders, I think the other best Japanesey food in town is Jazushi for eel pie and Ichiban Boshi for Tokyo ramen in Bondi, at successively lower price breaks. )

The fifth birth is that I finally delivered what I hope is the final draft of ISO Schematron. href="http://www.codegeneration.net/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=37"
>Daniel Cazzulino, who implemented Schematron.NET, had a couple of late good ideas: allow variables on patterns and phases, so it is much more regular. A PDF version
is >here. ISO Schematron is really a framework of elements into which you can slot your own query languages, so it does not require you limit your self to XSLT or commit yourself to XQuery. I will put out another blog shortly with
some of the features.

The last three births were the releases of three new
Topologi products, which I designed. They are really all about reporting as the key to quality in industrial publishing. How do we know that there has not been tag abuse? How do we know that all the graphics have been converted successfully? How do we know how much time a programmer will take to create a stylesheet for a particular document type? How do we know that a new person is marking up documents in the same way as other people are? How do we know that all the instances of some term that is supposed to have been marked up has in fact been marked up? How does a post-technical manager (you know what I mean) verify that documents are in the state that they are supposed to be in? How do you support an efficient division of labour? You get the idea.

In programming, these kind of issues used to be called “programming in the large”, but industrial markup is no different: the “markup in the large” issues can be just as vital as the nitty gritty issues of how many keystrokes it takes to enter data. There is a PDF of annotated screenshots "http://www.topologi.com/resources/pdfs/TProIntroduction.pdf"
>here.

Related link: http://www.studio3d.com/pages/stereovideo.html

Pretty cool link on how to shoot 3D (stereo) video.