O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://spatialguru.com/maps/apps/global/

In an earlier weblog I outlined the process of adding a hurricane track to my MapServer web application. Due to the interest in that weblog, I thought a brief update might be worthwhile.

Since that time I’ve added two more hurricanes: Ivan and Jeanne. In a perfect world, these would just start showing up on my map, but since we are in the real world some effort was required - but not much!

Shortly after I posted the weblog on Hurricane Frances, I went back through the “capabilities document” for the web server that I was pulling the hurricane maps from. Lo and behold I found that there was now a layer showing Ivan’s track. Then, just tonight, I looked again and found Hurricane Jeanne.

What did that mean to me? All I had to do was add a couple more pointers to these layers in my web map application and users could then see all the major hurricane activity in that part of the world.

I simply copy/pasted the layer definition for Hurrican Frances, and then changed a couple of layer names to the newer tracks. Here is an example of the syntax of the MapServer configuration:

LAYER  GROUP jeanne  NAME jeanne_track  TYPE RASTER  STATUS OFF  CONNECTIONTYPE WMS  CONNECTION "http://dev.gomoos.org/cgi-bin/wms_nhc?"  METADATA    "wms_name" "jeanne_track"    "wms_srs" "EPSG:4326"    "wms_server_version" "1.1.1"    "wms_layers" "jeanne_track"    "wms_request" "GetMap"    "wms_format" "image/gif"    "wms_connectiontimeout" "60"  ENDEND

Wherever you see the word “jeanne” is where I had to make changes. When hurricane Amy appears out of nowhere, I’ll copy/paste the layer definition and change “jeanne” to “amy” and my collection of hurricanes will continue to grow.

For those who are interested in the technology I am using here, this Global Mapping Site is running on a Pentium 4 processor, with SuSE Linux 9.1 and Apache2 web server. I’m running MapServer as a CGI application. The data sources on the site include local GeoTIFF images, ESRI shape files and remote/external images that are requested from various servers in real-time across the ‘net. The graphical interface is pure HTML. I know it’s ugly, but I’m looking to setup a better interface. I’m planning to implement two other interfaces: one based on the Chameleon project and another using the Open Source Internet Geo-mapping Framework (IGF). Both look promising and are based on PHP.

In short, using MapServer for my Global Map has been fun and I am really enjoying being able to provide a useful service based on completely open source tools. The only thing the map is costing me is time and a DSL connection!

To close, my sympathy goes out to those being affected by this seemingly endless barrage of storms.

Tell me what you think of the global mapping site or web mapping in general. I’d love to know how you’d apply the technology if it was readily available to you.

I’m into my third week at my new job - systems/network admin for MCN, a small ISP in northern California.

We have a pretty heterogeneous server environment: BSD, Linux, a few Windows boxes, and OS X Server. Almost all of my Unix experience has been with Solaris, Linux and to a lesser extent, AIX - all of which are much more like System V UNIX than BSD.

I haven’t spent any time at all prior to this job with OS X Server, and I know that it’s really BSD underneath. So I figured that the first thing to do would be to find a good book on the subject. Wrong!

As of today, there appears to be a single published book dealing with OS X Server: Mac OS X Server Administrator’s Guide by Andrew Russell & John Welch. Trouble is, this particular book was published in 2000, which means that it was written in 1999, which means it’s 5 years old, and applies to a much earlier version of OS X Server than 10.3.5.

Amazon shows a second book, Mac OS X Server 10.3 Panther by Schoun Regan, but it will not be published until November.

Why is there such a dearth of information on this operating system? If you subscribe to the Mac OS X Server mailing list hosted at apple.com, you’ll quickly find out that there are a lot of people using OS X Server.

I’m frankly shocked that O’Reilly doesn’t have a book out on the topic.

So there isn’t much printed matter for OS X Server. Any pointers for documentation online?

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/technology/circuits/09carb.html

My in-car entertainment computer company, Carbot, Inc. is featured in the New York Times “Circuits” section.

Related link: http://www.sugarcrm.com/home/

I’ve been looking for a product like ACT or Goldmine, but if you want multiple people using it collaboratively, you’re suddenly an “enterprise” customer, which means thousands of dollars.

Also, they just got a couple million from DFJ, who’s betting on the open source aspect - which has never been applied to CRM.

Draper is cool and I’m glad they’re funding this. I could see this making money like redhat, if done right.

I hope someone makes some client side applications for it so that it can be both web and application based. If some open source linux/win/mac/palm/symbian front ends pop up, they could destroy ACT and GoldMine for real.

Way, way cool.

Related link: http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/07/technology/tivo_netflix.reut/index.htm

Newsweek reports that Netflix and TiVO are looking at a deal to allow users to download movies to their TiVOs over the net. I’m sure MPAA will have something to say about this. But if it proves legally defensible, how fitting that movies on demand is finally delivered over the net, not by comcast or AT&T but two valley startups.

Related link: http://spatialguru.com/maps/apps/global/

I started the above linked website in order to experiment with open web mapping standards. There has been a lot of talk about Open GIS Consortium standards of late, so I decided to make my own global web map using some of the map data available through these Internet standards. It’s nothing fancy to look at, but how data behind it comes together is very intriguing. Any time I find a new data source that may be interesting to look at, I add it to my growing list of layers. Which brings me to Hurricane Frances.

Earlier today I received an email pointing me to a web map showing a current (updated every 6 hours) track of Hurricane Frances. Because the developers of the site (DM Solutions) implement open web mapping standards, I knew I’d probably be able to access the same data source they did for their track of Frances. Sure enough, I looked at their map credits page and found the reference I was after:

Hurricane Frances storm track
Organization: GoMOOS: http://www.gomoos.org
WMS Service Online Resource: http://dev.gomoos.org/cgi-bin/wms_nhc?

Perfect. This resource URL is the gateway to the service providing the Frances storm track data. I punch the URL into my web browser, and add request=getcapabilities to the end: http://dev.gomoos.org/cgi-bin/wms_nhc?request=getcapabilities

This returns an XML document describing this Web Map Service (WMS). I zip down to the section describing the layers and find the Name of the layers they have available. (”grep Name” works a lot easier) Ah - two of the layers are hurricane layers.

Next, I turn to my MapServer configuration file (aka “map file”). I have several other WMS data sources already loaded in map file so I just copy and paste one of them and make a few changes. I change the resource URL to point to the gomoos URL. I change some layer settings to use the frances_track and frances_latest layers from that WMS service. A couple of HTML tweaks to my (admittedly spartan) mapping interface and I’m ready to go.

Back in the web browser, I point back to my site, et voila. Frances appears! Updates occur every six hours. If you zoom in you can see that the remote server even timestamped the tracked locations.

So what did this teach me? Well, it continues to build my confidence in the applicability of web services and open source solutions. Although I had to wade through a tiny bit of XML, it really didn’t take any effort and only a few minutes to add a powerful little piece of data to my public site. Just think of the possibilities. Today, Frances. Tomorrow, gas prices in California - but that’s a weblog for another day!

What would you put on your map? Have an idea that open web map standards could help deliver? Let’s talk about it.

Related link: http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/006009.php

The Copyright Office has released a four-page memo of draft language for the Induce Act, as tasked by Sen. Orrin Hatch. Ernie Miller has taken a look at the language and finds it better than the original. But that is faint praise indeed. Miller finds the new language — and it is just draft language, open to further correction — still incredibly threatening to technology and innovation. Read my interview with Miller about the original bill

As a developer, do bills like this concern you, scare you, or will you just “obliviously sail along”?