Linfiniti Geo Blog

QGIS User Training Workshop

Yesterday (Sat 27 June 2009) we held a ‘QGIS Inside and Out’ workshop in Sandton, Johannesburgh, South Africa. The course was presented collaboratively by myself (Tim Sutton), Graeme McFerren , Gavin Fleming and Brendon Wolff-Piggott.

More pictures available on our flickr photostream!
Some of the attendees were teachers which was really great as I would love [...]

Reading GeoTagging data from Blackberry camera images

I recently acquired a Blackberry Bold. The device has a built in GPS and Camera and supports ‘GeoTagging’ images taken with the camera. Its pretty easy to get at the positional information under Ubuntu Linux. First I installed the exiftags package:

sudo apt-get install exiftags

To simply see a list of file names and the location each [...]

Sharing a 3G Modem connection with Ubuntu Jaunty

Where I live there is no broadband available and I rely on a Vodacom 3G modem to connect to the internet. I wanted to share the connection with other computers and guests visiting our house. Here is what I did:
Setup the gateway machine
I installed a small wireless router that also includes a 4 port hub. [...]

Introducing GIS with QGIS

We recently completed a job for the Department of Land Affairs, Eastern Cape, South Africa, to build an educational resource around QGIS. Otto Dassau and myself were the principle authors. The resource also includes screencasts and a custom windows installer for QGIS 1.0 with rebranded splash screen etc.
Here’s a sampler I uploaded to youtube:

One of [...]

CDSM Data in PostGIS

Today I was working a little more on my routines to ingest all of the South African 1:50 000 CDSM datasets into a single seamless PostGIS dataset. I posted the scripts I used for this purpose to my personal blog some time ago – I’ll repost here for those who are interested. There are still [...]

Microsoft Bing – too much Bling?

Microsoft have launched their bing.com search engine. I’m a habitual Google user and like their approach to fostering many open source projects and opening up the world through their search engine. Bing seems to be a little more flashy rip-off of google and after doing a couple of searches with it, I couldnt think of [...]

Missed opportunities

Every day there seem to be more opportunities for FOSS GIS to be deployed in some production context. However it is a real missed opportunity when people come looking for a solution and we never get to hear about it. Two came accross my desk in the last week:
The first was a tender for building [...]

Beautiful Ubuntu themes for your desktop

Its easy to make ubuntu look beautiful.
First add these PPA’s to your /etc/apt-sources.list:

# nice themes
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bisigi/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bisigi/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Then updated your apt database:

sudo apt-get update

Now install the themes:

sudo apt-get install balanzan-theme infinity-theme \
wild-shine-theme exotic-theme tropical-theme \
step-into-freedom-theme bamboo-zen-theme \
ubuntu-sunrise-theme aquadreams-theme

Afterwards use the appearance too and the login manager tool to make your desktop look [...]

QGIS 1.0.2 (stable) and 1.1.0 (unstable) are released

Last night we reached another milestone in the QGIS project, releasing a bug fix for our stable version and the next point release in our unstable series. The unstable release adds many new features including support for personal geospatial datastores in portable sqlite databases. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities since it [...]

Ubuntu Jaunty Post-Installation for FOSSGIS

Its quick (overlooking slow internet access) and easy to set up Ubuntu Jaunty 64 bit for use with the FOSSGIS stack. Here are the packages I install once the base system is set up (including a few non-fossgis ones that are nice to have).
sudo apt-get install build-essential vim grass libqt4-core \
libqt4-debug libqt4-dev libqt4-gui libqt4-qt3support libqt4-sql [...]