Some time ago on the QGIS IRC channel, Dane Springmeyer (thanks Dane!) walked me through the basic concepts of GeoDjango, an Open Source web application development framework with a geospatial twist. I often remark to people that I think Desktop Applications are the way to go in the 3rd world where lack of Internet connectivity… Read more »
OK this is GeoNerd turf really (which I guess encapsulates you, my readers right? ). Close to where I do some contract work is the HART-RAO radio observatory. The observatory is the site that was used as the basis for defining the new WGS84 based Hartebeeshoek94 Datum which replaces the out of date Cape Datum… Read more »
Sometimes just because a thing is possible doesn’t make it a good idea. In the last week I have been helping a client whose web developer has dissapeared. The developer implemented the database using a variation on the Entity Attribute Value (EAV) modelling paradigm. The database consists of only four tables: Entities, Attributes, Values, EntityTypes…. Read more »
We (my wife and I) have been teaching our neighbour, Sibongile (‘Bongi’) to use a computer over the last few months. We recently employed Bongi for a few evenings for the Gentle Introduction to GIS project we were contracted to do. The project involved creation of educational GIS materials for teachers and scholars and was… Read more »
I’ve been researching options for thin clients over the past few months and trying to get my Fit PCs to boot over LTSP / etherboot (still no joy so far). I do have them working as thin clients via XDMCP thought. Along the way I have found some handy websites which I thought I would… Read more »
Hey hey hey! Our openModeller article has finally been published in the GeoInformatica Journal. Unfortunately it’s not an open access article so contact me if you want a copy (assuming I am allowed to redistribute it). Here is the abstract: Species’ potential distribution modelling is the process of building a representation of the fundamental ecological… Read more »
Well I found this oracle-xe article hilarious. Here are a couple of choice phrases: “Deploying [oracle-xe] can also offer a solution to the common problem of users or developers downloading and installing open-source databases, which leaves you with a minefield of maintenance, support, and security headaches” Excuse me? I could easily rewrite this to say… Read more »
Today Graeme McFerren and I gave a presentation about the FOSSGIS software stack to a bunch of honours students at the University of Witwatersrand. The group was receptive and since they had pretty much never heard of FOSSGIS, it was a great opportunity to show them that there are alternatives out there! The presentation we… Read more »
Mapnik is an open source, high quality map rendering engine. From the front page of their site: “Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. Above all Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It is easily extensible and suitable for both desktop and web development.” For some time I have been planning to take… Read more »
Someone asked on twitter it is possible to dump all the tables in Postgres to individual shp files. Some time ago I wrote a script to dump all tables as SQL dumps. The question prompted me to tweak that script to drop out shapefiles instead. My original script looked like the listing below. The dump… Read more »