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 »
Posts By: Tim Sutton
Hilarious article on Oracle-xe
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 »
FOSSGIS Presentation at University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa)
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 »
Harnassing Mapnik for high quality map rendering
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 »
Automatically dumping all Postgres tables into their own SQL files
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 »
LTSP – A great option for setting up a training lab cheaply
I have been working on building a small training lab. The idea is that I will have six thin client pc’s and use my day to day desktop machine as a server. The server will run dhcp and the Linux Terminal Server Project server modules to provide a boot over ethernet (PXE) service for the… Read more »
Handy tip for the day : Backing up PostgreSQL data to a remote machine
Ok so I have a few production databases that I need to back up regularly. The trick is I want to run the backup from a remote machine so that the backup lives on a separate server to the actual database system. You can run backups manually like this (assuming your database is called ‘postgis’):… Read more »
jQuery Tools that Rock
I’ve been doing quite a bit of web development these days and have found the jQuery library to be indispensible. Here are a few addons and samples that I found to be really useful: Image popups aka lightbox effects with fancy box Sliding panels for login screens etc by web-kreation.com Some really nice tips 5… Read more »
PostGIS 1.4 Released
Good news if you are a PostGIS fan – the PostGIS team just released version 1.4! See the release announcement for full details…
TileCaching MapServer with GeoWebCache and TileCache on Ubuntu
A tilecache is an application that pre-renders a WMS (web mapping service) to rasters. Pre-rendering is useful to improve server side performance – at the expense of some disk space. The tiles are rendered at different scales and when a client that suppots the WMS Tiling protocol makes a request for an image, the server… Read more »