I’ve been a VIM user for many years and over that time I have tweaked my vimrc a little (not too much mind you). I have one modification that I use probably hundreds of times a day.

" Added by Tim to map alt-left/right to flip through buffers
nmap <A-Left> :bp<CR>
nmap <A-Right> :bn<CR>

Adding the above to your ~/.vimrc file will let you quickly hop between buffers – pressing alt-right arrow will take you to the next buffer and pressing alt-left arrow will take you to the previous buffer.

So my previous article about fusing QGIS Desktop with web technologies generated quite a bit of interest, including some people interested to start hacking on it (always a good sign). In this article I want to show the next level of functionality we can obtain by means of a simple example. There won’t be any flashy graphics here but hopefully it will give you inspiration for other things we can do.

Here is the executive summary and a quick video to demonstrate it:

• I replaced Metadata tab in the QGIS Raster Layer Properties with a QWebView widget
• I created a simple web page that accepts a C++ QgsRasterLayer object and then does stuff with it
• I implemented a Q_PROPERTY on QgsMapLayer (the base class for all map layers) that exposed the metadata property as a read-only property.
• I created a customised BluePrint CSS template (using a narrower format than the traditional 960 grid) and deployed it in QGIS resources
• I added a simple button  to the form and used a bit of jquery and javascript to call a slot on the QgsRasterLayer and retrieve its min and max scale properties, then update the page

If you’ve tried centering table cell contents in xhtml2pdf, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t work.  The typical symptoms seem to be that cell contents are right against (or even over) the upper border of the cell.

For reasons unknown, xhtml2pdf ignores “vertical-align” instructions, so you can’t use that.  To solve the problem, I did this:

table th, td {
  padding-top: 3px;
  padding-bottom: 2px;
  line-height: 50%;
}

You may want to add some more to this for the sake of appearance, but that’s the gist of it.

Building a wizard in designer is overly complex and has a few pitfalls. This is especially the case when you try to build your wizard using Qt4 Designer exclusively. The main problem comes in due to the fact that although you can happily place any widgets you like onto a QWizardPage, in the QWizard you cannot actually access them at run time. So that makes it useful for adding static content like labels or text but pretty challenging for everything else. A while ago I implemented a welcome wizard for QGIS but never actually applied it trunk. Today I had occasion to dust off the cobwebs and I thought I would write this up to explain how I did it since you won’t find much help on Google on the matter.

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Recently, XKCD strayed into our territory with this page about map projections:

To be honest, I’ve always like Gall-Peters myself, if only as a way to illustrate how map projections distort the appearance of continents. It’s quite effective at conveying this concept, because it distorts things in the opposite direction of the universally familiar Mercator. If you’re using it as a legitimate map projection, though, I honestly don’t know what to say to you.

Alex Mandel on #qgis IRC channel pointed me to this site: https://www.startssl.com/ which issues level 1 SSL certs for free. We are in the process of getting a certificate issued for QGIS.org but the site is generally useful for others who would like to obtain an SSL cert for their site easily.

Here is a nice article about teaching a semester course with FOSSGIS that William Kinghorn put me on to:

However, most students are shocked to discover how many capable FOSS GIS software packages exist and are excited that they can just download and install them, even on a Mac. They ask questions like, “Why isn’t everyone using QGIS?” Frequently students end the semester wanting more.

See the article here:  http://www.directionsmag.com/articles/experiences-teaching-free-and-open-source-gis-at-the-community-college/212522

At the recent get-together, I made a bunch of short clips with most of the attendees. These are presented below (or on my youtube channel). My apologies if you need to tilt your head 90′ left for some of them, YouTube’s online video editor is still a work in progress it seems… Just play the first video and the rest will follow automatically.

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I am writing this sitting on the plane making the ~25 hour return trip from Zurich to Swellendam (via Dubai) and as has become tradition, I thought I am making this summary of the activities at our bi-annual QGIS developer meeting. The developer meetings themselves have become a huge propellant to the project – bringing together developers and users from all areas of the project and providing a forum for us to plan and discuss things at a level of detail that simply isn’t possible via email, IRC and so on. The meeting also acts as a catalyst where a few moments spent between two people can provide the needed knowledge transfer to enable new contributions of code, bug fixes, documentation or whatever else is needed to cross a barrier that would otherwise prevent a person from helping the project.

We have now held developer meetings in Hannover, Vienna, Pisa, Wroclaw, Lisbon and Zurich and due to the kind contributions of our project sponsors have increasingly been able to cover the costs of attendees. This year all the meals were paid for by sponsors / donations, as well as the travel and accommodation for some developers. A number of Zurich residents also opened the doors of  their homes to provide accommodation for attendees. In addition each attendee contributed time out of their personal and professional lives that if we were to pay for this time in professional fees would amount to a massive investment.

This year the QGIS project has had two silver sponsors and the increasing levels of sponsorship are really a fantastic enabler for us to move the project forward significantly. I am looking forward to the day when funding levels have reached the level that a number of us can be employed by the project to work on improving it in a general way rather than meeting the specific needs of a single client.  For more information on how to sponsor or donate to the project, please see http://qgis.org/en/sponsorship.html.

Our host for the meeting was the Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich. We would especially like to thank the following people who facilitated the meeting:

• Ionut Iosifescu for helping to organize the meeting and arranging for permission for ETH to host it.
• Prof. Lorenz Hurni,  department head at the institute for generously agreeing to host the meeting.
• Corina Pachlatko - the secretary for organization and providing food/coffee!
• The State of Vorarlberg (our latest silver sponsor) for their donation which covered the costs for attendee travel and accommodation and really helped to jump start proceedings.
• Peter Oberholzer  from the City of Uster for covering food expenses.
• Marco Hugentobler, Pirmin Kalberer and Mathias Walker from Sourcepole for helping to organise the meeting.
• The City of Uster paid for the food/bread/supermarket bills.
• Andreas Neumann who helped to organise the event and donated his time and money to make it happen.

There are many more who worked hard behind the scenes to make the event happen, and we extend our thanks to you all! The food provided was really tasty including these delicious salty ‘pretzel’ things:

Delicious food and snacks kept the attendees going at full tilt!

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