Today I attended the IAC conference that was held this week in Cape Town. I could write a long essay about my experience there but I believe the image below will do a better job 
Tim on the Moon
PS. I also touched a moon rock!
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IAC – International Astronomy Conference 2011
Linfiniti goes scrummy
We just bought a nice big whiteboard at Linfiniti HQ so that we can really use SCRUM project management to good effect. Now if Rudi could just get a few more of those post-its into the Done! column, we can all go home and relax for the weekend
Rudi showing off our new scrum board!
Addition to the Linfiniti team
Just an update to let you know that I have recently joined Linfiniti. I was lucky enough to be an intern earlier in the year, and am happy to be part of the team again, and helping in bringing Open Source GIS to Africa and other parts of the world
A quick introduction – my name’s Samantha Lee Pan (sam for short). I have an undergrad in environmental & geographical science (with a second major in oceanography!) I’ve done my honours in GIS. I am also looking at doing a masters degree in the environmental field.
There is still a lot that I am learning here at Linfiniti and been very busy with a host of different projects. But I’m sure you will be hearing more from me, as I find useful bits of info or updates on the FOSS scene – and make time to post them here!
keep well
-sam
High capacity storage on the cheap
At one of my clients we manage a petabyte heirachical storage system (mixed offline tape storage, near-line cache storage and online disk storage) and several high capacity (e.g. 15TB) SAN enclosures. These devices are not cheap.
However, all is not lost – there is a blog post from BackBlaze thats doing the rounds on the web that is particularly interesting. To summarise they show how to build high capacity storage devices on the cheap using off the shelf components. In the GIS world if you work with raster data a lot, or produce tile cached web mapping services, you can quickly run up a large tally of disk space. If you are a little bit technically inclined, building BackBlaze style storage could be a great business opportunity and be of great benifit to your GIS using clients. Here’s hoping that someone picks up on this opportunity here in South Africa….
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 tips
I’ll add to this list over time as I come across more interesting gizmos.
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 beautiful.