XHTML2 Bites the Dust
As reported on Slashdot and elsewhere, W3C has ended the XHTML2 working group’s charter and increased the resources working on HTML5. This effectively kills XHTML2 and places HTML5 as the defining standard for HTML conte
Appending Pages to a PDF with Python
One of my customers created ~950 PDF’s of….something flood and letter related. I don’t know what exactly. Hey man, I just work the shovel. Anyways, they decided to tack a disclaimer on each of them after the PDF’s were m
Web Performance Best Practices Extension
Google has been busy this past month. They have just released a Web Performance Best Practices extension for Firefox. Via Google: When you profile a web page with Page Speed, it evaluates the page's conformance to a numb
Who Doesn't Like Blue Anyway?
I recently modified one of my mapping sites, Geospatial Portal, to have a nice blue theme to go along with a blue jQuery UI widget theme. I made a new logo, page background image, etc. Blue. Who doesn’t like blue? As it
Lazy Loading Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth
I’m not sure how the phrase goes exactly, but it includes the words “necessity”, “invention”, and “mother”. To say that my employer’s Internet connectivity can be spotty is a bit of an understatement. Besides frequent sl
Open Source ETL Tools
Moving spatial data into Postgres isn’t difficult to script. Suppose you have the shapefile ponies.shp in WGS84, and you want to dump it into PostGIS as ponies. A plain old batch script like this will do it for you: shp2
Easy Grids in Google Earth
For those of you that live your lives on the grid (ba hahaha! oh, I slay me), the great Free Geography Tools blog posted a link to some grid layers shared by Earth Point. The grids include Degrees/Minutes/Seconds, WGRS,
PyCon Videos Online
Editor’s Note: If you’re training budget looks like my training budget these days, upgrading your skills is something that has to be done on the cheap. Education doesn’t have to be expensive, however. I’m going to try to
jQuery 1.3.2 and jQuery UI 1.7 Released
In the woot! department, the jQuery and jQuery UI Javascript libraries have seen major updates. jQuery’s 1.3 branch upgrade happened back in January, with two bug fix releases since then to get to 1.3.2. This is a major
PostgreSQL Upgrade Hack
Here’s a handy tip for you Postgres admins on Windows if you’re getting a “insufficient privileges” error on a minor rev (i.e. 8.3.3 to 8.3.6) upgrade. This tip falls squarely into the hack realm, so use your best judgme