Failures of Imagination
As a programmer, you spend a lot of time thinking about how your users will interact with your system in unexpected ways. After the Apollo 1 disaster that claimed the lives of three astronauts during a test of the commu
NetBeans, Komodo Edit, and Bespin
Unless you are a holy crusader in the Vim vs Emacs war, you are probably less than 100% satisfied with your code editor/IDE. You may like yours a whole lot, but there are always some little things here and there than mak
Another Quick Google Maps Mashup
Recently an organization called the Land Use and Environmental Services Agency (LUESA) approached us about making a quick application for a festival they were having. Basically they wanted to give their staff the ability
Doing a (very) Little GIS with MySQL
Long Story Short: http://maps.co.mecklenburg.nc.us/demo_eplan/ Long Story Long: A problem recently came to my desk by way of the Fire Department. It seems they will soon begin using some cool software written by a unive
Geospatial Portal v2.0
Around the end of each year I start going over some of my sites and applications with a critical eye. While my sense of style is consistently bad, over time it evolves in various (bad) ways. Often when I look at somethin
Use Amahi for NAS/GIS on Steroids
Lately I’ve been in the market for….something. Mostly backups. Which to me means either a NAS or an offsite storage solution, like S3 or Dropbox (also kind of S3). Right now I handle backups via rsync to a drive sitting
OpenLayers Architect
While skulking about in Google Reader I ran across A handy tool for OpenLayers enthusiasts - OpenLayers Architect in Vish’s ramblings. OpenLayers Architect is basically a GUI that generates OpenLayers JavaScript and CSS
Creating Virtual Appliances with Ubuntu JeOS Part II
Gads! When I posted my previous bit on the virtual GIS appliance I made for a emergency response project, it generated a lot more interest than I had anticipated.* After being battered about by a couple of conferences, I
Finding Street Intersections in PostGIS
I recently had a colleague approach me needing a street intersection search added to our enterprise REST web services. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but it didn’t seem too difficult. I figured out some SQL and ra
Mashup/Open Source Workshop
As we did last year, Nianwei Liu from the City of Charlotte and I did a workshop at the GIS in the Carolinas Conference, which is a joint conference put on by Carolina URISA and Carolina GITA. We added a lot of material