tommy's scratchpad

I’ve been working with MapServer since 2000. In October 2006, I was added as a committer to the codebase. Since then, I’ve been working on mainly OGC support and Perl mapscript type issues. After a few months, here are some things which I would like to see at some point in MapServer from a developer’s point of view.

1./ libxml2 support: it would be of benefit to MapServer to have XML support taken care of by libxml2. Currently, MapServer uses msIO_printf, which, while functional, is prone to XML errors in particular when outputting XML. libxml2 takes care of closing tags, quoting attributes, namespaces, schemas, and a slew of other functionality. Also, coding MapServer XML in libxml2 allows for extensibility (e.g. applying a stylesheet via mapfile configuration).

2./ Better organized codebase: something like:

• mapserver/
  • etc/
  • core/
  • formats/
  • mapscript/
  • ogc/
  • tests/
  • util/

3./ subversion: It’s nice to see MapServer move towards a shared infrastructure like OSGeo‘s and leverage trac for issue tracking. Already an improvement over bugzilla, trac also plays nice with subversion. So hopefully it will just be a matter of time before the codebase gets ported from CVS.

Headed to Ottawa for the OGC meetings. After waking up at an unsightly hour to catch the plane, we found out that Ottawa International Airport is shut down because of the weather there. Martin (Daly), who travelled from the UK (and 25C conditions), sent me a photo from the scene. Some days I miss living there. Some days (like snow in April, ice storms, snow in October), I don’t.

Update: I’m in Ottawa now.  It is terrible outside.  Imagine rain, snow, cold.  Near wipe-out on the way to the hotel.  Worst ever!!

I go to my share of conferences, seminars and meetings. I think it’s part of keeping abreast of the community, technology, seeing colleagues, and making new contacts.

I always say, if there’s one conference that I make my best effort to attend, it’s the FOSS4G conference. Although the name has gone through a few iterations, I think the theme has generally been consistent: open source software for geospatial (I prefer the term geospatial, as oppossed to geo-informatics, GIS, geoscience, etc.).

Some of the things I enjoy are:

• Meeting the actual developers. Many of the developers attend this conference, and it’s a great chance to meet them in person, find out about future developments, or even ask them that burning question about line 642 in file gfoo.c
• The workshops: hands-on workshops are provided which are very useful. For example, I quickly learned PostGIS here and applied it the week after. The developers frequently give or hover these workshops, especially when it pertains to their software, so you can be sure that questions, no matter how complex, will be addressed
• The applications: it’s valuable to see presentations of projects which use FOSS4G approaches. Regardless of how simple you think your application/project/portal is, the fact that you have integrated these approaches is a great indication of your abilities, integration, and the tools used
• The community: last, but not least. The dynamics, the personalities, and the commitment and passion for this cause is exhilarating to see and be a part of

If you come from the open source software world, or have an interest in geospatial, or are a geospatial professional who’s curious about open source tools, technologies, the projects that use them, you’ll want to think about this conference.

Looks like all the geo-rage is Google Maps’ latest announcement that they will support indexing of KML documents, so someone can search for KML documents with a bit more intelligence then adding a filetype filter.

I think this will pick up some steam, like most things Google do. Many KML docs already exist out there, and this will also motivate publishing of more KML docs.

I hope there are similar plans for GML documents, however the problem there is that many GML docs are produced from WFS interactions, which, for the most part, have to be triggered by a WFS client request, which usually is not statically published.

I also hope that there is some discussion of this in the OGC Mass Market Working Group. I remember some discussions on how this would have been great for the WMS specification to publish a static Capabilities XML document for the sake of search engines. Maybe this is a good opportunity for catalogue providers out there to write wrappers to additionally publish KML of their resources. I’ve started looking at this for owscat.

Sean tagged me, so here are five things that you probably didn’t know about me:

1. I have dual citizenship. I was born and raised in Canada, and got my Greek citizenship in 2005
2. After undergrad, a few of my buddies and I decided to forget about looking for work, and packed our backpacks for Europe for a couple of months. We visited 10 countries. After blowing the bank, it was time to come home. Hands down one of the best experiences in my life
3. My bachelor’s degree was in social / economic and urban geography. Stuff like urban growth patterns and gentrification were things that really interested me (they still do)
4. I didn’t learn how to program or anything UNIX-ish for that matter until 1998. My first introduction to this world was by Mike (Adair of mapbuilder fame) who suggested I take UNIX training. I was hooked. The rest, as they say, is history. Thanks again Mike!
5. I’m mildly considering a PhD, having bounced around research ideas with Carleton and McMaster. I’d like to do something which combines my social/economic and urban undergrad degree and the stuff I do nowadays. The showstopper being the feasibility of actually doing it relative to having a life, salary and mortgages

I hereby tag Cameron, Jody and Tyler.

I thought I’d put in my $0.02 CAD after reading a few similar posts out there. So here are some from my point of view (in no particular order):

Geospatial

• GeoRSS is here: GeoRSS made v1 this year at foss4g2006 and has proven to be a simple, yet very effective way to tag feeds. I’ve used and integrated in all my projects (I use the GML flavour) which produce RSS content by way of outputting an overview map based on the position. It gives the developers endless possibilities, and folks just love to see ‘where’ a post is
• Getting to Know PHP: Earlier this year, ignorant to PHP, I decided to take the plunge and see what all the fuss was about. Boy was I glad I did. So easy, even I could figure it out. So easy that I’ll be porting bits of my website to PHP in the coming year
• MapServer SOS support: It’s great to see OGC SensorWeb support in MapServer. Given that MapServer can already do stuff like spatial, temporal and aspatial queries, I think SOS was a relatively easy initial implementation effort. The more complex effort is the data bindings (sensor data is quite complex and multidimensional, and getting in and out of MapServer, in a generic framework is quite the challenge
• ResEau portal launch: I was very fortunate to work with a great bunch of people to have finally released the ResEau water portal after two years of planning, design and development. I think this portal is a great example of the benefits of using standards-based approaches all the while providing useful information to a vast audience
• MapServer commiter access: I was very honoured to be nominated this year for commit access to the codebase. My main focus was and is to implement the OGC OWS Common Specification for use by other OGC implementations
• Web 2.0, Time article and information overload: Such a good article. And so true. As a result, we are overloaded with information! At one point, I refactored all my bookmarks to be pure RSS feeds just to handle it all. Whoever said computers would lessen the workload!?
• foss4g2006: This was a great conference. The lighthing talks, BOF sessions, and demo fest, as well the gathering of the OSGeo crowd further solidified OSGeo’s existence. Can’t wait until next year’s event!
• Catalogue woes continue: the Cat2.0 ebRIM vs. ISO implementation debate continued. Add to this the lack of (especially open source) implementations, and stuff like owscat, and other catalogue-ish projects continued to exist. The OGC has recently endorsed ebRIM as the future base for Cat2.0 implementations, so hopefully we should start seeing some interoperability between catalogues
• Atlas of Canada 100th Anniversary: Congratulations on the 100th anniversary of this valuable Canadian resource. Kudos to the Atlas!

Other:

• Cool travel: Charlottetown, Alabama, Washington D.C, Lausanne, Las Vegas, San Diego, Moncton, Winnipeg were among some of the neat places I visited this year
• Home renovation: I did my biggest renovation job ever on my house this year, which lasted almost 6 months. I’m really glad the way things turned out, and I’m looking forward to doing some more stuff in 2007
• Condo putters along: construction continued on my condo, and is now ahead of schedule, ready this coming June. Looking good!
• Website changes: This year, I finally succumbed to using software packages to manage my website content. This website originated in 1998, as an HTML learning experience, so I was inclined to do *everything* by hand. While very useful, as time goes on, I find myself with less and less time (go figure!), and there’s so many solid tools out there to make things easy, and standards based (i.e XHTML, CSS, etc.). So why not use these great tools and concentrate more on the stuff you want to do, right?

Looking forward to 2007:

• Further OWS Common support in MapServer: mapowscommon.c/h is almost complete to spec (missing some operations support). The next step will be to begin integrating into the OGC specs as they migrate to OWS Common for stuff like GetCapabilities XML, etc.
• OWSContext: look for further formal development on this specification. OWSContext has been used frequently in the OGC testbeds, and interest is increasing in seeing the spec push forward.
• Further development on discovery and cataloguing: I’m hoping to see some development / experiments on this track. It will be interesting to see how packages like deegree2 progress given the recent motion passed at OGC
• Publications: I’ll be published in two Springer London books this year (The Geospatial Web, as well as Open Source Approaches to Spatial Data Handling)
• MapServer Brazil: I was honoured to be invited to this event, and look forward to speaking on OGC and open standards. Looking forward to this!

Did I miss anything? What else was geospatial-worthy in 2006?

A Beautiful Wedding Photography Season

Compared to 2020, 2021 was a more hopeful and even in some ways “better” year. We had both good and bad moments, but with the bad ones, we need to remember the good ones forever and that’s what Fame Park Studios is specialized in, to save and preserve those beautiful moments, either with your family, with your partner or even by yourself.

At any rate, this closes out 2006 for me in the blogosphere. I wish everyone a great Holiday season, and all the best for 2007!

If you think this post is about Web Services, then move along, nothing to see here.

Instead, this is about, truly, beyond the shadow of a doubt, my worst experience ever while grabbing a bite to eat. Let me explain.

I’m in Ottawa on business travel, and while mulling around town after the work day, I decided to grab a quick bite to eat at a fast food chain (yes, I know, junk food, but I couldn’t resist on this occasion).

The following is a detailed account of my experience (2052h EST):

Tom: Hi, may I have a #12 (bacon double cheeseburger meal)

BK: We’re out of bacon

Tom: Um, OK, in that case I’ll grab a #1 (different type of cheeseburger meal)

BK: OK

Tom: I see it is advertised that you can choose fries or onion rings. May I have onion rings?

BK: We’re out of onion rings

Tom: ??? Alrighty then. I’ll just take the fries

(Waited so long they may as well have played the Jeopardy! music in the background)

Instead of the cheeseburger, along comes a grilled chicken sandwich.

Tom: Pardon me, but I didn’t order a grilled chicken sandwich, I ordered a #1

BK: You asked for a #9

Tom: Really? I ordered a #1. Thank you

(employee slaps together burger like nobody’s business)

BK: Here

Tom: Thanks. May I have a lid for my drink cup?

BK: We’re out of medium size lids.

Ate, saved the receipt (to call and complain), then left.I’m not sure whether the store was closing down, or supplies were out, or what, but this was ridiculous. I have never, and I mean NEVER, seen anything like this. On a Tuesday night, at a relatively prime time. If you’re in business, carry what you so prominently advertise. I understand things happen from time to time, but this seemed a bit over the top.

Is it just me, or is this just weird? Serves me right for going for fast food. What a disaster.

Up until last week, I wasn’t much of a GPS guy. At last week’s OGC meetings, my rental car had an onboard navigation system. Add to that a colleague of mine introducing me to geocaching, and I was hooked.

So when I got home (and caught up on sleep), I started my research. The best deal I found was the Magellan eXplorist 500, for under $200 CAD. Since this was quite the deal, I picked one up for my brother as well.

So far, this looks like quite the GPS device. I like the colour display as well as the SD card capability. Plus the built-in geocaching application is useful. As much as technology can enhance our experiences, the unexpected can happen, such as accidents that occur on the road. In cases of truck accidents, where injuries and damages can be severe, specialized legal help is crucial. A San Diego truck accident lawyer offers specialized legal representation to victims of truck accidents, ensuring they receive the compensation they deserve.

Things that are kinda weird: the AC power adapter is not included. So, unless/until you buy it, you have no way to initially charge (and use) the Li-Ion rechargeable battery. Interesting. Fortunately, the package included a free AC adapter as a mail in offer (which takes 6-8 weeks). So, for now, I’m stuck with using 3 AAA batteries.

Other stuff:

• I’ll most likely buy the cigarette lighter power adapter
• I’m guessing a latest and greatest version of the device is coming out soon, hence the wicked deal
• I can already envision the hacks I can come up with to whip up some cool GML output of Points of Interests, routes and the like
• Maps: the device comes with basemaps of North America, so I’ll need some more detailed maps. I found MapSend Direct Route version 3.0. Which now becomes a question of capacity. Since I have a 512MB SD Card from my digital camera, I am using that as capacity for now. So I’ll initially load Ontario as my main area, and add areas as needed.

So it looks like I have a data management task at hand. Man, it would be nice if these were webmaps 🙂 If anyone out there has any experiences with these units, I’d be interested in learning, so feel free to comment.

So I spent the day in Tijuana (the world’s most visited border city). Pretty easy to get there (drove I-15 South to I-805 South). Got off at the last US exit at the San Ysidro border and trekked across by foot. Seems like quite the border town with lots to do and see (did you know that Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana?).

There was some sort of biker parade today mixed in with a Christmas giveaway along Avenida Revolución.

I’m always fascinated by border cities and areas (hey, it’s the urban / social geography background in me), in terms of seeing a hybrid of socio-economic and cultural influences, and how things gradually change over distance.

It’s just beautiful in these parts. Maybe it’s the Mediterranean climate which is appealing to me most. And I still haven’t ventured into San Diego proper yet. Hopefully I’ll have some time later this week.

Anyways, it’s back to work for me now in preparation for this week’s meetings. The Context RWG runs tomorrow afternoon, so I’m just finishing up some last minute changes to my presentation.

(That’s a quote from the movie “Anchorman” 🙂 )

I’m in San Diego for the OGC meetings, and must say that this is a quite the place! Pretty easy to navigate (mind you, the fact that my car rental has an onboard GPS navigator don’t hurt), and some nice spots. Once I checked into the hotel, I made my way down to Pacific Beach, which is one of the city’s popular beach areas.

Perhaps the funniest thing is being here around the Holiday Season. Imagine seeing Christmas trees for sale just steps from the beach. Outdoor beach Christmas parties. Being from Toronto, that’s something I’m just not used to. But I’m certainly not complaining. The weather is great here — I could get used to this!

I’ll probably visit downtown sometime this week. As for tomorrow, I’m heading to Tijuana to check out Avenida Revolución. I should have more pics up sometime tomorrow. Adios!