GeoPDF Road Show Link

The GeoPDF Road Show link, as promised.

FogBugz World Tour Atlanta

Speaking of road shows, Patrick and I made it down to meet Joel Spolsky on the Atlanta leg of the FogBugz World Tour. If you have any interest in the business of software or software development (or doing road shows), you might going to hear him give his spiel. Joel is entertaining. However, FogBugz has embedded with in it some interesting concepts including evidence-based scheduling, and the talk, while a pitch, does invite you to think more deeply about the hows and whys of software development.

Best FOSS4G Swag

For myriad reasons, I haven't had a chance to break down the wonderfulness that was this year's Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference. There are a few items I do want to address before too long, but, to celebrate the re-uppage of the online stash space, let me share with you what I believe to be the best swag of the conference: The Google Fauxleskine!

GeoPDF Road Show

TerraGo is sending folks on the road to show off GeoPDF. We don't see to have a nice neat link to point you at, so you have can either go to TerraGo homepage and click on the road show link, or enjoy this direct link. I will, however, hook you up with sites and dates:

Miami	16 September
Baltimore	16 September
Salt Lake	16 September
Orlando	18 September
Philadelphia	18 September
Los Angeles	23 September
Albany	23 September
San Diego	24 September
Boston	24 September
New York City	24 September
Sacramento	26 September
Portland	06 November
Fairfax	06 November
Atlanta	07 November
Tacoma	07 November
Raleigh/Durham	08 November
Anchorage	09 November
Washington DC	13 November
Denver	13 November
Houston	13 November
Las Vegas	15 November
Austin	15 November
Kansas City	27 November
St. Louis	29 November
Phoenix	30 November
Tucson	30 November

I'm off to see if we can't get a permanent link, and to see if the stash space has been restored... Done!

Tom Patterson's Shaded Relief

Tom Patterson's Shaded Relief is chock-full of information for folks interested in cartographic presentation of shaded relief maps, and other stuff as well. Check it out.

I bounced there by way of an article on realism in NPS maps. Figure 4 condenses some interesting concepts about a continuity from abstraction to realism and how it's related to concepts you want to present.

Festival of Maps: Chicago

From Joe Germuska on the geowanking mailing list:

"The Festival of Maps: Chicago is a citywide celebration that joins over 30 cultural and scientific institutions in a unique collaboration to display humanity's greatest discoveries and the maps that record our boldest explorations."

It's really a "festival" in a more old-fashioned sense, as many of the "events" are themed exhibitions at museums and galleries, many of which last beyond November. That's not to say that there aren't also time-bound events. There's way too much to gloss in an email.

Rather than inline the hyperlinks, I've recorded them here with Joe's caveat about flash:
Festival of Maps (annoying overreliance on Flash)

Blog


Joe also gave the thumbs up to The Map Room, citing it as
"one of our best beer bars in town."

Gigapan Panoramic Imager and Gigapan.org

Gigapan imager uses off-the-shelf digital cameras to stitch together high-resolution panoramas. They're collecting user-contributed images at gigapan.org. Nifty, nifty stuff!

USGS GeoPDF Locator Map Does USNG

The Google-powered USGS GeoPDF locator map dynamically displays coordinates associated with mouse location, displaying both lat/long and USNG. It's the first time I've seen the dual coordinate display on a web map. TerraGo HQ is at 16S GC 3500 5400. USNG is handy to use with USGS quad sheets and lets you work in linear units rather than lat/lons. Cool!

Pointy Hair, Without the Boss?

It burns!

Pointy… hair… popping… out… scalp…

I've abandoned my development role (more or less) and am now in marketing. More specifically, I'm in product management.

Yes, I still use emacs every day (and right now (New look and feel to the emacs homepage, btw)).

Yes, I still use lisp to recurse to this or that solution to this or that problem that's plaguing me.

That said, my new job is map problems to requirements -- not to write code.

What might make the move seem all the more mysterious (and perhaps questionable to some) is that the development team is improving by leaps and bounds all the time. I had a great boss (*great* boss) in Wade Hundley (you Leica folks know of what I speak) and we've been adding new folks to the team as we find them

So, why leave (professional) hacking?

The glib answer is: to engage the market.

There will come a day when can be told the "GeoPDF story" -- and trust me -- I'm chomping at the bit to write (and illustrate!) that story. Until then, however, I've got to speak in meta-stories. My part in crafting the foundation of the bridge spanning Adobe's PDF platform (and it's billions of eyes!) and the even larger geospatial world was finished years ago. If I say so myself, GeoPDF is cool.

However, cool is insufficient.

Just because GeoPDF *can* solve your problems doesn't mean it's worth the square micrometer holding the bytes encoding the words you're reading on the commodity hard drive on a blogger server, somewhere, out there, wherever.

If GeoPDF is not validated in the marketplace -- if it doesn't deliver value to you -- all of that stitching will have been for naught.

So: What's the problem? How do I solve it? Does GeoPDF fit in?

I loathe (metaphorical) shoehorns. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it, don't own it. Give it to your dog to chew with impunity and gusto.

We can rebuild Steve Austin -- we have the technology. The question is, should we? Can GeoPDF be your bionic man?

I want to know.

Spatial References In Your Format Of Choice-O-Rama

I was grovelling around for a full-blown GML representation of a spatial reference to stare at in, er, wonder, when what to my great delight did I discover? Spatial Reference-O-Rama! The site slings spatial reference definitions in the format of your choice. It's driven by user submissions, supports commenting, etc. The claim is "Put together in a day or two by Howard Butler and Christopher Schmidt." Very cool!

But wait, there's more!

Slippy map with *coordinates* in the SRS of your choice! Ausgezeichnet!

Autodesk buys Mentor, releases CS-MAP to OSGeo

Many fun and interesting things went down at FOSS4G this year. One of the more interesting was Geoff Zeiss' announcement of Autodesk's acquisition of Mentor. In addition, Autodesk was going to release CS-MAP to OSGeo. Adena's take is worth reading.

It's going to be interesting to see how Autodesk's commoditization of this complement to their offerings is going to affect offerings like Blue Marble's GeoCalc libraries, as well as OSGeo's offerings.