standards = big beard!

this is a great post! I’ve argued for quite some time about how standards actually stop people getting on with stuff – to me they’re a haven for beards!

I wrote a meta-data editor a while ago for ArcGIS because the editors they ship with are all standards based and would take longer to fill in than it took to build the pyramids – I mean really – do you need to know all that crap – my editor allowed the users to specify the information they wished to collect and how they wished to collect it – simple – it provided context and clarity to the data they were collecting and it was quick and easy.

Information becomes useful and of a higher standard when shared, this is basics and we need to ensure that we keep the chaff down to a minimum, otherwise we’ll be overrun with beards telling us we’ve missed a tag here or there.

flash globe API

i like this and it’s really easy which suits me – love these free API‘s man they’re the business

technological posturing

following my recent post, troops are being positioned ready to fight for their beloved technologies. i find it quite frustrating sometimes when as a junior developer i talk to those, long in the tooth, who have such strong and often personal preferences for this of that language or technology, when really what you want to know is which language or technology is the best fit for the job you need to do.

well of course the answer is look and find out for yourself!

the silverlight v’s flex debate typifies this nonsense, and there are many other examples.

It’s typical of software vendors and you can’t blame them wanting to market their product as the best and only suitable solution for your needs, but i’ve found that you inevitably need a set of different tools to do your job and each tool is ideally the best fit for a particular part of the job – it’s a pity vendors don’t give clients the respect to make these informed choices instead of notching up clients like shags on the bed post – how many GIS operations do you know that are a ‘this’ OR ‘that’ shop, and how many do you know are a ‘this’ AND ‘that’ shop?

I remember one particular vendor talk about ‘enterprise’ GIS as if it were synonymous with homogeneous GIS, as long as the systems happened to be theirs and you purchased the job lot you had a true ‘enterprise’ system…..bollocks – ‘enterprise’ to me are those operations doing loads with little – that’s the true meaning of ‘enterprise’ GIS in my mind.

anyway i’ve gone way off target, I’ll enjoy watching the troops duel it out on the forums with their handbags, but i’d much rather see them take it outside like men though!

i farted…HERE…listen

following an article on the BBC, i began thinking how interesting sounds and space are.

i’ve always found it fascinating how regional accents have developed and how different they can sound even across such small distances. Again the BBC with their voices project are preserving UK accents, which are some of the richest in the English language. They’ve got some fantastic recordings on their site as well as some cool maps which chart the usage of different words

years ago i wanted to be a human geographer (what ever that means these days), unfortunately like a lot of people i meet you end up ‘doing’ GIS instead, which lacks the cultural sustenance but i still find it interesting to read about soundscapes. We’ll soon be able to interact with soundscapes in Google earth, bollocks to going on holiday to Italy this year can someone send me the sound of a scooter and a sketch up of the tower of piza instead….virtual holidays, thats another post i reckon

Mars..

I quite like the stuff from Cadorp , they’ve got a strong desktop product that natively supports shit loads of data formats and I like the fact it easily plugs into oracle spatial. I recently found this on their site which i thought was great, i’d like to know what they use behind the scene to engineer the PDF?

Its a nifty output which is really useful to those that just want to hard copy or those that want a map with a bit extra, without the need for a GIS or an install of a light viewer.

In relation to PDF I’ve had a brief look at Mars from Adobe – there’s real potential if anyone can be arsed to build a wrapper around the mars framework – then again there’s quite a few pdf libraries out there……