tommy's scratchpad

Fresh off the press, check it out.

I’m in Boulder, Colorado for the OGC meetings. I had a chance to check out Denver earlier today (16th Street Mall, as well stumbling upon a Latin-American festival), which was very nice. The mountains are absolutely breathtaking!

I’m going to try to hook up with Sean sometime this week, as he is close by. In the meantime, check out some photos from today — I’ll be updating these as the week goes on.

My first major code contribution to MapServer was a server side implementation of OWS Common 1.0.0. For those who are not aware, OWS Common is a specification which unifies common XML constructs, etc. used by OGC specifications, such as Capabilities metadata, exception reports and bounding box encodings. The benefit of OWS Common is that specifications, and subsequently server implementations, can focus on their core specific functionality while leveraging the common bits.

A good example here is MapServer’s SOS server support, which leverages mapowscommon.c, making mapogcsos.c alot lighter as a result. Client implementations can additionally write OWS Common parsers as reusable functionality which they can then use when writing their, say, WFS and SOS clients. I really believe that this is a benefit for those developing SDI components (i.e. why should contact information be encoded differently for WMS and WFS, really?); just imagine the reduction in code as a result of OWS Common!

Sean recently pointed me to OWSlib, a python lib for working with OGC Web Services. I initially thought it would be great to write an OWS Common client / parser for OWSlib, so that when WFS 1.1.0 and SOS 1.0.0 clients are developed, they can use an OWS Common class between them.

But then I thought why not just implement this in MapServer, and have the functionality exposed via mapscript?

My previous post declared my plugging my nose and jumping into Python GIS stuff. Advice and info from Sean have been valuable in getting familiar with things, though I’ll be the first to admit I’m still green (writing Python like a Perl / C hack 🙂 ).

So here’s one of my first attempts at solving a real world problem: reprojecting a bunch of points from a CSV file:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import mapscript

if (len(sys.argv) == 1):

	print sys.argv[0] + " <csvfile>"
	sys.exit(1)
else:
	projInObj  = mapscript.projectionObj("init=epsg:32619")
	projOutObj = mapscript.projectionObj("init=epsg:4326")

	print "id,geom,zone"
	f = open(sys.argv[1], 'r')
	for line in f:
		s = line.strip()
		k = s.split(",")
		wkt = "POINT(" + k[1] + " " + k[2] + ")"
		shape = mapscript.shapeObj.fromWKT(wkt) # man, I love WKT!!
		shape.project(projInObj, projOutObj)
		print k[0] + "," + shape.toWKT() + "," + k[3]
	f.close()

And that’s it! So now you can take the CSV output with the geometry encoded as WKT and hook it up to MapServer with some simple OGR OVF syntax in your mapfile:

CONNECTIONTYPE OGR
CONNECTION "<OGRVRTDataSource>
<OGRVRTLayer name='nb'>
<SrcDataSource>./nb.csv</SrcDataSource>
<GeometryType>wkbPoint</GeometryType>
<GeometryField encoding='WKT' field='geom'/>
</OGRVRTLayer>
</OGRVRTDataSource>"

Mind you, you might question why to reproject when MapServer can do this for you, but I digress. There’s probably more eloquent ways to do this than what’s been done above via mapscript, eh?

Well, I’ve finally decided to give Python an honest try. A born and bred Perl hack, then dipping into PHP, I’ve seen much Python applause in the geospatial software community through many of Sean’s posts. Though I know Sean thinks mapscript is a disaster, it was via mapscript that I started to look more into Python.

So here’s what I typically start off with when doing development:

• HTTP / URLs / Forms: for Perl, I use CGI; for PHP, I use the native, built in functions
• XML Processing: for Perl, I use XML::Simple; for PHP, I use SimpleXMLElement
• Database: for Perl, I use DBI; for PHP, I use the compiled in mysql support, for example

So far I’ve found urllib2 and ElementTree to be useful. Other than that, I’m finding the command line pretty awesome for one offs and testing.

If anyone’s got any other suggestions, that would be great!!

UPDATE (20 June 2007): Manual trackback and great post / response from Sean

Check out these articles from IBM on tuning LAMP applications. Being a longtime LAMP guy (the “P” being long time Perl hack, but slowly moving towards PHP), I found this useful for tweaks and optimizing my applications.

Part 1

Part 2

Looking forward to Part 3, which covers MySQL.

Update (10 June 2007): here’s Part 3.

Check the out the latest title from Springer, The Geospatial Web: How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society. If you’re into mashups, Web Services and GIS, this title is worth a read.

Casinos and the Network Society: The Intersection of Gambling and Technology

The rise of the internet and digital technologies has had a major impact on many industries, and the casino industry is no exception. With the advent of online casinos and mobile gambling apps like nye casino 2022, the way we experience casinos has changed dramatically. And if you’re looking for other games to play, then you may check out mahjong ways 2 here.

But what exactly is the relationship between casinos and the network society? And how has technology transformed the casino industry in the 21st century?

One key aspect of the network society is the concept of connectivity. With the proliferation of smartphones and other devices, it’s easier than ever for people to connect and communicate with each other no matter where they are. This connectivity is also driving the growth of the online casino industry, as players can now access a wide range of situs slot games from the comfort of their own homes.

A SA Casino offers a level of convenience and accessibility that traditional brick-and-mortar casinos can’t match. Players can choose from a wide range of games, including slots, table games, and even live dealer games, all with a few clicks of a button. And with the use of virtual reality technology, poker online terpercaya casinos are even starting to replicate the immersive experience of a real-life casino.

But the rise of online gambling has also led to some challenges. One concern is the potential for increased problem gambling, as it’s easier for people to access games at any time of day. There is also the issue of regulation, as different countries have different laws and policies surrounding online gambling. If you’re starting your own business, you’ll also need to do nebraska llc yearly filing for legal compliance.

Despite these challenges, it’s clear that the intersection of casinos and the network society is here to stay. As technology continues to advance, it will be interesting to see how the casino industry evolves and adapts to the digital age.

Just read Cameron’s pointer to this course. All I have to say is wow. This is probably the most user-friendly and comprehensive online course / outreach material I’ve seen in a long time. And the student demo pages are really impressive.

Kudos to Ian and students!!

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.