Archive for February, 2007

GDAL maintenance

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

GDAL logoFrank Warmerdam announced on the OSGeo website, in the GDAL Project Maintainer Contracted news, that I’ve started general GDAL maintenance and support activities. In fact, it will be a continuation, because I have been involved in GDAL project since March 2006, or a bit longer.

I’m very happy and thankful about this opportunity. I hope my services will be valuable to the GDAL project and bring a nice set of improvements.

If anyone of you, GDAL or OGR users, will have any comments or suggestions related to GDAL issues, or you will need any help in this subject, please drop me a note or step in to the #gdal channel on the irc.freeenode.net server to talk about it.

Posted in author, gdal | 8 Comments »

Extended STL

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

Extended STLThe Extended STL is a new C++ book written by Matthew Wilson. The first volume Collections and Iterators will be available in June 2007. Second volume Algorithms, Functions and Exotic Matter been also planned but it is still very much up in the air. The book will discuss:

principles and practices of STL extension, many of which are used in the implementation of the STLSoft libraries

The first Matt Wilson’s book – The Imperfect C++ – presented C++ language programming in a very practical way. This book has two faces. It is a C++ introductory book and it also presents various C++ weaknesses and their solutions at the same time. The Extended STL will be a kind of continuation and focus on the Standard Template Library. According to my understanding, Matt will try to present programmers with solutions of how to use C++ techniques and STL concepts with existing code bases and technologies, for instance how to use STL collections with COM objects.

Certainly, the range of topics will be much wider. As presented in the TOC, most of must-understand concepts will be presented there, like RAII, constraints and contract programming, and much more.

I think the new book will also be a perfect completion to Nicolai M. Josuttis’ The C++ Standard Library – A Tutorial and Reference.

Posted in books, c++ | No Comments »

FDO, any plans for summer?

Friday, February 16th, 2007

Thanks to Jason Birch recently calling on the FDO developers mailing list, it’s getting loudly about idea of joining the Google Summer of Code 2007 with Feature Data Objects project.

I strongly support Jason’s idea because with SoC, Google is giving a great opportunity for Open Source projects to boost their development and gain new features or prototypes ready for next steps toward usability.

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Posted in fdo, gis, open source, programming | No Comments »

Agony of my Windows box

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Dell twins For last 2 weeks, I’ve been observing a slow agony of my desktop machine running Windows XP – random restarts and freezes, BIOS settings resetting on every boot, etc. In Friday, these problems entered the final stage. In Sunday, my machine was dead.
This is not a high quality computer but the only I have to run Windows operating system on it, and very important projects I’m working on under Windows system got suspended for a while. I really don’t like low cost desktops…

I decided to jump for shopping to find some new-old but stable machine to be able to continue my Windows work on it. So, I defined quite short list of requirements for new system: well-known brand, stability, no more desktops, plus good price but not a low-cost computer. Ah, I’ve for got about one: no Windows Vista – a hardware killer :-)

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Posted in hardware | 2 Comments »

Why C++?

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Recently, Piotr Wyderski – a friend who I know virtually from the pl.comp.lang.c newsgroup – posted a very nice summary aptly expressing why I use C++ programming language.

in Polish:

Bo jest to jedyny znany mi język, który pozwala na zejście na bardzo niski poziom tam, gdzie to jest potrzebne i odizolowanie się od niego tam, gdzie to potrzebne nie jest.

in English:

Because, C++ is the only [programming] language, that makes it possible to get on a very low level when it’s needed and isolate from the bare metal when it’s not needed.

I completely agree with Piotr’s point of view.

Posted in c++ | No Comments »

About handling FDO exceptions

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Every one who has played with Feature Data Objects (FDO) using C++ knows that FDO uses exceptions pretty intensively. Therefore, it’s important to understand how to handle exceptions thrown by FDO properly and effectively. A good introductory about exceptions handling can be found in The FDO Developer’s Guide document, under Development Practices and Exception Handling nodes. I’ll focus on practical examples here.

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Posted in c++, fdo | No Comments »

FDO PostGIS turning point

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

More than a week ago, after longer discussion in the FDO PostGIS team (Paul Ramsey, Jason Birch and I) we decided about a turning point in the development of PostGIS provider for FDO. The most important part of our decision is about dropping the Generic RDBMS framework as an intermediate API for the provider and implementing FDO core interface directly.

What is the Generic RDBMS framework:

The Generic RDBMS project provides FDO with access to RDBMS systems through a generic framework that allows code reuse and reduces the development time for creating new FDO providers.

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Posted in fdo, gis, open source | 7 Comments »