Mateusz Loskot

Yesterday, Frank announced another milestone hit by GDAL:

Santa and the GDAL/OGR Project Team are pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.5.0. This is the first “new feature” release since the GDAL 1.4.0 release approximately one year ago.

The new release brings a lot of new features and bug fixes. Just give some statistics:

• more than 420 tickets closed on the Trac
• implemented 17 new GDAL drivers for raster formats
• and 4 new OGR drivers for vectors
• implemented 4 (5 counting RFC 16) RFC documents
• added 5 new command line utilities
• plus, big number of features and improvements in SWIG bindings for scripting languages

The complete and long list of changes can be found in the 1.5.0 Release News.

The new GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 sources and a couple of additional packages can be found at Download Source website. There are also Windows 32-bit binaries available: http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/win32/1.5/

On behalf of the GDAL/OGR Project Team, I’d like to send a big thanks to all developers, contributors and users involved in development of the 1.5.0 release for their great work and support, invaluable bug reports and testing. And thanks to Santa too!

Here is the official GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 announcement posted on the OSGeo News.

A few minutes ago, Frank announced new release of PROJ.4 - Cartographic Projections Library 4.6.0. This release brings only a few but important fixes. Follow the announcement link to find more details.

Continuing my adventures with Visual C++ 2008, I’d like to share some observations about new WinSock2 features. The Visual C++ 2008 uses new incarnation of Microsoft Platform SDK called Windows SDK (New Windows SDK Available to Download). This SDK is named as for Windows Vista what’s quite misinforming because it also supports development for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Server 2003 R2.

One of new feature in Winsock API is WSAPoll function. As the MSDN says, this function is is defined on Windows Vista and later. However, if the Windows SDK is used on Windows XP this function is also available when building software but it’s not usable in run-time.

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Today, I’ve been testing GDAL builds using Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition, compiler version 9.0. There are few drivers based on libcurl, so I needed to build this library as well. I used curl 7.17.1 (released in Oct 29, 2007) and it almost worked. In order to build libcurl using Visual C++, small patch required for lib/config-win32.h file:

/* Define to make select.h work fine on VC++ 9.0 (2008) */
#if defined(_MSC_VER) && (_MSC_VER >= 1500)
/* The poll struct and associated defines are present in the Windows SDK v6.0 that comes with this version... */
#define HAVE_STRUCT_POLLFD 1
#endif

It’s correct to assume all pre-7.17.1 also need this patch. This patch has been applied to the cURL CVS and should be available in next future. Thanks to Daniel Stenberg for assistance on the #curl channel.

…for its bloody powerful simplicity that fits Unix philosophy and toolset very well and helps to achieve less and more complex tasks in very intuitive way.

Let’s say I need to find details of all test cases in GDAL autotest package referring to GetNoDataValue method of Band class from Python bindings:

$ cd autotest
$ grep -l GetNoDataValue *.py | xargs gvim

All files answering the filter are loaded to Vim:

I’ve seen may questions on the Usenet what’s the best IDE for Unix, especially comparable to Visual Studion and in most cases nothing well-working came out. Means, there is no such IDE for Unix. My answer is: Unix, with its astronomical number of small tools, is a perfect IDE, so nobody intends to develop anything like that.