Mateusz Loskot

From time to time, Google helps me to find and get new treasures laying deep on the Internet. Today, it dug out OpenGeology.pl website. Apparently, it has been launched quite recently and Google reports very few references about it. Because it’s mostly in Polish language and English version is incomplete, I will give a short overview of it here. So, what is this website about?

The front page explains it very well:

The OpenGeology.pl is devoted to the applications of Open Source Software in Geology

Later, one can browse various resources organized by topic - reviews of Open Source Software, tutorials ie. on DEM processing and 3D technologies in geology as well as collection of free and public geodata. DEM of Poland based on the SRTM-3 is available through a friendly map-based interface in two alternative coordinate systems (WGS 84 and PUWG 92) and three grid formats. It’s worth to notice that holes in original DEM files have been patched. I’ve not played with this data myself but it sounds very promising.

Now, let’s get to the point - the software. And here, my eyes saw a nice list of FOSS packages, including OSGeo Foundation projects…and there was much rejoicing.

OpenGeology community (see below) has found following FOSS4G and OSGeo projects useful: GRASS, Open Source Software Image Map (OSSIM), Quantum GIS, GDAL/OGR and FWTools.

A couple of words about the OpenGeology.pl authors. If my understanding is correct, the website was founded by Polish Geological Institute and Maciej Tomaszczyk is the main author and content provider. Kudos to the OpenGeology.pl Community for their efforts to spread the FOSS4G in Poland.

This is just a short post reporting that Terminus font works on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) very well.

In my old post Terminus, my eyes saver, there is more information on Terminus font, with pointers to where to get it and how to install it.

I have just discovered colormake utility - a simple wrapper around make to colorize its output.

colormake is really helpful for someone who heavily works in Unix shell environments to visually analyse messages generated during programs compilation. Simply, colors are used as another language for communication with a user, complementing letters printed out to the console. The colormake wrapper in combination with clean console fonts like Terminus serve as a great tandem in hacker daily job.

First, I started to use colormake 0.2 on Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install colormake

Next, I tried it on Mac OS X 10.5, though with no luck. Basically, because of subtle differences in Bash and format of GCC output messages. So, simple patch (colormake-0.2-mloskot.patch) is required to get colormake 0.2 working on Mac OS X. I’ve sent this patch to Bjarni - the author of colormake, so perhaps he will like to include it in next (0.3?) version. BTW, thanks to Bjarni for the colormake tool!

Continuing my recent discussion about OpenID and considering OpenID usage for authenticating to OSGeo services, I wanted to make a short review of its disadvantages. The OpenID advantages are well-known and can be described with a short statement:

open, decentralized, free framework, which allows Internet users to control their digital life with single identity

Stefan Brand collected number of opinions about OpenID and compiled a very interesting post on his blog about problem(s) with OpenID. Stefan’s blog entry is pretty long, so to understand his findings easier, I decided to abstract key thoughts on that matter.

Stefan summarized main problems and sources of OpenID criticism as follows:

OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing to become an OpenID consumer.

Next, complaints about the OpenID framework are presented in a few categories, which I’m going to summarize below.

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A few weeks ago, CASCADOSS project leaders requested for patronage from the OSGeo Foundation for two upcoming events: International Symposium and International Information Workshop. The request was approved and final decision was made during the 36th OSGeo Board Meeting.

Yesterday, Frank Warmerdam officially announced this fact in the OSGeo News: OSGeo Supports CASCADOSS

Detailed document describing the Support for CASCADOSS is available on the OSGeo Wiki, together with body of letter of support. Printed copy of the letter was sent to the CASCADOSS project leaders.

On May 8th, Ross Turk posted on the SourceForge.net community blog: Hey! So I’ll just blurt it out: we’ve joined the OpenID Foundation!. As Ross confirms, OpenID use is becoming very popular, means users like the idea of decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.

In the initial announcement about the OpenID idea, SF.net stuff revealed they use OpenID implementation from Zend Framework - Open Source Software (oh yeah!) available under BSD License.

Recently, I’ve noticed that Chris brought the idea of OpenID to OSGeo year ago and setup necessary infrastructure, so OSGeo userid can be used as an openid.

I tried today to use OpenID capabilities of OSGeo User ID, but without any luck. It seems like the service has been disabled or moved without update in docs. Anyway, I hope we are going to keep it running. Hmm, it’s unclear to me if the OSGeo User ID is supposed to work as an OpenID and allow OSGeo users to authenticate to external non-OSGeo services with it, like to SourceForge.net. Is it?.

I’m wondering if it would be reasonable and beneficial the OSGeo Foundation participates in activities lead by the OpenID Foundation. What about joining the OpenID Foundation as a non-profit organization?

During last weeks, a lot of fresh bits have been contributed to the PostGIS provider for FDO Open Source. The great part of this work was committed by Bruno Scott and his colleagues. Bruno has recently joined the FDO development team. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Bruno for his fantastic help in improving the PostGIS provider. The provider has got better shape and stability.

Recently, I’ve failed my duties in the provider development, so motivated by the load of Bruno’s work I found some gaps in time to submit a few fixes too :-)

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